[00:01] SPEAKER_01:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, bringing you the best in professional practice.
[00:06] Announcer:
Here's your host, director of the Principal Center and champion of high-performance instructional leadership, Justin Bader. Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio.
[00:15] SPEAKER_02:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Kiera Mascareñas. Kiara is the Managing Partner for Organizational Design at Education Elements, where she focuses on organizational design and how to build and scale a culture of innovation in large systems. Kiara leads work in change management, leadership development, school design, and strategic planning, and is the toolkit creator for The New School Rules, Six Practices for Thriving and Responsive Schools, which we're here to talk about today.
[00:47] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:49] SPEAKER_02:
So Kiara, welcome to Principal Center Radio.
[00:51] SPEAKER_00:
Thanks so much, Justin. Really excited to be on with you this morning.
[00:54] SPEAKER_02:
Well, I'm excited to get into talking about your book, The New Team Habits, because I think teamwork is one of those things that in every school, you know, we see it as necessary, we see it as helpful, but often we don't treat teamwork as something that we actually need to learn how to do, right? We just kind of take it for granted that if we put people together and give them work to do, then they will figure it out. But you actually have a lot of experience in building capacity in this area. And I wonder if we could start by just talking about that work that you've been doing over the past few years with schools.
[01:24] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, absolutely. So I've been really lucky as a partner at Education Elements over the last seven years to work with close to a thousand schools and districts around the United States. So the Ed Elements team currently works across 36 states, We work in rural, suburban, and urban school districts across K-12. We work with a handful of charter and private schools as well. And in that work, you know, we see pretty common visions and focus areas across schools, kind of regardless of geography or student population. You know, we're all heading for a really similar North Star, which is, you know, how do we improve student achievement?
[02:06]
How do we better serve our communities? And so the what we're trying to do doesn't look extremely different district to district or school to school. But we noticed that, you know, some teams were much better prepared and much better able to achieve those goals. And so Anthony and Kawhi and I, my co-authors of the book, The New Team Habits, really started thinking about what makes some teams better able to achieve these goals. And what we found is it was less about what they were focused on or why they were focused on that work, and it was mostly about how they were working together. So how were they setting up their roles?
[02:45]
How were they making decisions? How were they collaborating? And so we really started studying what we call these habits of a team, the things you do every day that set up the culture that you operate in and really impact your ability to achieve these high-level goals. And what we found was that some teams were simply better at articulating and following these systems for work. So the way that they develop and support learning on the team, the way they run their meetings, the way they lead their projects. And so this book is really meant to help.
[03:18]
other teams that might not have these habits in place or need to deepen them to create these stronger habits for teams and ultimately build better teams that can achieve the goals that they're hoping to move toward.
[03:30] SPEAKER_02:
Well, I love that approach to thinking about the habits that teams need, because we're not talking necessarily here about protocols, you know, like often a meeting will have a protocol or a purpose or an agenda. But you're talking about habits that can kind of run as the operating system in any team, regardless of what specifically that team is working on.
[03:48] SPEAKER_00:
Absolutely. So I started my career in education as a teacher and we worked with a ton of consultants in the district I was in. It was one of the lowest performing districts in the state of New Mexico. And we got protocols up the wazoo. And I think protocols are helpful. We use a lot of protocols in our works with districts.
[04:07]
But ultimately, the protocol wouldn't change the way that we interacted outside of that single meeting environment. And so when we think about a habit, we really think about it like a pebble. And that pebble is meant to be really small. So in like your personal life, a habit might be brushing your teeth, right? Something very easy that we probably many of us do without even thinking about it at this point, a couple of times a day. But that pebble, that habit has a pretty big ripple effect in terms of your mouth health and your overall physical health.
[04:40]
And ultimately, you know, it might impact your lifespan or your ability to eat or laugh or engage with other people. And so when we were thinking about the habits for work, we wanted to similarly think about what's a really small pebble, a really small habit that we could help build that would be a part of a team's working life every single day. So one habit from the book we think about is we talk about mistakes. And we find by simply helping leaders and teams talk about their mistakes, admit their vulnerabilities, that's something you can do in less than 30 seconds and you can do on a daily and weekly basis. But over time, it has a few ripple effects from talking about mistakes. It starts to model vulnerability.
[05:28]
It makes it safer for others to talk about their mistakes. And ultimately, it creates an environment of psychological safety where the entire team can be learning and growing together, asking questions, admitting mistakes, questioning if they're moving in the right direction. And that has a really huge impact that a single protocol might not have on that team.
[05:50] SPEAKER_02:
And I think that's such a key distinction about that ripple effect. The small habit makes a big difference because it has that ripple effect. I think a lot of us were taught to focus on habits that maybe didn't have that ripple effect. Like brushing your teeth does have lots of ripple effects, but making your bed maybe does not. That was at least how I felt about it as a kid. Nobody's going to notice except you, mom, so why do I have to do this?
[06:14]
But in an organization, in a team setting, talking about mistakes, as you said, models that vulnerability, helps the team learn and grow, sets an example for others, and results in continuous learning. So that ripple effect, I think we probably have both read many of the same authors on habits, such as Charles Duhigg and... you know, looking at how both personal and organizational habits are developed. So in the in the book, you talk about a method for building team habits, because obviously, as leaders, we can model as leaders, we can even explain how we're modeling and say, Hey, I want to model, you know, talking about my mistakes for you.
[06:56]
But in the book, you talk about a five step process for building habits. And I wonder before we talk about the other two habits, if we want to jump into that method.
[07:05] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, absolutely. So as you said, Justin, I love Charles Duhigg and James Clear. I think of them kind of as the two godfathers of habits. And they're really focused on how you change an individual habit. Ironically, I think James Clear uses the example of making his bed. And talks about how over time, this seemingly meaningless habit of making your bed every day leads to an identity of being a clean person, right?
[07:32]
And the impact that that's had on his life and identity overall. So your mom would be proud.
[07:39] SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, well, and I'll say I definitely know what you mean there. Because for me, it's like the kitchen sink, I got to get the kitchen sink clean, or everything else is kind of a mess, right? So yeah, I get that idea, though.
[07:49] SPEAKER_00:
Exactly. So, you know, as Anthony and Koi and I were thinking about this book, we were really thinking about habit change and how it happens differently at the individual level, at the team level, and at the organization level. And so... While Duhigg and Clear we think offer these really great frameworks for how to change an individual habit, thinking about your cue, your routine, and your reward, we think that it requires a different kind of set of noticings and learning to change a habit as a team, to really help a group of people develop a habit that not only impacts how they act as an individual, but how they engage with the rest of the group.
[08:27]
And so that's why we developed what we call the CPAD method. And CPAT is an acronym that stands for the five steps that we think are helpful when you're thinking about building team habits, starting with a spark. So really creating an inspiration for why this habit needs to change. I think especially in education, because we're so focused on learning and continuous improvement, we don't always pause to say, let's like help through something fun or something surprising to create this spark of learning that really engages and inspires people to want to make a change. So acknowledging that not everyone wants to change right from the start, and it's part of our responsibility as a team and as leaders to spark that inspiration. From there, building in explicit time to expand, to build knowledge.
[09:17]
Again, not assuming everyone has that common set of understanding of what this habit is or what the impact might be. So actually taking time for the habit I shared about talking about mistakes to really understand why talking about mistakes matters, what psychological safety is. Then providing practice time. So a safe space before you take it back to the real world and have to talk about a mistake in front of an actual team or parents or students or teachers. to practice with peers in a way that allows you to test and kind of feel what works and doesn't work before you take it back out into that real world application. Then we think it's important to have an explicit application period.
[10:01]
So it might be a few days or a few weeks where you try the habit in the real world, hopefully a few times and have an opportunity to really think like a scientist and collect data. seeing failures and successes, not as good or bad, but just as data points that you learn from in terms of what works for you in using this habit. And then the final step of CPAT is the debrief. So coming back together as a group to reflect on what you tried, what worked and what future iterations you wanna make to really cement that habit as part of your ongoing practice and identity.
[10:37] SPEAKER_02:
And that was SEPAD, Spark, Expand, Practice, Apply, Debrief, right?
[10:42] SPEAKER_00:
Yes. CPAD, as you know, doesn't stand for anything besides those. So if any of the listeners have a clever way to explain CPAD, let me know. But that's our catchy acronym. We think the steps are really solid, the acronym, not so much. Okay.
[11:01] SPEAKER_02:
Perfect. And it works for teaching any of the habits that you talk about in the book and developing those in a team.
[11:07] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, absolutely. It's actually a method that we started testing about two years ago in the workshops that we lead with teams around the country. And we're really surprised to see how effective it was for building habits in a group of people, a group of leaders. And so it's been actually really neat to see even before the book came out, this method spread as coaches and principals that we work with around the country start to use these same steps in professional development for their own staff.
[11:36] SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, absolutely. And we should emphasize the book really is designed to be kind of a workbook, right? Like people work through this, think about their planning for their work with teams.
[11:44] SPEAKER_00:
Exactly. We know that not everyone has access to a consultant group who can kind of help guide their team through change. And so we wrote this book as a step-by-step guide with the hope that if a team purchase the book, they could work through it together, and it would really serve as almost a built-in coach for their team.
[12:01] SPEAKER_02:
Yeah, very structured, very clear, but also very flexible as a set of tools for teaching those habits to teams. So the first was the learning habit, talking about mistakes. What's the next habit we should talk about?
[12:13] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, absolutely. So I'll zoom out for a moment just to say when we were thinking about habits, we were really trying to think about what is the work that teams do every day. So The New Team Habits is a follow-up book to The New School Rules, which Anthony Kim and Alexis Gonzalez-Black wrote and published a few years ago. It's been one of Corwin's bestsellers.
[12:35] SPEAKER_02:
And I should mention that Anthony and I have spoken on Principal Center Radio about his book, The New School Rules, Six Vital Practices for Thriving and Responsive Schools. So I would encourage you to go back and look on our website at principalcenter.com. Just search for Anthony Kim, and you can listen to our interview about the new school rules.
[12:52] SPEAKER_00:
And I think both books are really trying to solve the same challenge, which is how do we improve the way we work? But we found that the new school rules, which has these like six kind of philosophical approaches to planning, decision-making roles, sometimes there was a translation gap where leaders and teams would read about the rules, become really inspired, but not know how to translate it exactly into their day-to-day work. And so in the new team habits, we really tried to take the frame of what is every team doing on a daily and weekly basis? And that's how we came up with these categories of learning meetings and projects. We think that every team that we work with and that we hear from has a need around improving the way their teams learn, and share improving their meetings and improving the way that their projects are led.
[13:43]
So that first habit I shared about, we talk about mistakes is part of the learning category. The second category is meetings, knowing that one of the biggest pain points that we hear from the district and school leadership teams we talk to and work with is, you know, how do we improve the way that we meet? How do we make sure meetings, which the latest statistic I've read take up 50% or more of our time. And for some district leaders, I've heard up to 80 or 90% of superintendent's time is spent in meetings. How do we make sure those are actually moments of engagement and inspiration and help drive work forward as opposed to moments that we dread or feel like they're a distraction from the work? And so one of the habits we've seen be most impactful in changing the way that meetings can actually serve and support your vision and goals is starting with check-ins.
[14:37]
So the small habit of we lead check-ins, which is a simple round based on a single question. It might be a fun question, like what's your favorite childhood snack? It might be a serious question, which is what was your low point for the week or what's occupying your mind as we start this meeting? It provides that first ripple of increasing presence in the meeting. So giving everyone a voice, regardless of their positional authority in that meeting, and giving everyone an opportunity to connect as humans first before moving on to the work at hand. And the bigger ripple effect of doing these check-ins, which at EdElements, we lead a check-in for every single meeting we do every day, and we lead it with every district we partner with.
[15:20]
is that we start to see not only more presence in the meeting, but we start to see more engagement for the entirety of the meeting, not just during the check-in at the start. And it starts to create more equal talk time, which in Charles Duhigg's research about what Google found to make great teams, equal talk time and ostentatious listening were the two key pillars that determined if a team had psychological safety. So are people... having a pretty equal amount of talking and listening, and then am I engaged when you're talking right in my listening and response to you?
[15:56]
And so that very small habit, which I think sometimes people think, how can doing a three-minute check-in or a five-minute check-in have such a big impact? We've really seen have those ripples in terms of increasing presence and starting to distribute power and talk time in the meetings.
[16:11] SPEAKER_02:
I think that's so important because there is the potential for that talk time to be distributed in ways that are just not helpful, either based on personality or how people are feeling that day or status. And that's not necessarily relevant at all to who needs to be talking in that meeting.
[16:30] SPEAKER_00:
Absolutely, yeah. One of the things I'll often do for new teams that we're working with is what I call a meeting audit. So I'll just sit in as a fly on the wall, and kind of observe the minutes that folks are talking. And exactly as you said, Justin, you would be surprised the majority of meetings usually have one or two voices. And there are many meetings I have attended where a number of people have zero voice in the entire hour, two hour, three hour meeting. And you really think about the impact that has on culture, right?
[16:59]
And the ability for that team to collaborate over time if some voices are privileged while others are silenced.
[17:05] SPEAKER_02:
Well, and that gives me a little bit of a segue into the CIA challenge. I think that was kind of a fun little activity that's in there to really get us thinking about, you know, like what would we want to avoid or what would we wish upon our worst enemies? Tell us about the CIA challenge.
[17:23] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, absolutely. This was inspired by a good friend and colleague, Mike Arouse, who leads August Public, which is a consulting group that works mostly with fortunes. 500 companies to try to improve the way that their teams work together. And one of the things we did for this book is really try to learn from other sectors outside of education and bring the best of the best back into schools and districts. So in the challenge, which I think we've led now close to 200 times, we asked the group to come up with the 10 ways They could sabotage an organization from the inside out. This was actually a real mission from the CIA in the 1930s that they gave to their agents.
[18:05]
And so it's amazing what people come up with very quickly in terms of the strategies. to destroy an enemy organization, the only rules are that you can't use violence and you can't get fired, right? So if you wanna maintain your status in the organization, what could you do? And people come up with create silos, give one person lots of power, constantly refer things to committees. And so as they create this list of 10 and we share out, then we always ask, how many of you have experienced one or more of these in your own organizations and every hand inevitably raises. And so I think, you know, what we know is that we are often sabotaging ourselves and our work and our very important goals that we have for schools and districts by the way that we're working together.
[18:51]
And unfortunately, you know, a lot of these habits we learned early on in life, and we're never given an opportunity to build newer and better habits for collaboration. Harvard Business Review released a study earlier this year that said, you in the last 10 years. And so we know that adults are gonna have to collaborate and work together more and more, that is the trend. And yet we're not taking time to build these better habits. And so what happens is the sabotage that we see through the CIA challenge.
[19:26] SPEAKER_02:
all it takes is a little bit of intentionality and thinking to really get outside of and avoid the pitfalls of that kind of unintentional sabotage.
[19:34] SPEAKER_00:
Absolutely. And that's the goal for the book is how do we take something that is very small and relatively easy to learn? So we suggest that timeframe for each of these habits is a 90 minute session, an opportunity to apply and 30 minutes to come back. So we're talking about a few hours to make a change that we think can be pretty impactful and lasting.
[19:57] SPEAKER_02:
So let's talk about the third habit, a project habit. What is that?
[20:01] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah. So the third habit is really focused on how we begin projects. So I'm sure many of your listeners, and I'm sure you, Justin, and I know certainly I have experienced joining a project where you might step into a meeting and feel like you missed something, right? So the project's already launched, and there's some expectation that you're supposed to do something. Or in the worst case, you never even gathered, but you receive an email at some point letting you know that you're part of a team working on something. We think one of the most important habits, and I think this one may seem the most simple, is that we kick off work.
[20:40]
So putting, and I think you said it well before, intentionality into the way that we start new work. And, you know, a project can be as small as let's plan our next parent teacher conference night. or as big as let's design our next strategic plan. But in any case, we think the small habit of kicking off work has those ripple effects of increasing clarity. So helping the folks who are part of that project team to understand the purpose of the project, their roles and accountabilities and the roadmap. And we think by increasing the clarity that the team has who is supporting the project, We can make teams that are more agile, that are better able to achieve the purpose of the project, and that can really adjust the plans as needed.
[21:29]
Because one of our core beliefs, and this really comes from the new school rules, is that you should be planning for change and not perfection. So we know that we cannot plan for every possible scenario, right, that will impact, especially a project as big as a strategic plan. And so we think in order to help teams be able to respond to changing data, changing needs, that the best gift we can give them is that clarity about the project purpose, their roles and the roadmap. So they can make those pivots to steal a term from Eric Reese's lean startup can make those pivots in the moment to better achieve their purpose.
[22:08] SPEAKER_02:
And I love just the opportunity that you create to learn from other organizations that are trying to make similar changes. Because I think we're aware of the silos that we have within schools, but I think sometimes we're not aware of the silos that we have between schools. And on the other hand, the opportunity we have to learn from change efforts that have been underway in some cases for many years, very successfully elsewhere. So, Kiara, if people want to get in touch with you and learn more about the work you do at Ed Elements in bringing about change and planning for change, in addition to the book, The New Team Habits, A Guide to the New School Rules, where's the best place for people to go online to find out more about Ed Elements?
[22:48] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, absolutely. They can come to the EdElements website, which is www.edelements.com. The book will publish this November. It's available for pre-order now on Amazon.
[23:00]
And we will be launching the New Team Habits website, which will be full of free resources, videos, and additional content later this fall. And that will be at www.newteamhabits.com. In the meantime, Anthony, Kawhi, and I are all active on Twitter with the hashtag Team Habits. And at Kiara Moscarania is my first and last name.
[23:24] SPEAKER_02:
So again, the book is The New Team Habits, A Guide to the New School Rules. Kiara, thanks so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. Thanks so much, Justin.
[23:33] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
