Dr. Jim: [00:00:00] Leaders in the K through 12 space are overthinking their strategic plans. You spent countless hours crafting a massive document and then post it to the website and then it collects dust for a little while. Oftentimes, these things are just too complex to be meaningful, and districts tend to include too many things to focus on to the point where nothing gets done, and when you run into that issue, it ends up not being worth the paper that it's printed on.
So what would be a better way forward? One surefire way to get results is to anchor everything to closing the opportunity gap and the achievement gap through the process of building a strategic plan. So how do you accomplish that? That's the story that we're going to cover today. And joining us, we have Ryan Logger leading us through the discussion.
So let's talk a little bit about Ryan's background. So Ryan is currently the super-intendent of schools at Belle Plaine, Minnesota, and he's in his 10th year as su-perintendent. He believes that excellent leadership is about building bridges and fostering a collaborative approach to academic success, combining leadership, management, [00:01:00] communication, and professional growth.
His focus on innovation. Involves creating a clear mission for the future, ensur-ing goals and objectives are well understood and communicated through both actions and words. He's a strong manager and ensures that his team is equipped with necessary tools, resources, and time to achieve excellence. He's been com-mitted to assessing and improving initiatives regularly, ensuring continuous growth and success within the school system.
His leadership is built on respect for stakeholders, creating an atmosphere of motivation, optimism, and partnership. And he's been dedicated to lifelong learning. He leads by example constantly enhancing his understanding of educa-tional best practices, both theoretical and practical in order to maintain his role as an instructional leader and constantly listening to the feedback loops in the dis-trict to make sure that he has a pulse on how things are going
Ryan, welcome to the show. Why don't you share with us a little bit about some of those key moments that helped drive your leadership success.
Dr. Ryan Laager: Yeah, I think it's really anytime you get to a position like this, and as you get older, you reflect back on all of [00:02:00] the learning experi-ences you have. And I think many of those have been the people I've been able to work with over the years and the leaders that I've been able to work with over the years and also the experiences that I had in a variety of places.
I started my teaching career in a suburban metro district one of the smaller sub-urban metro districts and after my first year there, we ended up in statutory op-erating debt because of a financial mistake that was made, superintendent left for the summer for two weeks, came back and found the business manager had tak-en another job, and in taking that job, the superintendent then found out they were in statutory operating debt, and I saw the significant impact that had on losing colleagues but significant budget cuts, things like that.
Then I moved and transitioned, had the opportunity to be a head basketball coach, which I will say that I also think you learn a lot about leadership through athletics and activities. Really my first opportunity to be a leader of young men. And I don't think I fully appreciated the responsibility.
I've [00:03:00] coined a term out of that to who much is given, much is ex-pected. And I know that's a term that's used a lot, but I think I've really come to realize that as I still have connections with a lot of those kids today, they're all adults, many of them very successful. You start to realize the impact you have on people's lives when you're placed in positions like that.
That was in the largest district in the state of Minnesota and I had the opportuni-ty to work with an incredible leader. Who really was a servant leader led from her heart extremely intelligent and is an incredibly successful superintendent here in Minnesota now was Ivy League educated which I was always Extremely impressed by.
But you would never know it unless you knew that about her. And she taught me so many skills about the importance of listening and communication. And those air to probably fundamental things that I've learned. If you want to be suc-cessful as a leader, you have to listen. You have to communicate and people have to feel like you're trying to support them and solve their problems.
I left there. I was a basketball coach, then an assistant principal, and then I [00:04:00] transitioned to be a principal in a district where they had five princi-pals in nine years. It was a high performing school district in Minnesota very much a college prep public school system. And in my time there we endured some significant financial challenges.
We made budget cuts five of the eight years that I was there. And in that time you, when you don't have the resources you need you're constantly riding a roller coaster. When we talk about strategic planning, we did a lot of strategic planning there. We used a Cambridge model we used an organization called Teamworks International.
We developed multiple strategic plans, the bridge to excellence, a variety of dif-ferent coin names. But, the one thing about those plans are, I don't think, I think the people who knew what were in them were those of us that worked in leader-ship level positions by title, principals, district office staff, but I never really saw it translate down to the school level.
Dr. Jim: There's a couple of things that you mentioned in what you just shared with us that caught my interest.
And that was some of the quote unquote disasters that you walked [00:05:00] into, you had a scenario where the business manager had left and then you had another scenario where there was a another sort of financial birds nest that you needed to unwind. It's often said that you learn the most from situations of ad-versity.
So when you had to unwind those scenarios where you had a mess to deal with, what did you learn most in those experiences that you feel set yourself up for success today?
Dr. Ryan Laager: I think the importance of being financially stable if you want to, I pride myself on really working on having a positive culture. And if you don't have the resources you need to support the work of the people who you're supposed to be leading it's very difficult for them to do their job.
Dr. Jim: So it became, I always say the resources are the blood of the organiza-tion and they need to be available so we can support staff in the way that they need to be supported.
When you look at the challenge of resourcing it's come up a couple of different times in what we've just talked about so far.
Dr. Jim: What I'm [00:06:00] curious about is when you look at your current district that you've been in for 10 years, what was the landscape of that district when you took over as a leader?
Dr. Ryan Laager: It's interesting. I came in End of July, early August contracts were unsettled. All of our labor agreements were unsettled. And we were facing what ended up being almost a million dollars in budget reductions. And at the time when the board hired me, they didn't want me to be directly involved in teacher negotiations, because there had been significant cultural challenges in the past between the district and the teachers union.
And they struggled to settle contracts. And one day the union president came to me and said if you're not involved, we're not going to understand like what your role is and how are you going to impact us as a leader? I was able to get in-volved and we got that contract settled at that point.
In fast forwarding 10 years, we've settled our last. Contracts in one meeting. The last one was two meetings, but that was because they thought there were more resources available here in the state than were, but we've [00:07:00] totally flipped the culture and we haven't had to make a budget reduction in the last nine years.
Again, walked into a very similar situation where there were significant financial challenges that were. Prohibiting the ability to have a positive culture here.
Dr. Jim: So you underplayed the situation that you walked into. So you're walking into a financial issue. You're walking into a bunch of unsettled contracts and things like that. You're directed by the board not to get involved in the teacher contract negotiations. So when you look at all of those different financial pieces that aren't Set up in, in a good way.
What did you, what was your approach to start unwinding all of that process that you inherited?
Dr. Ryan Laager: I had some experience and again, getting back to the im-portance of having experiences over a lifetime of having to do budget reduc-tions and seeing that impact from early on as a teacher to being a principal. I ac-tually taught a graduate course in HR and finance and my culminating project in that.
Had all of the students in the [00:08:00] class look at all of the key expenditure areas that districts have as well as resources. So they, all of the students in that class actually provided me with a lot of data from around the state as to what were districts were spending their money and what challenges they were having in it.
So I had developed a finance model. Where it used comparable districts instead of a lot of times when school districts make cuts, we look at our own budgets, we look at our own staffing and we say these are the things we don't need. And my question always is if you didn't need those things before, why were you paying for them?
We're now, and I went to staff and I went around and I showed them what the impact of the cuts were going to be here. And then I shared my financial model with them, which looks at our own district and then six districts that are compa-rable to us in resources and size. And I basically said, if we, if you, if we can settle this contract and we can get through this, we'll use this model and we will not have to make a budget reduction outside of declining enrollment.
Going forward because this model will [00:09:00] be our guide and we've used that model now for the last nine years and we haven't had to make a budget re-duction. We actually just presented our end of year budget last night and we're in great shape. I can tell you out until 2028 as long as we stay balanced, we're going to be fine financially.
Dr. Jim: So that gives us a good perspective into the financial landscape that you walked into. Tell me a little bit about the school performance landscape that you were facing when you took over the district.
Dr. Ryan Laager: Yeah, at the time, the district was only above the we give the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment here in Minnesota, the MCA test, and the test is one piece. So I talk about that as the achievement gap, and then the oppor-tunity gap are what are the opportunities that we're providing kids. And at that time when I took over, we were above the state average in four of the 17 differ-ent grade levels and areas that were assessed in the MCA.
So we began looking deeper at some strand data, some other, our curricular are-as, the amount of time we were spending on instruction in [00:10:00] certain ar-eas, things like that on that side. And then we did have a lot of opportunities More probably at the elementary, where kids were spending a lot of time on what I would call the opportunity gap type experiences, but they weren't getting enough core instruction or enough minutes of instruction in those areas.
And then also, we spent a significant time looking at what was the curriculum in those areas with a goal or hopes of improving both the achievement gap. And still maintaining an opportunity gap for kids, but knowing we were going to have to really reduce some of that because there's only so many minutes in a day to be able to do both of those things.
Dr. Jim: When you start looking at the situation on the ground, you've already described an opportunity gap and an achievement gap. And that as a potential problem that you want to take on.
Where do you start? In the process of solving both of those gaps.
Dr. Ryan Laager: I use a process and I had used this process in a large high school, 2250 kids as well. I went around and did grade level and what I call hour [00:11:00] by hour meetings at the secondary where teachers can drop in on their prep and in those meetings what I did because I really wanted to get to know people and them to get to know me and I use a very simple exercise.
It's called a 321. I asked them, tell me three things that are really going well in the district or three things that you really value about being in the Belle Plaine public schools. Give me two school. Challenges two things you'd like to see that we need to work on. And what's one way administratively, all of us as leaders can better support you as staff.
And so I went around and did that with all of our teachers, paraprofessionals and I collected all of that information and getting back to listening is extremely important. And then also communicating, I would communicate back what eve-ryone shared so everybody could see. What people were seeing at each of our elementary schools at our secondary buildings.
As well as at grade levels and by different academic disciplines throughout the district. And that really helped me start to shape [00:12:00] what people valued here and helped to build really what became our initial strategic plan and we have reworked that. And we're actually in the process right now of even evaluat-ing and looking at what are our, we have four strategic directions and a mission statement.
We keep it nice and simple, one page. But every year I go back And I what I call I unpack the mission where I take it portions of the mission statement apart and I address all the things we've done in each of those areas. So people yearly can see this is how we're living our mission. And we do the same thing with our four strategic directions.
So everything that we do over the course of the year, we highlight the successes. Or the work we're doing or continue to do in those areas.
Dr. Jim: You just described something that is unusual and that's a pretty lean strategic plan. But that didn't automatically come into existence in, in its current form. You had to go through a process. So tell us a little bit about. How you got to this current version of a strategic plan and why previous versions didn't really help you [00:13:00] close that achievement gap.
Dr. Ryan Laager: In past experiences, I had been a part of like we did these scorecards and they actually were working on those scorecards when I came here is what their strategic plan was. And it gets back to a statement I've made before about. If we did everything on these scorecards, how do we know we're going to be a better district?
And a lot of those would set specific data points we were going to reach or things like that. And in, in one district, we had 56 different strategic directions. It was like we brought community in, we brought all of these people together to write the strategic plan. And I describe it as throwing spaghetti noodles against the wall and seeing what was going to stick.
And everybody got a little bit of what they wanted into the strategic plan, but the problem was a lot of the things that were in there. One, we didn't know how to operationalize it. We probably didn't know if we operationalized it. What did it actually mean? And if we operationalized it. Were we actually going to be better?
Were kids going, were we going to be meeting the needs that our staff saw in the district? Were they the needs that our kids [00:14:00] actually had? And how were they going to translate into doing the work that actually needed to be done in the district? It was really, again, those culminating experiences over a lifetime and a career where I saw a lot of things that didn't work.
And really wanted to make sure that As we put this plan together to drive our work here that it was something that came from staff and they saw as what they valued what their needs were, how they needed to be supported. And then what's really important to me is that every year we report this out.
No one in the district is going to walk away and say I don't understand what my purpose is, or I don't understand what our direction is, because we unpack every year in the fall, what we did the previous year and how it had an impact both on our culture, on our kids on our community, all those things.
Dr. Jim: When you're looking at this streamlined version of this plan that you have in place currently. And you're revising and revisiting it every year. I would imagine that there's a potential [00:15:00] risk falling into the trap of, let's work on whatever is urgent at the moment. So you end up getting super tactical in-stead of strategic.
So what did you do to make sure that you weren't? Focusing in on the wrong thing or the media thing, and you still had a big picture that informed kind of the overall direction you want to go.
Dr. Ryan Laager: For us, I think It's anchored in our mission statement. Like our mission is to pursue excellence in academics, programming, social, emo-tional development of our students, fostering a culture of kindness, inclusion, and pride in ourselves, our school, and our community. And in that statement, culture is bolded, italicized, and underlined.
Because the one thing that has been, was the most important thing when I got here that I identified is staff really wanted to have a relationship with the district with Both the board, the leadership, the principals that we were all rolling in the same direction, but that they also felt a connection to us.
So we make sure that we root everything in that [00:16:00] word culture. And it comes back to, as we make decisions about, absenteeism or supporting staff, if they have a need, we always go back to how is this decision going to affect cul-ture that first and foremost. So it's really anchored back in what our mission is and really truly anchored in.
Culture is the one thing that we will protect at any cost. And then from there, we build out what are the other things that we need and assess how those things are going to make sure that they're getting the intended and desired results that we're all hoping for.
Dr. Jim: I like the fact that you talked about how everything is anchored on cul-ture. And when I think about that and think about where you started from, so you described a scenario where you had 56 different directions that you could potentially grow and that. Came out of a lot of people having voice in deciding what you work on, and now you're streamlining to a much leaner way of oper-ating.
So to go from 56 to a [00:17:00] handful and still keep people involved in the process and feeling like they have a say in the matter, how did you bridge that? Because I would imagine. Some people might feel left out if you're going from 56 things down to a handful of things. So how did you bridge that?
Dr. Ryan Laager: So we started developing the draft with us as a leadership team going through, and we actually did the 3 2 1 activity, and we have 10 peo-ple on our leadership team. And we took that draft and then I went out to build-ings and I did the 3 2 1 and I shared information back with them and we com-pared the information that we collected from all of our staff.
And then we formulated a sample of that mission statement, which was going to be our anchor. And then I went back to buildings to staff meetings where every-body was present and shared the mission. And then at their tables, I had a copy of the mission act. Ask them to tweak and change different wording.
I always say words matter and tone matter a lot when [00:18:00] you're putting this together, but then we continued to refine that to a point that I thought we had captured what. What our leadership team felt, and the one reason I start there is I always say the teachers always know best what the student needs are because they're with them every day.
I know them at a certain level as an assistant principal, and I probably know them at a lower level. As a principal, and I probably know less of them as a su-perintendent, because as you become further away, less of what those needs are and those components. And then our staff are in our buildings every day, so they understand what their own needs are to be able to function at a high level or an optimal level for themselves.
So that's why we started there. Where a lot of people will just start by putting a huge community group together and it's made up of staff and parents and com-munity members and business owners and all those things, in doing some of these processes in the past, I had a lot of community members and business owners share with me.
We don't really know what happens in the school. We don't really know what. We need, but we think this sounds like a good thing that we should have in there or [00:19:00] that we should be trying to achieve. And then from there we go to our we went to our board and We had a retreat in the summertime and we shared all of the feedback from staff from our leadership team And then we shared the draft statement The statements we had put together and then how it had changed and morphed in our board wordsmith and changed some of that mission state-ment that I just shared a few minutes ago as well and then we shared that out with our community and offered an opportunity for them to provide feedback through a Google form on what their thoughts were about the mission.
And the one thing I will say is, yes, our process doesn't involve community or parents as much as typical strategic planning processes do. But the one thing I'll say is we don't really have parents who ever come to our board meetings and complain about things going on in the district. We receive a lot of positive feed-back.
I think the one thing is parents and community are going to let you know if things aren't going in the right direction or there's things that need to change. We have those [00:20:00] posts on Facebook where people are concerned about certain things. We take those to heart and we look at our mission and say, okay, are there things here that are happening.
Was there communication that was dropped? Are we not treating people with kindness? Are we not including people who need to be included in certain things? So we take all of that feedback and constantly play it back to the mis-sion, but we don't get nearly as much of that because. I think we truly assessed what we needed as an organization 'cause we were right to the people who best understood it.
And that was our staff working at the grassroots level of what was important to them about being in Bell Plaine and what was most important to them about what we needed to do as a district to be better.
Dr. Jim: So if I'm taking inventory of what you just described and I'm drawing a process map off of it, it sounds like what you described involves these five or six steps. So one is to find the anchor that is going to Define or motivate every action that happens out of it. So you define [00:21:00] culture as the key anchor and then what you did to streamline this process that involved 56 directions into something that was much tighter is that at the executive tier of the organization, you define the key pillars of the strategy that you wanted to focus on.
Then you brought those Elements down to the building leadership tier and the educator tier to define, okay, here's what we're thinking. What do we need to do to get there? So define the action steps out of it. Then you had the community and board offer their input and that's how you actually came up with the stream-lined plan.
Am I working through that process map correctly?
Dr. Ryan Laager: Yeah. And in that last piece, it was really having the teachers at the classroom level. Our paraprofessionals, our staff, and our buildings weigh in, and this was just on the mission component of it. And I think what was im-portant to see was, and for me, was getting back to the board was very hesitant when I got here [00:22:00] because of the relationship between district leader-ship and staff, that they wanted a positive culture so they were aware that culture was something Needed to be valued and that came out of the teachers as culture was something I need to be about so for me I sat back and smiled at the fact that we had the entities from the top of the organization all the way down through The organization realizing culture was most important You know our communi-ty feedback at the end was just really sharing what we had come up with and honestly There wasn't a lot of feedback offered on it Because I think the com-munity saw bits and pieces of things that everybody valued in that statement.
And again, that just becomes the anchor. Then from there, we have far more specific things we're doing that have to meet all of those things. But any deci-sion we make or anything we do always comes back to how is this going to im-pact our culture to ensure we have a positive culture.
Dr. Jim: Once you've done that work You developed a handful of initiatives that the district is focused on so when you look at those [00:23:00] initiatives How did you prioritize which one of those initiatives you tackle first?
Dr. Ryan Laager: So again we started as a leadership team in this way. We worked a little bit. We developed what we thought were three to four key strate-gic directions that we needed to work on as a district. And we did this as a lead-ership team. And then we took that to a board retreat. And again, the same re-treat with the board weighed in on what the mission statement was.
They weighed in on what those strategic directions were going to be. The main reason for the timing of that was we did this in the summer or we typically do this in the summer. It's also where we reevaluate. It's why we come back and unpack the mission and that in the fall with staff is because we spend a lot of our time in the summer, unpacking these things and looking at what did we do well?
What could have we done better? And then we plan for the upcoming school year. But so for us, those came back to number one, academic development is extremely important. Like kids need to be [00:24:00] able to learn and they need to have opportunities to find their passion or something they might want to pur-sue long term.
Then the second thing that we really valued and we also feel our community valued was really student involvement in our school and community. And that can be in activities. It doesn't just mean sports. It doesn't just mean theater. It means our our agri science clubs, robotics our choirs and bands, those kind of things.
How are they involved in our school and community? And then the one that re-ally resonated in the last time that we revisited this process was the importance of social emotional development of our kids. We've seen a significant Or seen significant challenges in the area of mental health around anxiety, depression, those kind of things.
So it was extremely important both to us as a leadership team and our board at that time that was something that we looked at. And then we have infrastructure and facility needs. If we don't have the facilities to support academic develop-ment, social emotional [00:25:00] learning development of our kids, and then our kids involvement in our school and our community.
Without infrastructure, we can't do that. So those became those four things, and we took those, and those were our common themes. Then those common themes we went back and shared at back to school workshop with all staff. And then I went and shared them at a building level and collected feedback from staff at a building level about what they thought were key priorities.
And similar to the other process we talked about I collected all that information, I shared it back so everybody could see what was we had a leadership team that we just talked about in every school, and we worked as a leadership team to form that into. Okay. These are what we're going to focus on in these four areas.
And then we spent the year really developing what were the supports going to be to make sure we were addressing those four strategic directions.
Dr. Jim: that makes sense. I think the one piece that i'm still a little unclear on is You went from 56 different directions down to three [00:26:00] to four, and these were the three or four that you landed on. How did you come up with these four as the one out of the 56 that were the most critical?
Dr. Ryan Laager: One of the things, so they were working on a scorecard model when I came here, which was and so the 56 strategic directions had been a part of a plan that I was a part of actually in a previous district as well. But I would say when I try to remember the scorecard here, it was probably five by this probably 25, five by five categories.
Those were just very specific about we're going to see a 3 percent growth in MCA math at 4th, 3rd grade, or we're going to see, and so what we talked a lot about was. That kind of specificity doesn't really motivate people. It's very hard when you're that specific about things. It gets back to, if we do these things, does it mean we're better?
And I would give the example of, if our goal was to improve our MCA math score by 5 percent at 3rd grade, and we do that, What if the state [00:27:00] went up by 25 percent that year, and we're celebrating the fact we went up by five, which is actually 20 percent worse than the rest of the state did. Are we a better district.
And that's where a lot of that conversation came through in the scorecards of yeah, we can keep score, but it doesn't mean we're any better. So for us, it was really about coming up with some broad areas that we thought were better. the most important needs of our kids. And then going back to our staff, I will say, our staff continues social emotional learning continues to be at the forefront of that.
Coming out of COVID as well, but I'll say this, We had that as a strategic direc-tion prior to COVID and one of the decisions that was made was we hired a full time licensed mental health therapist in our district as a result of that strategic di-rection, because we saw a need for therapy level support for kids while they were at school, because a lot of kids who needed that support, they couldn't get appointments or get to appointments at a clinic somewhere.
We needed to provide [00:28:00] that here. Yeah. Our goal is, we're always on, we're going to be leaders in these areas and there was a lot more that went into that strategic direction, but that became really the top of that. After we had done a lot of other things, we had a program that happened every day we had counse-lors in all of our buildings and they could make referrals, but.
What we were seeing happen was a counselor would get to a point where I know this kid needs help, but we didn't, we couldn't get to the next step. It would have been up to the kid to do that. So it, that's how we went from say 25 things that were very specific to, we wanted to look at more or overarching things that were significant needs.
And a kid's mental health has a significant need has a significant impact on their ability to achieve academically. Or their ability to find that opportunity or that passion they want to pursue because they're dealing with their own mental health challenges. So that's how I would say we went down to that was we wanted a little bit more broad than just the specifics because the specifics didn't really tell us much anyway.
Dr. Jim: That's a good walkthrough that you've taken us [00:29:00] through from where you were to where you are and how that strategic plan has become much more streamlined and usable.
That's all great. How did it impact? What was the impact that it had when we're talking about the main thing that we wanted to cover closing the opportunity and achievement gap? What's been the result of all of this work that you've done on the strategic plan side? And how is that shown up in the actual scorecard?
Dr. Ryan Laager: If we took it, if we take a look at the academic and achieve-ment gap side of it this last year we're in our third year of implementing a cur-riculum, which was based on the science of reading. And we saw district wide. Six and a half percent growth in our literacy score, going back to one of the challenges that I saw when I came here.
We were only above the state average in four of the 17 areas. Now I think we're over the state average in 14 or 15 of the 17 areas, and we're within like one or two percentage points of being over in all of them. So on the literacy side that would be one area. On the math side. 6 [00:30:00] 12, we actually adopted a new math curriculum two years ago, and at 7th and 8th grade, we saw roughly 18 percent growth and almost 20 percent growth this last year in 8th grade, but overall across the district, we saw 8 percent growth in our test score data, and I'm very careful.
Test scores just are one measure at one point in time. Actually is not a great pre-dictor of a kid's long term academic success, even, but it is a measuring stick. And we've also measured that both cohort growth and year over year growth. So kids in third grade. How did they do in fourth grade? And then also against how did the state do in those cohort groups and year over year groups, so our data on that side is starting to look really strong and has been growing towards that.
But we've really seen some significant improvement on the opportunity gap side. We've added. I want to say, I would have to count, but I would guess roughly 40 to 50 new programs. In fact, this year we have over 80 kids taking a [00:31:00] class, two sections on how to develop a podcast. And they've been putting those together and posting those podcasts out there and it's really inter-esting.
And it's interesting to see kids, some kids who aren't engaged in other areas who absolutely have just taken that class and run with it. We have a construction trades class this year that's new where they're just finishing building a 52 by 20 foot shed from the ground up out at our softball complex.
We've created a lot. Our kids can get certified FAA certification for flying drones. So we've added. A variety of courses where if we didn't talk about the opportunity gap, we wouldn't be offering those. If staff didn't know that was an area of focus, they wouldn't come to us with these ideas.
And then the same thing on the achievement side, our staff really drove the cur-ricular changes because they wanted to see that academic development continue to improve our kids. So that's really what I would say is the impact where we are today at least.
Dr. Jim: When you think about all of the different things that we talked about today, one of the big things that came out [00:32:00] of this conversation is, building a strategic plan that's actually usable.
If somebody else is looking at trying to accomplish the same thing, what are the key things that they need to keep in mind to pull that off successfully?
Dr. Ryan Laager: I think number one is simplify the process. Number two is make sure everybody understands what's a part of it and keep it at the forefront of what you communicate and all the decisions you make. And you talked about this in your intro where it's not, a lot of strategic plans aren't worth the paper they're written on because they look really pretty.
But nobody knows what's actually on the paper. I think the third piece that's re-ally important is communicating out every year about what did you do around each of those statements in your mission statement? And what did you do around each of those strategic directions? Because the people in your organiza-tion can see their role in each portion of that mission statement and they can see their role in each of those [00:33:00] strategic directions because they do some-thing You In many cases in each of those areas every day, and then the one thing I guess that we didn't talk about also is if you go to our website and you click on our strategic plan, our unpacked mission statement from last year is there are strategic directions are there so people can see all the things we did.
In the last school year around our mission statement. So when you talk about community can go out and see what are this is your mission. That's great. What did you do? It's right there where if you would go to most school district pages and you'd find their mission statement. I bet you would have a hard time finding with that level of simplicity.
What are they actually doing to try to achieve that mission?
Dr. Jim: Really great stuff, Ryan. If people want to continue the conversation, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?
Dr. Ryan Laager: You can email me, go to the Bell Plain public schools here in Minnesota You can click on the superintendent. My email address is on there. Feel free to reach out. You shoot me an email. I actually put my cell phone number on the bottom of every email I send out whether it goes to a parent, a kid, a community member, [00:34:00] anybody I always say I would rather an-swer my phone than have to check my voicemail and call people back and I ac-tually don't use my office phone when I call parents.
I call them on my cell phone because I want to make sure they have that direct connection. And some people will say you're a smaller suburban school district. I did that when I was in the largest school district in Minnesota as a principal. I was in the 20th largest district in the state as a principal and an executive direc-tor.
Yeah. It's just an easier way for me to operate. And people, what I've learned over my career is people don't abuse that piece of it. And it just creates a better connection, a more personable one for me with people. So feel free to give me a call too.
Dr. Jim: Awesome stuff. So I appreciate you hanging out with us, Ryan. When I think about this conversation, there's a couple of things that stood out to me as important principles that we should keep simplifying strategic plans. I think There's two questions that are really critical in this process. One is what is your anchor?
What is that defining value or purpose that you're going to build everything around and having a clear line of sight into what that is going to [00:35:00] bet-ter inform all any and all of the directions that you might decide to take on. And then the other question that I think is important for other leaders to think about when they're looking at this process of building a more effective strategic plan.
Is if you have a line item on there, you have to be disciplined to ask the ques-tion. If we achieve this line item, are we any better? How are, how is this mak-ing us better? So those two questions I think are critical in this process of simpli-fying the strategic planning process and the strategic plan to make it actionable.
So I appreciate you sharing that with us. For those of you who have been listen-ing to this conversation, we appreciate you hanging out. If you liked the discus-sion, make sure you leave us a review on your favorite podcast player. If you haven't already done so, make sure you join our community. And then tune in late, tune in next time where we'll have another leader hanging out with us and sharing with us the game changing insights that help them build a high perform-ing team