Darrin Peppard: Road To Awesome

Road To Awesome

Daniel (00:02):
So, how would you feel if you had the opportunity, an invitation to lead the school where you grew up? Or where you came from? Or what if you got to lead the school where you started off as a teacher? Maybe in one of those scenarios, it would be exciting to return home and to lead. I know today’s guest was super excited to go back home, but when he got there, he found something interesting. The culture had shifted, it became a bit toxic. People were really focused on everything that was going wrong versus everything that was going right. And not only will we tell that story, we’ll take you to the moment where the light bulb went on and Darrin Peppard figured out there’s a better way. There’s a Road to Awesome, as he calls it. Hey, it’s Danny, and welcome to the Better Leaders Better Schools podcast, a show for Ruckus Makers, which means that you invest in your continuous growth, you challenge the status quo, and you’re designing the future of school now. Hope you enjoyed today’s conversation with Darrin Peppard, and we’ll be right back after a few messages from our show sponsors.

Daniel (01:18):
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Daniel (02:54):
All right. Hey, Ruckus Makers. I’m here with Darrin Pepper, who’s a leadership expert focused on organizational culture and climate and coaching growing emerging leaders. Darrin’s the author of the book Road to Awesome, empower Lead, Change the Game. He’s also the host of , leaning into Leadership podcasts. As a recovering high school principal, Darrin shares Strategies and Lessons Learned that helped him be effective from over 25 years in public ed to help leaders to be effective in their roles and positively impact the world around them. Darrin, welcome to this show.

Darrin (03:34):
Thank you so much, Danny. I’ve been looking forward to this.

Daniel (03:37):
Yeah, this is gonna be great. You were super generous and had me on your podcast and here we are. You’re able to do a little podcast swap and have you on as well. Again, check out Darrin’s work the Road to Awesome, the stuff is great. Let’s start with your story. You left the classroom, you returned to your home state. If you landed in a toxic culture, tell us that story.

Darrin (04:03):
It’s interesting when I left my teaching position. I had taught in the classroom in Arizona for 11 years and just really we wanted to go back home. My home state is Wyoming and I was ready to make that leap, I guess from being a classroom teacher and a coach to being an administrator. I didn’t know it was a toxic culture, and I don’t think any of us really did. But we discovered through finally taking a look at ourselves and maybe doing a little bit of self-reflection. I’ll tell you a story about a staff meeting in a second, but we were really good at catching people doing things wrong and that’s what we were all about. That whole thing is like punishment to gain a compliance type of leadership style. That’s who we were. Partway through my first year we’re in this, in that staff meeting, so many people have, the one where you’re trying to solve those big issues. Like what are you doing about hats and what are you doing about cell phones? Somebody raised a hand and said, “man, Darrin, why is it always gotta be about what to do wrong? Why can’t it be about what to do?” I think for me, that was that moment when I realized that our culture was pretty toxic. We weren’t celebrating all the great things, we were just busy being the hammer and letting our kids be the nail.

Daniel (05:26):
Yeah. So it sounds like that staff meeting was the light bulb moment for you, and here you are in the staff member, why aren’t we catching ’em what they’re doing and celebrating that. What would you say to a Ruckus Maker watching or listening to the show? I assume that they’re not that kind of leader, but maybe they are dealing with that. And if they are how can schools practically see and hear and love and celebrate their students?

Darrin (05:55):
First and foremost, I think every leader should take that moment to, I guess take a step back or take a step up onto the balcony. When we’re busy leading our schools each and every day, we really get deep into the weeds and we have a tendency to kinda lose sight of what we’re doing in terms of what are those main goals. So jump up on the balcony and maybe kind of take a look, and then you’ll realize where are you spending your time and what is it that you’re really shining the spotlight on as far as how do you go about celebrating and recognizing those incredible things? Start with what you’re looking for I mean, a simple way to think about it is Danny, next time you’re out in your car, just count the number of red cars you see as you’re driving along. You’re gonna find a lot of ’em. And it’s simply because that’s what you’re looking for. So start totally really training your mind to look for the great things in your school, and then just find those simple ways to recognize, reward, and reinforce that it could be celebrating the great ki great things that kids are doing academically, behaviorally, attendance, those types of things at some type of an academic pep rally. Do a pep rally like you do for athletics, but celebrate those other things instead. You keep doing the athletic stuff, the athletic stuff’s awesome, they’ve gotta figure it out. But do some of those same types of things instead of certificates for kids. Certificates just go in a drawer and come up with something that’s visible or tangible, a shirt or a wristband or maybe do, I’m actually right now working on my blog poster today. And it’s a way to celebrate and say thank you. And so we used to do a barbecue, we did it once a month, we did a barbecue for all our kids. We’re meeting certain targets or positive referrals for those kinds of things. So talk to your kids. I mean, that’s the bottom line. You wanna know how your kids wanna be celebrated? Talk to ’em, actually ask ’em.

Daniel (07:55):
We’ve had a lot of mastermind members have success with good news calls of the day and, and yeah, I think that’s what you’re talking about. This culture of celebration. And I love that you’re talking about give them tangible things too. And to move past just athletics. Like, there’s so many different ways that schools excuse me, students exhibit their brilliance. I just wanna highlight Doc Chris Jones, who’s viewing right now, and definitely a Ruckus Maker who listens to the podcast. He said, compliance encourages resistance and I would agree with that. There’s a part of my book that talks about expectations versus agreements. Anything you wanna add in terms of doc’s comment here that compliance encourages resistance.

Darrin (08:43):
I really appreciate what Chris is saying there, because to me, compliance is like the enemy of innovation. If we are focused only on compliance, we’re not gonna have people who are being innovative and creative in their classroom, and our kids aren’t necessarily gonna take risks because our teachers won’t take risks in those cultures of compliance. It’s like people will function and perform at a level just north of that, which would get them punished. We definitely want to move in that direction where we’re encouraging people to take a risk and take a chance and be willing to do some things differently. And then you really celebrate those people for taking chances and doing cool things in our classroom. I mean, that’s what being a Ruckus Maker’s all about. You can’t, that’s right. You can’t make a ruckus if you can’t take a risk.

Daniel (09:32):
No. It’s to invest in your continuous growth, challenging the status quo, which is inherently risky in designing the future school now. Like, why, wait, and the one thing I want to add too, like, back to this like compliance riff and expectations riff were happen too. Here’s the thing, especially when it comes to resistance. Viewers, listeners, like to think for a moment. Honestly, investigate your own experience when you have expectations or you’re pushing people to be compliant, how do you feel when they violate? You know, that expectation, you’re pretty, you’re upset right now. How do you feel if they actually meet the expectation or they are quite compliant? Do you throw a party for ’em, you high five ’em? No. You just think to yourself, oh, they’re just doing their job. So it’s a lose lose situation. That’s why agreements are so much better. A culture of celebration is so much better because when it’s sort of an organic and bottom up and collaborative process that people say, this is how I’m gonna add more value, they’re thrilled to make that the reality. And that’s really how you build a remarkable school, a remarkable culture. Another way you can do it is to have a leadership coach. And I know you had an executive leadership coach as a principal. Tell us, Darrin, like what did you learn from that experience? Having a coach

Darrin (10:49):
Danny was a game changer. I mean, it really was that holy cow. I became the principal in the same school where I’d been an assistant principal, and it was seriously 40 feet from my AP office to the principal’s office. I’m mean, like a really short little move down the hallway, and it might as well have been like 400 miles because. When I stepped into that principal role, and I think a lot of principals go through what I went through Darrin peppered sat at the interview table and Darrin Peppered was offered the job, and then Darrin peppered thought, “oh, now I have to be Superman. I have to do it all.” They didn’t inter they didn’t interview or hire Superman, they interviewed me, but I was convinced for whatever reason that I had to have all the answers and I had to solve everybody’s problems and all this.

Darrin (11:39):
And before I knew it, man, that first year, I’ll be honest with you, I mean, I say I was breathing through a snorkel, but I probably was full on scuba gear for most of the year, cuz my head was just totally below water. Year two, I was able to work with an executive leadership coach. And man, I’ll never forget the first time he was at my school. That whole morning was just you know, eight teachers needed me right away and my secretary needed me. And I had a group of angry parents and I had bunches of stuff on my push pin board and in administration, we just call that Monday. My leadership coach when I’m working my way through all this stuff, and yeah, then he, I turned around, he wasn’t there, and my secretary’s like, yeah, he’s in room 318, grab a notepad.

Darrin (12:27):
He said, get down there. And I went and he’s doing walkthroughs. I’m like, dude, what are you doing? I mean, I got all this stuff. And he pulled me aside, and Danny, this to me, this is what leadership coaching is all about. He said something I’ll never forget, he just looked at me and said, Darrin, it’s time for you to stop being a firefighter and start being a leader. And if you’re going to lead, you need to be where the action is. There’s plenty of people to help you with all of that. It’s not your job to do all of those things. You need to be in classrooms, you need to be with your teachers, you need to be with your kids. It was a game changer, man. I could go on and on with that story seriously, but it was a game changer.

Daniel (13:09):
Yeah. It’s a game changer moment that you’re not a firefighter, like putting out emergencies all the time, and you should need to be where the action is, be a leader. To add a little more, how long did that take to sink in? I know it was a game changing, but then there’s like the shift in the attitude and beliefs and how that shows up in your day-to-day operations.

Darrin (13:33):
Yeah, no, absolutely. Happy to go deep into that. It was interesting because as he said that, and then we continued doing some walkthroughs and that kind of stuff. My initial thought was, well we should maybe have a cup of coffee and talk about different things. But it was like, no, we need to get into the work and we need to be doing this on a regular basis. From there, it became, let’s start putting some systems in place that ensure that you can go and do that work. And it wasn’t just, Hey, go do this. We had to build some systems and it was things like just simply managing my time differently. You know, the leaders I coach now, one of the first things I always talk to them about is, Hey, how much do you empower your secretary or your administrative assistant, whatever the title is?Do they have access to your email? Do they have access to your calendar? Are they able to answer questions with authority on certain things? i learned probably, no, I would say over the course of that first year, working with him, just exactly what were the things that I should be delegating and allowing others to do, and honestly trusting others to do. Fast forward down the road when I became a superintendent sitting down with my HR director, she was solving everybody’s problems. And it’s like, no, we need to start teaching people how to solve their own problems so that you don’t have to do everything for ’em. It easily took a year for me to get comfortable with that and to feel like, “Oh, okay, wait, this is something that I need to be delegating to one of my assistant principals, or this is something that this is our process.” I’ll give you a simple example. I would walk down a hallway, it was a passing period, Danny, I’d have like four or five teachers who wanted to talk to me. I would stop and talk and stop and talk and stop and talk. Well then I’d be 10 minutes late for where I was supposed to be. A simple system we put in place was, I would just tell them, “Hey, I really want to talk with you, but I’m already scheduled somewhere. Email Marilyn, my secretary, she’ll get you on the calendar. You tell her how long you need me and I will come to you.” She was empowered to just build that time into my calendar. I would go to that person. I was saying to them, your time is more valuable than mine. I’m coming to your classroom to talk to you.

Darrin (15:58):
I’m not gonna ask you to come to me. But that system, it took a little bit of time to get comfortable with it, but then the staff just knew they would just email Marilyn directly “Hey, I need 10 minutes with Darrin, can you get me set up? “The same thing was true with email. We all get 2, 3, 400 emails as school leaders. 80% of that I didn’t need to respond to. Or some of it you’d get that parent email and I really wasn’t the one who needed to respond to it. They needed to talk to the counselor or talk to a teacher. She just did that for me. She’s like, I already know what to do with this. We met every single day. It’s not like she just ran autonomously, But that relationship with her, and the same thing is true with my assistant principals, was so critical. But it took time. It didn’t just happen by Tom saying, “Hey, quit being a firefighter. Oh, okay, I’ll stop doing that. It didn’t work like that. It took time. It really did.

Daniel (16:59):
Well, I appreciate you illustrating some of those points. And one of the key words there is systems. So having a system of how you’ll generally deal with stuff. Also, one of my favorite words, which is delegation. And that’s great because you’re empowering your team and like you said 80% of the emails Marilyn knew how to handle on your behalf. And some of that’s through coaching and mentorship through your daily meeting and all of that. But it’s saving you time. And I love that. Yeah. You know, teachers could get on your calendar that you’d meet ’em in their space. And really you are also telling them that I’m gonna give you full presence, full attention. And they’re just not gonna get that in a passing period when you know, you got somewhere to be and they’re trying to tell you something that’s important. Actually it probably saved a lot of relationships and nurtured a lot of relationships. Otherwise, you’re like, “oh, okay, I’m pretending to listen.” And then you’re off and you totally even forgot what they talked about. Super cool stuff there. Let’s chat about your book, Road To Awesome. I highly recommend that Ruckus Makers check that out. Darrin’s book. It introduces six things that are important to leaders. We don’t have time to dig in and go deep on all of ’em, but can you just give an overview of what those six things are?

Darrin (18:21):
When I first wrote this book my goal behind putting this book out was to have leaders have an opportunity to really reflect on what matters to them. Again, this goes back to my coaching experience, but I had to understand the importance of clarity, and I had to understand the importance of being intentional with my work. The first and foremost thing was you gotta be clear about what matters to you. And so for me it was really important. I was really clear with what the vision of our school was and that I had to be communicating that all the time, and I needed to be really clear about building and maintaining that positive culture and climate in our school. The other ones that are in there as well, I talk about really empowering our students and ensuring that we have high quality, authentic learning experiences for our kids.

Darrin (19:13):
I talk about really loving and supporting and caring for all of the people who work in our school. I call ’em faculty, staff plus faculty. And then I just talked about how important it is for us to be telling the stories of our schools because yes, if we let somebody else tell our story, we’re probably not gonna like their version. We have to own it. And then the last one is coaching exactly what we’re talking about. As a school leader, as the principal, my really biggest job was to grow and coach everybody else in that school, grow and coach my teachers, grow and coach my leaders, grow and coach my support staff so that we were doing everything we could for kids. Now an interesting wrinkle, and you and I haven’t had a chance to talk about this, but we are actually going to be releasing an updated version of this book just cool.

Darrin (20:02):
Shortly after the beginning of the year. We’re really excited about that. Still gonna be very similar to this book. The second edition is going to dive a little deeper into that clarity, into being intentional and really focusing around what we believe are the three primary tenets of traveling the road to Awesome. Which is number one, we focus on the things we can control and go what we can’t. Number two, we rise by lifting others. And number three, as educators, we change the world one conversation at a time. So we are working on that updated edition right now, so that’s gonna be exciting. That’ll be coming out in January.

Daniel (20:46):
Sweet. So people watching now can pre-order soon hopefully. And then folks that listen absolutely on the podcast this will release after the book is absolutely revised, so go pick it up. Let’s talk about empowering the team and there’s a leader, so shout out to John. One of my favorite Ruckus Makers for sure. We’ve worked together in the mastermind and one-on-one and he’s very interested in empowering his team. I said I’m gonna talk to somebody about that and put it in the podcast. Can you tell us some ways that have really worked for you when empowering your team?

Darrin (21:21):
There’s two things to really think about when you’re empowering your team. Number one, what are the things that they’re really good at? What are their strengths? If we can help people play to their strengths. Think about this as an athletic coach, I was a basketball coach. Everything we did, it wasn’t just, “Hey, this is my offensive system and that’s what we’re gonna do.” My athletes changed from year to year and you wanna play to their strengths and try to minimize those things that maybe we’re not good at. If I don’t have a lot of speed, I’m not gonna press. That’s just how it is. When I do have that, maybe that’s the direction that I’m gonna go. When you’re empowering your team, think about what are the things they’re really good at and honestly, if you’ve built a good team, they’re good at things that maybe you’re not. Identifying those things that they’re really good at. And then the second thing I would say is definitely take those things they’re good at, but how can you stretch them just a little bit? You know, how can you push them a little bit outside their comfort zone so that they’re continuing to grow and getting better at other things, you know? And what happens when it’s not just, this is what I’m good at, but hey, this is gonna stretch me, this is gonna push me a little bit. It increases the ownership that they take in whatever that is that, that you’re helping them are allowing them to, to take and run with. Those are just to me, the two most important things we can do.

Daniel (22:49):
Oh, absolutely. And I love the idea of stretching them just a little bit too. It makes me think of zone proximal development and I think a great way to identify what that even is to ask people. What are your goals? And you might ask something like, what’s an experiment you might like to run? Or what would stretch you? And people can think another way that you could frame it is, okay, Darrin, so you’ve accomplished that goal. What’s the next one? Now you might’ve identified what that stretch goal is too. I love these ideas so much. I’m really enjoying our conversation.

Darrin (23:24):
It takes us back a little bit to the compliance piece when Chris Jones kind of kind of shared that in there too. When we go the opposite direction, when we go with a little bit more of that being a little bit innovative or being willing to take some risk when you’re doing exactly the work that, that you talked about, that I talked about, what that does is it gives those individuals the opportunity to start coming to you with ideas. You know, it doesn’t just have to be I like how you said it that Hey, what’s a goal that you’d like to accomplish? Or what are you gonna do next? You know, I always like to talk with my team about what are some you know, maybe some pain points or some problems of practice that we’re having in the building that you feel like you would like to take on. Then number one, it’s not me having to be the one to lead all of that, but more importantly, it’s an opportunity for them to grow to, to lead a little bit outside of what their job description is. I’m not saying do something as the athletic director within athletics. What are some things outside of your normal job description that you can do that shows the staff that you’re willing to go out and take a risk that you’re willing to work on improving things and overall just making us a better place ultimately for kids. I think that’s just huge right there. And when we have people who know they have the opportunity to innovate or they know they have the opportunity to take a, they’re gonna come forward with those ideas. So it’s not even just like our aps, it’s other leaders within the building, other teachers, and sometimes even our kids, you know?

Daniel (24:59):
Absolutely. Why not? I mean, they’ve got tons of great ideas they can help solve difficult problems often overlooked. Let’s get some messages in from the show sponsors. When we get back, I would love to just talk really quick about your podcast and then get to the last three questions I ask all my guests. Learn how to successfully navigate, change, shape your school success, and empower your teams with Harvard’s certificate and school management and leadership. Get an online PD that fits your schedule. Courses include leading change, leading school strategy and innovation, leading people and leading learning. Apply today at BetterLeadersBetterschools.com/harvard. School Leaders today. Know that productive student talk. Teach FX drives student learning, but the average teacher talks 75% of class time. Give your students more opportunities to learn in class by monitoring their talk time. And you can check Teach FX for yourself @teachfx.com/BLBS.

Daniel (26:01):
Today’s shows are also proudly sponsored by Organized Binder. A program, which gives students daily exposure to goal setting, reflective learning time and task management, study strategies, organizational skills, and more organized binders. Color coded system is implemented by the teacher through a parallel process with students helping them create a predictable and dependable classroom routine. You can learn more and improve your students’ executive [email protected]. We’re back with Darrin Peppard, and as I mentioned, he has a great podcast and definitely wants Ruckus Makers to check it out. It’s called Leaning Into Leadership It for and who’s it for, would you say?

Darrin (26:48):
This is the podcast that is for today’s hard working leader. Every one of us is out there doing everything we can to try to improve our schools and to do right by our staff. And sometimes we just need to hear from other leaders and it’s not always just leaders in education. When we launched Leaning into Leadership in January of 2022, the idea was definitely to have different successful school leaders on to share insight and share ideas, but I’ve long been a believer that great leadership is great leadership and it doesn’t matter what spaces that it’s happening in. I’ve had business leaders on, I had a county sheriff on one of my favorite episodes. We’re actually getting ready to drop episode 47 coming week as we’re recording.

Darrin (27:38):
We had the county sheriff from Grand County, a Colorado guy named Bre Roland led through an absolutely massive wildfire, the second largest wildfire in his state’s history, and just the leadership insight from him of what he learned and pieces with communication. And those are things all of us can learn from. And so I just want every Sunday to drop a little bit of leadership knowledge from somebody who’s out there doing it each and every day. Also just to bring a little bit of a smile, bring a little bit of joy. My whole goal with everything I do is to help leaders find that clarity to walk in their purpose and to just get back in touch with the joy in their job. And so that’s what I try to do with the podcast each and every week.

Daniel (28:30):
Yeah. Love it. Cool. So check out Leaning Into Learning and it’s available. I’m sure everywhere you can list the podcast and you know, check out the episode that I did with Darrin as well, which was a whole lot of fun.

Darrin (28:41):
Absolutely. It was awesome having you on Leaning into Leadership, man. It was a blast.

Daniel (28:45):
Did I say leaning into learning? I’m sorry if I did. So leaning into leadership. Cool. If you could put a message, Darrin, on all school Marques, around the world for a single day, what would your mess, your message read?

Darrin (28:59):
It would be awesome, just simply that. Find you’re awesome. You know, every one of us is on our own unique journey and we can’t let other people define that journey for us. So whatever it is that is going to lead to your moment of awesome or your world of awesome, that’s what I think we should be doing in our school. So that’s what I would want to put on the Marques.

Daniel (29:22):
Let’s build your dream school. And if you weren’t limited by any resources, your only limitation was your imagination, how would you build your dream school and what would be the top three guiding principles?

Darrin (29:35):
I think one of the pieces that would have to go into building that dream school would be to bring lots of different voices to the table. I mean, this shouldn’t just simply be built by educators, for educators. It’s gotta be people that are out there in the business space that are also really innovative thinkers. As we look at the world today, the jobs that exist now and the jobs that will exist down the road are so much different than what we’re usually preparing kids for. I would say number one when you think about our priorities in this dream school, it has gotta be innovative and I mean, truly innovative not, oh, hey, we’ll give a kid a computer that’s not innovative anymore. We need to be really looking at something as creative as possible. And to get there, I think that’s where my other two priorities would come in. Okay. I want kids doing really truly innovative work, like solving real world problems now, working with people in industry out in the world, being able to actually solve problems. You know what, why should we why should we just be cranking out some worksheets or doing some things that maybe solving problems have already been solved. Our kids think so much differently than their brain, their brains are just so much more elastic than our hours. So why not give them the opportunity to really solve real world problems? And then maybe the other piece I would say is we’ve gotta be independent from accountability measures that just don’t work. You know, quit measuring me by a, a standard tape measure and allow me to measure kids growth in a way that’s actually meaningful, in a way that actually gets them to where they can find their Awesome.

Daniel (31:22):
We’ve covered a lot of ground on this road to awesome, Darrin, and of everything we talked about today, what’s the one thing you want a Ruckus Maker to remember?

Darrin (31:32):
You know I briefly touched it, but I want to come back to it. Here’s what I would say that I want Ruckus Makers to remember, and that is the work that we get to do. We should never forget that being an educator, we’re in the people business. And that’s a blessing. It’s an opportunity, and it’s honestly a chance to change the world one conversation at a time. Never overlook any conversation that we’re having with an adult in our school and never overlook a conversation we’re having with a kid in our school, because that could very well be the conversation that changes the world.

Daniel (32:08):
Awesome. Thanks for listening to The Better Leaders, Better Schools podcast Ruckus Maker. If you have a question or would like to connect my email, [email protected] or hit me up on Twitter at @Alienearbud. If the Better Leaders Better Schools Podcast is helping you grow as a school leader, then please help us serve more Ruckus Makers like you. You can subscribe, leave an honest rating and review or share on social media with your biggest takeaway from the episode, extra credit for tagging me on Twitter at @alienearbud, and using the hashtag #BLBS. Level up your leadership at BetterLeadersBetterschools.com and talk to you next time. Until then, “class dismissed.”