In this important discussion led by Marcus Meyers, Chief Academic Officer at the West Ada School District, Meyers asks, “Why are the right people leaving or not knocking? First of all, we're expected now to trust during times that can't be trusted. And that's tough in an educational setting because of these other two pieces. How we define success in education now is defined for us and not with us. And that's a really tough concept. And it's fairly unique to the realm of education. People, in their own minds, simply because they all went to school at one point another, define what success looks like.

“But COVID instantly created a different level of how the public defined success. And they did it without us. And it happened through no fault of our own. And so that has an impact on whether people want to come to this profession.  We have lost people through the lens of, ‘Is this a job I really want to do? Do I want to get paid this much to have this limited number of resources and take this much from the general public?’ Because we took it and we took it hard for a couple of years, even though at the end, we did a phenomenal job, a phenomenal job of how we responded to COVID and what that looked like.

“Let's talk about trusting during times that can't be trusted. So, we talked a little bit about this ever evolving landscape of education and community things like changing expectations and the guidelines of what parents expected as result of remote learning, and expectations versus what we could do, and then understanding between balancing what we can do resource-wise and what we can do for students while still being bound by financial and resource restraints.

“Fearless organizations are characterized by high levels of trust. Trust, and psychological safety are better predictors of performance of teams than education, backgrounds and personality types, which are the criteria often used to select and promote employees. When you start within an organization, you start with the person, you have these conversations with them, but what keeps them there is that level of trust. And in the past couple of years, trust has very much been eroded. And that perception of trust of schools keeps people from filling out that application. And so, although this is a reason behind people leaving and behind recruitment efforts that have stalled, we're going to talk about how to counteract that through a team structure.”

You’ll want to watch this fascinating and extremely effective discussion with Marcus Myers of the West Ada School District. District administrators report that recruiting and retaining talent is perhaps the most difficult tasks currently on their district’s plate. In this video, you’ll learn effective strategy for not only attracting the right individuals, but building an organization that promotes loyalty to the highest degree.