"How Do I Keep The Board Informed Without a Mountain of Detail?"

Brad Rathgeber, One Schoolhouse Head and CEO, discusses how to get everyone, from the board on down, to row in the same direction

Oct 13, 2023

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And now it’s time for the October “People Talking” interview.

I first got to know Brad Rathgeber, Head and CEO of One Schoolhouse, when I sat next to him at lunch at the Headmistresses of the East (now The 1911 Group) annual meeting. He was a presenter and facilitator. We immediately connected as we are both committed to thinking about ways schools can retain their magic while thriving in a quickly changing world. And he is super fun to talk to.

This interview was done at the end of August (I’m still figuring out the timing on these interviews and hopefully will get them up closer to when we actually have the conversation…). Brad’s topic of choice was the operations plan. I was not familiar with this and I learned it’s a potent structure to support strategy living in the day to day operation of a school - or any organization. It’s also a powerful tool for Board of Trustees alignment and communications, going beyond the more typical set of annual goals.

As has been happening during every interview, we wandered off the topic and did a bit of exploration of navigating change in school culture - I’ll share that section later in the fall.

Julie Faulstich

Brad, thank you for talking to me today. We’ve talked many times about the ways schools can become more strategic and effective at operations. At One Schoolhouse, you implemented an annual operations plan and I was immediately curious to hear more. I think this is probably new for a lot of people, so if you could provide some context, that would be great.

Brad Rathgeber

Julie, like you, I was really lucky to have an exceptional CFO that I worked with early on in my headship, Lorri Palko. She was well-versed both in industry and in independent schools. She brought new and exciting viewpoints to me and really helped me grow as a young leader of an organization. Early on, when we were starting to talk about how to present our budget to our board of trustees, she came to me with an idea. She suggested that I needed a narrative to help the board understand why it is that this budget is essential for them to approve in any given year. Numbers on the page aren’t meaningful, right? You want to have a narrative that says, if you approve this budget, this is going to be the outcome that we have. She called it an operations plan and I had never heard of the term before.

So to begin with, I think we developed four or five paragraphs that laid out what we were trying to accomplish that year with the funds allocated. And then we reported back as the year went along as to how these different initiatives were going. It was really successful in aligning the board's expectations with the work of the staff.

This was a narrative. This wasn't spreadsheets or charts.

Originally, it was just a simple narrative: Here's just what we're going to do and how we're going to accomplish this and the types of ways we're going to use these funds. It helped immediately that the board had a keen understanding of what the staff's work was without feeling like it had to be nose into every little aspect of operations. It helped immediately with the whole challenge that I know that heads and executive directors have - how do I keep the board informed without creating a mountain of detail.

That is a perpetual struggle for most heads and probably most executive directors at nonprofits.

Absolutely. Then over time, we've evolved this thing, and it's gotten to be much more complex. As we started to develop our strategic plans, we made sure that the operations plan every year operationalized what was said in the strategic plan. If the strategic plan had four goals in it, then we would align the three initiatives we were implementing towards each specific goal. These are the ways the board should hold us to account as to the work that we're doing. And it didn't mean that we couldn't change things as we went along or that the world wouldn't change around us. It just meant very clearly, here's the stuff we're working on and here's how it ties to the strategic plan.

It helps align everything.

Exactly. It made it so that the operations plan became the link between the strategy that the board was setting and the work that staff was doing on a day-to-day basis. It also, on a really cool level, allowed the staff to see how their day-to-day work impacted the strategy of the organization. You know how often you're working with the staff and it can sometimes be a challenge for them to appreciate how this thing that I'm doing today really helps to move this organization that I care about forward? When you have an operations plan, the staff can see the direct link between what we're doing with something like the database this year and how this is moving the organization forward in a really good strategic direction.

One of the things I love about this is that, because I just read a brief but insightful piece from Raw Signal Group reminding leaders that there's always a fair number of people in an organization who think strategy work is boring. Leaders usually find it fascinating and they forget others don’t share that fascination, plus it’s an add on to their workload. But when you actually have this operations plan, you are demonstrating the value of strategy in a way that lives in the organization - how everyone’s day-to-day work is relevant.

Take it a step further. At One Schoolhouse, we create our operations plan every year, late summer, early fall. The board formally passes the operations plan at the same time we pass our budget. Makes sense, right? Again, it's the narrative. It's what you're doing, it's the initiatives you're working on, strategy you're working on, it is approved at the same time the budget is. From there, we make sure that every one of our staff members creates goals that are based around the operations plan.

Oh, I love that even more.

Goal setting comes off of the operations plan of that year, which comes off of the organizational strategy. Strategy is aligned to initiatives. Initiatives are aligned to individual performance and goals. Which means that at One Schoolhouse, it's not part of our culture to say, my goal this year is to make sure I read six more novels related to my particular academic interest, or something like that, which creeps into a lot of independent schools. It's just part of the culture that in goal-setting, the staff approach is in terms of what the organization is focusing on this year. And here's how I'm going to make sure that the thing that’s under my purview in this operations plan becomes reality.

So everything is interrelated?

Everything.

I’m just curious - is there any downside to that? Because I'm also thinking about the faculty member at the independent school who was like, back in the day, we could wander off into the woods on a nice day to hunt for fungi and now it's so corporate. I feel like that’s one of the highest insults - “It's so corporate.” Or if there are any unexpected consequences you have to manage.

One of the preconditions for moving to this model is developing an organizational culture around trust, transparency and being okay with failure.

And the head and senior leaders modeling being OK with failure could be extremely powerful.

Let’s say in the operations plan we presented in the fall we tell the board we're working on sixteen initiatives this year. It is totally okay to come back to the board in May and say, Here’s where we are. We got twelve of these done. Two of these are still in process because we realize they're really much more complicated than we thought they were back in October. Two of these we've jettisoned off. They’ve either turned out to be less relevant than we thought or maybe we don’t have the resources to do them. But for whatever reason, we jettison them off. In some independent school cultures, particularly those that are built around perfectionism, it wouldn't be okay to say we didn't accomplish the sixteen original things.

So to recap - preconditioned for getting to that space of creating alignment is creating a culture of transparency, trust, and embedding the idea that failure is okay or that it's okay to change course, or that iteration is okay or however you want to frame it if the word “failure” is too big a leap. And it would have to permeate the culture of the board as well.

And moving the culture is probably a bigger lift than implementing an operations plan.

I agree. I am a firm believer that you can always make some progress when you are also trying to shift a culture, but to get to the point One Schoolhouse is at - that is a major endeavor. What I love about this operations plan is that it's an articulation of high standards that is practical and not just a bunch of empty rhetoric.

We’re working now to formalize our operations plan even further. We're going to establish key performance indicators for each of our strategies and then how do we measure this on an annual basis. Then instead of initiatives that we’re trying to advance, the focus is on what are the key results we’re trying to achieve.

Because you don’t want to be implementing initiatives just to implement them. And it also puts a structure in place. You're not reinventing the wheel every year. Or even, if you left your position, you have built this structure into the organization and it’s all tied together.

I feel like I keep watching new heads get thrown in the deep end of the pool and they finally figure out how to dog-paddle around, and then move on. And then the next person just gets thrown in the deep end of the pool, and they're reinventing it in a way that's going to work for them. So the idea of having structures that provide guidance and direction but aren't rigid is a blessing for the sustainability of the organization.

This is perhaps getting personal, but as a founder of an organization, I'm really hyper-aware that at some point I need to step aside in order for this organization to take on its next iteration. Whenever that is, I want to make sure that that next person has all the tools that they need to find great success and take their vision to that next space. That's one of the reasons that I'm so attracted to something like an operations plan because then it can become all about what the next person’s vision is. It's not about how do I get this vision to become a reality.

Exactly. Which eats up all of your time as a new head. I think there is so much to recommend people considering how to implement an operations plan structure.

I have one final question - how much work goes into creating the plan itself? Because whether it’s board reports or a strategic plan, the time it takes to create these things is often overlooked.

Actually, some of this flows from the strategic plan. I don't think most schools do themselves a good service by creating a strategic plan that is complicated and involves so many multiple steps that it gets shelved really fast when one of those steps does not pan out in the way that the school thinks it will. They create a fifteen page document that states we've got to accomplish these 25 things in a certain timeframe.

And to go back to something we just talked about - sometimes it seems that you go to so much trouble, you are listing initiatives for the sake of initiatives because after all that money and all that time, you need a very robust list of stuff to show for it.

It’s better to put that level of detail in an operations plan. Because you want to be thinking about what types of things I want to be doing this year. Every year there are variables that might impact what you can implement - enrollment, faculty retention, world events. I think we tend to dictate too much in the strategic planning process. At One Schoolhouse, that's why it was important for us when we created our new strategic plan last year to have a one-page plan. It very quickly says, here's who we serve. Here's what our mission is. Here's the things we're going to be concentrating on. Here’s our vision of how the world is better when we’ve been successful.

For our operations plan, we kick it off with our senior administrative folks in early August and make sure that they start to talk about it with their teams, come back with idea germination, right about now. I'm having one-on-one meetings with all of my direct reports right now* about what they’d like to see in the operation plan and how they see that going towards the key results we're trying to take on this year. Does it take time to create? Sure. Is it something that you need 75 meetings in order to handle in any given year? No. It's much more streamlined than that. Yet it's also inclusive in that folks will, at least within their teams, have a chance to discuss where we're heading and what we want to achieve.

(Reminder: this interview was done in August, 2023)

Thank you to Brad for taking the time for this conversation. And stay tuned for Part II where we explore obstacles to change in schools as well as a topic of urgent interest to just about every school administrator right now - hiring and faculty retention.

A brief follow up about institutional statements

Finally, I just wanted to say it appears that Monday’s special edition about writing a statement was helpful and was passed along as TOOS gained a number of subscribers. There are as many ways to create a statement as there are schools and while we don’t have “the” answer, Lauren and I are very pleased if any of what we’ve learned was supportive to you. I’ve been watching the conversation about institutional statements unfold over the past week. NAIS published what I thought was a very helpful piece last spring. I am a huge advocate for intentional, sensible guidelines that can be called on in moments of high emotions.

But on the other hand - I’m beginning to think all the careful guidelines in the world are only of so much help once a world shaking event comes in this age of hyper-connectedness.

Just as a person, I am still reeling from the degree of sadistic, highly interpersonal inhumanity that was perpetrated by terrorist in Israel last Saturday. It can only be described as evidence of evil. And so much more suffering follows in its wake. In a world where we are all witnesses, organizations need to foster an ability to be nimble and speak to moments that transcends well intentioned and good sense guidelines. Our communities are counting on us to help navigate a scary, unstable world.

Sending all of you working in schools so much support!

Love and Peace -

Julie