The Road to Awesome with Darrin Peppard REIA 473

Welcome to Real Estate Investing Abundance, the show for busy, fulfilled professionals like you to learn how to develop financial independence built on solid passive real estate investments. Now, here is your host, Dr. Allen Lomax.

Hello, enlightened investors, and welcome back to Real Estate Investing Abundance.

Today we have a very interesting program. We are going to look at Road to Awesome. And with us today is Darren Peppard, and he is an author, leadership coach, consultant, and speaker focused on organizational culture and climate and growing emerging leaders. Darren is the best-selling author of the book Road to Awesome and is the host of Leaning Into Leadership podcast. As a recovering high school principal, Darren shares strategies and lessons learned from 26 years in public education to help leaders gain clarity, find joy in their work, and walk in their purpose. And I am so glad to have Darren with us today. The topic is dear to my heart, and I know it is very close and dear to the hearts of my audience as well. So welcome, Darren, and we are going to go into the show if you would just share with us some of your background, how you went from being a principal to being a leadership coach.

Yeah, thank you, Allen, for having me here on the show. It's an honor to join you today. I'll tell you, you know, my journey is kind of interesting. I'm a guy that grew up in a school where my mom was the person who oversaw attendance at the school. So I, you know, I didn't do a whole lot of things wrong. You know, when, you know, when your mom knows before you do something what you're going to do, you, you tend to choose, choose the right path, right? So, so when I got off to college, I discovered that nobody was looking over my shoulder and did not necessarily put my best foot when I first entered college. And, you know, so often people talk with me and know that I was a career educator and think, oh, well, you must have wanted to be a teacher your whole life. And honestly, that couldn't be further from the truth. And it was several years and multiple changes of the major before discovering education as my path. And once I got, you know, a little bit of clarity around what it was that I was called to do in my life, Things obviously started going in the right direction and had the opportunity to be a head basketball coach. I was a high school science teacher, junior high school science teacher, and then ultimately made my way back to my home state of Wyoming. And I became first an assistant principal and then a high school principal. And that was really the point in time where I discovered this love for leadership coaching. As a first-year high school principal, Allen, I struggled. I mean, I really struggled. I did so many of the things that you shouldn't do, like trying to prove you're not your predecessor, trying to do everything for everybody, trying to solve everybody's problems. I fell into all the traps. And after a year, we got a new superintendent, and the person who came in believed in leadership coaches, and he hired one for every one of us. It was, it was a godsend for me because it was an opportunity to actually take a step back and look at, you know, what do I really care about? I was so busy running around fighting fires that I wasn't leading my school. And so to have the opportunity to, you know, have that, that second perspective from someone to just kind of share with me, you know, hey, Darren, here's what you ought to be focused on, you know, and let's, let's work on the right work. And that helped me to kind of get it all, all figured out and ended up having a really successful career as a high school principal, ultimately finishing my career in public education as a superintendent. But I go back to that time and I just fell in love with coaching leaders. Once, once I kind of had it, I guess, figured out, if you will, working with my assistant principals, my aspiring leaders, my department leaders really became something that I truly, truly loved. And I believe this about leadership, that leadership is a people business. And your work is about developing people. So as a superintendent, I created a little bit of a side hustle doing some leadership coaching. And it started with just a simple one high school. A superintendent had reached out to me, hey, would you, you know, help my high school principal? He needs a little bit of support. And that grew into eventually a completely new career. So sometimes that side hustle becomes, becomes your primary focus. And my wife and I started doing this work full-time about 3 years ago. I'm a leadership coach. I am a keynote speaker. And we also run a small publishing company. So when, when we talk about those, those multiple veins of income, For us, our business really operates off of about 3 different branches. So that, I guess, that's a little bit about me, a little bit about my journey that has brought me to where I am now.

Well, interesting journey there. And I like how what you were talking about in particular, you were struggling at first and then with just a little bit of help from a coach that turned things around. But as you went through your career, what you really began to find out is that your passion was really in leadership. And once you discovered that, you really blossomed and, and real— and things really started coming together for you from that passion. And I see that, I see that so many, many times in working with individuals that if we can just get them to tune into that passion, then the road just opens up in so many, many, many different ways.

Yeah.

One thing you were talking about when you first were— your first year, you were running around putting out fires. And I remember back, I was attending a conference, a higher education conference, and With student affairs administrators. And the leader of this particular workshop that we were in was talking about staying in touch with her particular school. She was a dean, I believe, and she was talking about staying in touch with them while she was at this conference because she had to stay on top of putting out all of these fires.

Yeah.

And she was stating that in a way that she was proud of the fact that she had to do that. And I was sitting there in that room and going, God, I am so glad my team has it together and I don't have to worry about putting out fires. Do you see that oftentimes that people are proud of the fact that they're running around putting out fires?

Yeah, that's— I was cringing as you were telling that story. You should not be proud of that. But, but I do think that that happens. I think it happens frequently. And whether it's that they are prideful that they're needed to do that, or if they perhaps have a distorted view of what The role of leadership really is, and therefore they're proud of the work they're doing, which they probably do a great job of helping to put out fires. But, you know, my leadership coach said it to me so, so very well, and I'll share it here. The first day that he came and spent time on my campus, after I was running around putting out fire after fire and dealing with angry parents and all kinds of stuff, he said to me, he said, Darren, you need to make a decision. You need to decide, do you want to be a firefighter or do you want to be a leader? Because you can't be both. And you're going to have to fight some fires. That's just reality. But you can choose to live in the firefighter world and visit the leadership world, or you can choose to live in leadership world and visit firefighter world only when necessary. And for me, that was a huge shift. And I see that a lot in so many different administrators. And I just spoke recently, just a week ago, at the Texas Association for Secondary School Principals. So thousands of secondary school principals at this conference, and talking specifically about that firefighter versus leader paradigm. So many of them wanted to have conversations afterwards and just ask, you know, How do you move from being a firefighter when we're in a time right now where so many people just want us to solve their problems for them? How do you move from that into that space where you can actually focus on and put your time toward the work that really matters, the stuff that you really value, the things that are going to move the needle, whether Whether that's, you know, sales projections or it's test scores or it's graduation rates or wherever, whatever space you might be in, all leaders have to be able to find that clarity, have to be able to identify what do I really care about, what really makes a difference, what's really going to make an impact, and then I have to find ways to be intentional to focus on that work. And one of those key pieces Is empowering the people with whom you work. So back to your story, that person being proud that they needed to have a finger on the pulse in case a fire came up. Really, a great leader would be empowering others to make their own decisions, to solve their own problems, and If a situation comes up, know that whomever is there can handle the situation. You know, I had, I had a situation once where myself and one of my principals— this is when I was a superintendent— we were away at a conference, or actually I think we were at a teacher fair. I think we were recruiting teachers, and we got a phone call about our school. the principal's, he was my elementary principal, his school being in lockdown and there being a concern about someone in the neighborhood with a gun. And, you know, certainly that's a moment when, as the superintendent, I want to be there and be in the building, right?

Mm-hmm.

But knowing that we had grown the people in the building, knowing that we had a system in place, You know, you, you have to be able to trust the people around you, and you have to know that you've leaned into them. And if you don't, that's when it's only I can solve the problem.

Mm-hmm.

And, you know, in that moment for us, fortunately everything was fine, but we knew we could trust the people in our school because we had really leaned into them and, and, uh, invested in them and, and given them the, you know, empowerment to know they could make decisions and that we would support them.

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And finally, be sure to subscribe so you don't miss a single one of our upcoming episodes. That's a great example of how You've really got to do that because you can't always be in the building. There are always going to be times when you want to be there, but you just are not going to be able to be there. One thing you had mentioned was that what really makes the difference is really being able to— for leaders to really tune into what is important. How do you help leaders to do that?

That's a great question, and I really appreciate that. It's one of those things that I think each of us have to dig in deep and take a look at what we believe in. I think it's also one of those things where I love to do this with leadership teams where we start to just write down what are the things that matter to us the most. In my book, Road to Awesome: The Journey of the Leader, I talk about 6 things for me that, as a school leader, I think are by far and away the most important. But I challenge my reader not to agree with me, but rather to just dig into what do they care about. Like, for me, as an example, the most important thing is building and maintaining positive culture and climate. I think if we're not intentional with that work, odds are our culture is going to change, but just probably not in the direction that we want it to. So giving examples to leaders about what I feel really matters helps them to kind of think a little bit more deeply. I believe that it's really important that if I'm going to carry the title of principal, that I am the instructional leader of my campus, which means I need to be not only in classrooms, but I need to be involved in curriculum work. I need to be involved in our professional learning communities. I need to be involved in helping analyze our data, whether that's annual data or that's, you know, data in, you know, some type of short-cycle assessment or whatever the case may be. But really getting into it and asking deep questions of leaders, I think, is the best way for me to pull that out. You know, certainly sharing my examples is good, But I'll give you an example real quick. One of the schools that I support, it's a high school, and it's a high school that honestly performs quite well. They're in an affluent community, and they they do quite well. But even even the school leaders have shared that they feel like they do well because their kids are compliant. They aren't necessarily Pushing the envelope and going further and further when it comes to pushing their students to be really deep leaders, or rather deep learners. So their focus this past year, they wanted greater rigor in the classroom, which that's wonderful. I'm certain at the higher education level you hear the phrase rigor every now and again too. But here's where Going deep and asking good questions is really important. I could simply say, you know, hey, I think that's great, you want to have more rigor. But instead, I ask several questions of the team. First and foremost, I ask them to simply define that for me. What does that really mean to you? Because oftentimes, when it comes to rigor, people mistakenly think, oh, that just means make it harder, or that means give them more. But that's not what it is. Rigor is really about who is, who's doing the learning, who is able to take whatever is being processed and, and bring that back or use that to synthesize something new or whatever, whatever it might be. So just simply asking them and pushing them to define it and then to take them to the next level. Do your teachers understand that? What does that look like in a classroom? What might we be looking for when we go into a classroom? What might we ask students about their learning in the classroom in order for us to find that deeper cognitive rigor that you're genuinely looking for? So I— and that's, that's the coach in me, Alan. It really is. I think the most important thing a coach can do is ask good questions. It's not about having the answers, it's about asking good questions. And actually, that's true of great leaders. I think the best leaders are going to ask really, really good questions. That's how you empower others. You pull that knowledge out of them, allow them to discover that they know a whole lot more than maybe they give themselves credit for, that they're able to do a whole lot more than they give themselves credit for. So I think in a roundabout way, I've, I've hit that question. I don't know, I feel like I kind of kind of chased that one around the schoolyard a little bit.

Well, sometimes it's good to chase things around the schoolyard. Well, we are with Darren Pepper today, and he is the author of the best-selling book Road to Awesome, and he is a dynamic leadership coach specializing, of course, in leadership in education, but leadership is something that we can apply to all of our life's work, and all of us who are entrepreneurs certainly have that task of applying leadership. So Darren, just tell us a little bit about your coaching practice and what is it that you have to offer our viewers and listeners today.

Yeah, absolutely. So my, my coaching practice is really gets back to, again, helping leaders to get clear about what matters, helping leaders to find the things that really bring them joy in their work, and helping them not spend all their time fighting fires or, or, you know, chasing around the mundane, and actually moving into a space where they're truly leading and whether that's in a school or, you know, in a nonprofit organization, in, in the business space, wherever it might be. What I offer is virtual coaching. I offer in-person coaching. A lot of what I'm doing lately is working with leadership teams and helping facilitate leadership teams to really get a lot of clarity around collectively What is it that we're working toward, and how do we grow as a leadership team to ensure that we're able to to actually achieve what we're looking for? Individual leadership, I think, is is something I'm super passionate about. But that that group, that that team dynamic, that's an area that I'm finding myself pushing more and more and more into. So often. We'll have a goal as an organization, and it will require our team to do it. But we don't spend the time truly investing in the team to get the team at a space where we move away from all of those different things that keep teams from being successful. Patrick Lencioni's work, The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, is a great baseline for that. You know, there are so many issues sometimes that come up within leadership teams, whether that's issues of trust or issues of, you know, this selfish, you know, me before the team, you know, or even just getting a clear North Star for your group. A lot of the work I'm doing lately has been actually working with, with teams doing, you know, 2 and 3-day trainings or retreats where we're really digging in deep and helping the team work through some of those, those obstacles that keep them from being successful and, and really developing a plan for, you know, over the long term. You know, if we're talking a 6-month project, if we're talking the length of a school year, How will this team continue to circle back? You know, a lot of times, you know, you mentioned going to a conference. You know, a lot of times we'll, you know, we'll go to a conference and we'll hear something, we'll say, yeah, we're going to do that. And then we get back to work and we get into the weeds of work, right? And those things don't happen. So I've really been pushing on teams right now to develop plans, part of which includes bringing me back in or jumping back on with me virtually throughout the course of their project, throughout the course of the year, so that they get that check-in, so they can kind of jump up on the balcony a little bit and, and take a look at the work from a little bit different angle. Are we continuing to stay focused on what we collectively set as a team? Are we continuing to stay focused and hold each other accountable to the work that we're going to do to grow grow our team. So to me, I think that's, that's a big part of what I offer. For the most part, any leadership team or any individual that I'm working with, I want to make sure that we're building something for them that's going to help meet their specific needs. So nothing that I do is canned or, or just, you know, prescriptive. It must be this way. I, I'm a lifelong educator. You know, I mean, in education, we want our teachers to meet our kids where they are. I want to do the same thing as a leadership coach. I want to meet the leader where they are and help them get where they want to go.

And Darren, I believe you have a free gift for our audience, an ebook. How do we get hold of that?

Yeah, absolutely. So I have an ebook that I put together recently. That is called— wow, I just lost the name of my— Walk in Your Purpose. I lost the name of my own, of my own ebook. That's pretty crazy, right? So yeah, it's Walk in Your Purpose: 5 Mindsets to Level Up Your Leadership. And you can go to walkinyourpurpose.roadtoawesome.net/ebook, and it's a free download. So again, walkinyourpurpose.roadtoawesome.net/ebook. Awesome. When you go there, you just enter your email address, you click and you download the book. And just my purpose behind that was just helping leaders kind of think about mindset. You know, there's a lot of great research around mindset. And, you know, sometimes I'll use myself as a quick example. My mindset early in my leadership career As an assistant principal at the high school level in charge of discipline and attendance, I was just looking for everything people were doing wrong. You know, that was what it was all about. Let's catch them doing it wrong. Let's use punishment to gain compliance. By the way, terrible leadership strategy. Absolutely a terrible leadership strategy. But, you know, in a moment— and this is actually where Road to Awesome really was created. A moment in a staff meeting when somebody said, why does it always have to be about what they do wrong? Why can't it be about what they do right? That really helped me. So boom, 2 roads, right? I could stay on the road where I'm catching them doing it wrong or take this other road where we really focus on the good things that are happening in our organization, where we recognize, reward, and reinforce the things we want to see, right? So that's one of those mindsets that for me was so pivotal in honestly rescuing my leadership career. If I had stayed on that road, I know I would not be doing what I'm doing today. So, so yeah, you can grab that, that ebook. And I know you'll probably put that link in the show notes so that people can get right to it.

Absolutely. You will find that in our show notes for sure. Well, Darren, as we wrap this up, what is the big takeaway message from essentially your keynotes, your books? Essentially, what's the big takeaway from the work you do in leadership?

Absolutely. I think the number one takeaway is, as leaders, first and foremost, we have got to be clear about what it is that we value, about what it is that we're looking for, and About what it is that we hold near and dear. And then we've got to be really intentional about how we spend our time, about how we communicate, about how we create that compelling vision of our organization so that everybody can understand what their piece is. You know, again, I said it earlier. You know, leadership is a people business, and to get people to follow, they need to know what it is that you believe in. They need to know what their piece is in that. And if you are real clear about that and you're really intentional about what you do, about how you use your time, and about how you communicate, it's much, much easier to get the entire collective group all moving in the same direction.

Well, that's a wonderful closing statement there, but it is full of challenging, challenging things for us as leaders. Getting clarity on our values is challenging, and then looking at that, how do we communicate all that? How do we be intentional about all of those things? And as you had mentioned, when we go back from conferences, we always get into the weeds. It's really challenging to keep that, that bird's-eye view of an organization while you're down in the weeds. So enlightened investors, you can see the importance in leadership coaching because it's a daily challenge. And Darren Has spent a lifetime perfecting all of those skills, and it's a great place to go for leadership coaching. So Darren, thank you so much for being with us today. Very enlightening conversation. We are so glad that you could be with us. And Enlightened Investors, as always, thank you so much for being with us, and live abundantly in all areas of your life. And I look forward to being with you in our next episode. Thank you.

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