Rooting and Tuning

Growing up, I attended a fine arts magnet school where I focused on music—singing in chorus and playing the violin. Two things were muscle memory for a violinist: tuning your instrument and recording practice tapes. 

At the start of every practice and rehearsal, I tightened and loosened the four strings of my violin to ensure that I was in harmony with each member of the orchestra. Though each song brought its own notes, crescendos, and dissonance, tuning ensured that we were all of one sound. At home each week, I set my recorder and picked up practicing where school left off, listening back to my playing to perfect every note. I imagined my orchestra, each member in their own homes looping back their recordings over and over again like I did to improve their own skills. And when we came to practice together the next day, we played the songs with more confidence and mastery, the repetition moving us closer to the design, intention, and beauty of the composition.

At the turn of the year, I began considering my own intentions for the beautiful year ahead that I want to design for myself and for StartOps. Muscle memory never really goes away and the words “rooting and tuning” kept surfacing. Moving through school operations in my work feels orchestral. The typical 180 days of school are daily practices for operations teams, adapting (tuning) and synchronizing (harmonizing) to the rhythm of school. But operations teams don’t need reminding: the isolation, unsustainable demand, and lack of role clarity and preparation that is all too common with our work leads to dissonance, if not a loud crash, most days.

So how do we root in existing best practices and tune our own work as operations teams? Where can we create space to make mistakes, reflect on them, and adapt our approach to work through the many aspects of school operations better?

ROOTING

Like violinists, teachers commonly record their lessons and review them with more experienced teachers and coaches to improve their performance. This cycle of practice, reflection, and adjustment is not new to schools, but it is virtually exclusive to instruction, not operations. Operations work through a cycle of deliverables and projects year over year, but for many teams, there are not the stages of reflection and adjustment for each staff member to refine their skillsets.

I use the word “rooting” because, like practice tapes, this cycle begins with self. As an operations team member, I began with documenting how I complete a specific project. I then rooted in what the school’s vision, mission, values, and standards are to compare whether my approach contributes to my team’s shared goals. The documentation is critical because it enabled me to observe from a distance how I, at that current time and with the tools I had available, worked through a process. The same rooting applies to my current leadership at StartOps - each project ends and begins with a reflection: how did we do it before? How did we do it this time? How will we do it better next time?

TUNING

Tuning requires an ear for your team and audience. My own tuning began late January with in-person visits and virtual pulse checks with our school partners. During these conversations, we surfaced the need for continued role clarity as a means to allow for role ownership by individual team members; made new commitments to creating resources for stronger collaboration and accountability; and discussed what is required for a successful close of the year (and start to the next school year). Our partners are our audience because they experience the work we share, and we are fortunate that they will tell us exactly what they need. And this action of tuning has created clarity for how StartOps will continue to deliver on our mission to retain and support operations team members.

The bottom line is that the beginning months of each year grant us a reset to root in the values that guide our ways of being and tune ourselves to the goals, knowledge, and assumptions of our teams. Organizational and operational work is orchestral and that can inspire how we improve our schools’ flow.