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You have run the offsite. The values are on the wall. You still have silos. Dan Schmidt did not train his way out of that problem. He designed his way out.
North Star Elementary opened in 2022 with six learning studios, a two-story Learning Commons, and one rule that changed everything: no teacher gets a permanent desk. Dan and I trace the whole arc, vision to building to culture, and the evidence five years on.
Meet Dan Schmidt: Dan Schmidt is the founding principal of North Star Elementary School in Hugo, Minnesota, a 720-student building in the White Bear Lake Area School District that he helped envision before a single wall went up. He was one of roughly 30 people in the room for the dreaming phase, and then he did the harder part: he recruited the staff, built the teams, and turned renderings into a culture now in its fifth year.
In this episode, Dan and Janyne explore:
- Why removing permanent desks did what a culture initiative could not
- How to staff a transformation without turning the people who opt out into your resistance
- What a school built for self-regulation reveals about what your organization is missing
- Why the fix for a conflict that keeps recurring is a decision made before it, not during it
Two-thirds of senior leaders say their organizations are overly complex, and structural redesigns are producing diminishing returns. [1] Dan's worked, and the reason matters. Most restructures move boxes on a chart. His changed who is in the room with whom, every day. The same logic runs through the regulation architecture: every studio has two reset rooms, one for five minutes and one for thirty, so a child sliding out of an executive state can find the way back without a public walk down a hallway. [2]
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Ready to go deeper? Book a complimentary Discovery Call: https://yourexecutivecoach.com/discovery
--- Action4Traction™ - Take one this week:
1. Name one behavior you keep asking for that your structure quietly punishes.
2. Find where someone here can go to reset. If there is nowhere, that is the finding.
3. Before your next hard meeting, write down how you want to behave in it.
Talk4Traction™ - Bring one to your next team meeting to elevate the dialogue:
1. Where does our setup reward working alone, no matter what we say about collaboration?
2. What would it take for someone here to opt out of a change without it costing them?
3. When one of us gets triggered in a meeting, what do we do about the next twenty minutes?
---
Together, we've got this!
Janyne
Connect with Dan: https://northstar.isd624.org/
Connect with Janyne: https://tinyurl.com/JPE-LinkedIn | https://tinyurl.com/JPE-Facebook
Listen: https://tinyurl.com/YAE-Apple-Podcast | https://tinyurl.com/YAE-Spotify |
https://tinyurl.com/YAE-Youtube
About Your Authentic Executive:
Authentic Leadership | Profound Stories | Proven Lessons.
A monthly podcast hosted by Janyne Peek Emsick, Ph.D. Full episodes drop the first Tuesday of each month;
Janyne Peek Emsick, Ph.D. has coached executives on six continents for 35+ years. Her clients document a 70% Improvement in Resilience Under Pressure. Founder, 5R Edge™. Pronounced jah-neen'.
#YourAuthenticExecutive #5REdge #ExecutiveLeadership #Silos #TeamCulture #Collaboration #SchoolDesign
ENDNOTES: [1] McKinsey & Company, "The State of Organizations 2026," 2026. [2] Matthew D. Lieberman et al., "Putting Feelings into Words: Affect Labeling Disrupts Amygdala Activity in Response to Affective Stimuli," Psychological Science 18, no. 5 (2007): 421-28, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01916.x. [3] Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith, The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1993).
Your Authentic Executive Podcast
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