Transformative Principal

Welcome to Transformative Principal, where I help you stop putting out fires and start leading.

I'm your host, Jethro Jones.

You can follow me on Twitter at Jethro Jones.

Okay.

Welcome to Transformative Principal.

I'm your host Jethro Jones, and I'm very excited to have Mike Caldwell with me on the program.

Mike is the founder of Linked Leaders.

You can check that out@linkedleaders.com.

In fact, you can go there and sign up for a free account and, and, uh, what's it called?

Hall pass.

That's right.

Yeah.

So you get a hall pass or free, uh, and you, you can use a, you can go on the hall pass as much as you need to.

Not like my kid's school where you're only allowed three per semester per period, which is just,

Is that true?

It's so stupid.

I hate it.

I don't know what these teachers are thinking.

they're punishing the good kids because they don't know how to manage the bad kids.

That's what I don't understand.

You should have, you should have one of those teachers on your podcast and get, get to the bottom of it.

I should, I don't know if that'll get to the bottom of it though, but, uh, Mike, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, where you came from, um, and what you've been doing before you started Linked Leaders, and then we'll get into Linked Leaders.

Yeah, you bet.

Um.

Was it about a year ago, by the way?

I was just thinking like that we, that you and I met, I mean roughly about a year ago it feels like maybe.

You know, because I am a nerd, I can actually tell you we had our first meeting, which was on November 19th, 2024 at 9:37 AM

You are such a nerd.

I wanna know how you, how you did that, but, uh, that's cool.

Yeah, I knew it was roughly a year.

Yeah.

yeah.

Mike Caldwell, um, I live in the Rocky Mountain Northwest, similar to Jethro.

So, uh, I'm in Boise, Idaho.

Been in, um.

Idaho.

Pretty much all my life, Idaho, Montana, um, but my entire career has been in Idaho.

I was a math teacher for several, a few years, I should say.

Um, and then quickly went into administration.

Um, that wasn't necessarily my plan, but it happened as a assistant principal for a couple year or a few few years, and then was a director for our state online program.

And then, um, went back to the school where I was an assistant principal.

Served as principal for nine years, and then over the last two years I've been working for a nonprofit, um, as a mentor, leadership coach, um, for charter school leaders here in Idaho.

And, um, in parallel, about a year ago, um, conceived or was working on the conception of this idea of linked leaders.

And now I'm essentially doing that full time.

So.

Here we are.

How, how awesome is that?

A year ago you had this brainchild and then now it's mature already and you're doing it full time.

So tell us about what Linked Leaders is and then um, well actually, I'll tell you what I love about it.

Uh, I've been coaching principals for years now, and it's been really great.

I, I'm pretty good at it, but there are some things that

Good at I will, I will attest to that.

I've, I've, I've written.

Um, but there are some things that I just don't know the answer to.

And as arrogant and prideful as I am, I realize that I don't have all the answers.

Even though you give me any situation, I feel like I can answer it and give a pretty decent answer.

Um, but what I love about it is that it allows you to get the support you need from someone who does know the answer.

Like right away.

And I think that is just incredibly powerful.

So give us your overview of what Linked Leaders is.

I think the, the.

The genesis is really kind of similar in kind of the root of what you just said.

I was voluntarily working with some school leaders after a Facebook post.

I think I've shared that story a number of times and from, from all over the country.

And while also in my real job, you know, at the time, um, was coaching school leaders and, and, um, what I was.

What I realized is, you know, I'm working with, you know, let's say Nicole over in Maine, you know, if you're listening, Nicole, hi.

Um, miss ya.

Um, but working with this elementary school principal, right.

And my entire career has been in, in high school and so I'm talking to her and I've also had a lot of private school experience and she's struggling with some special ed issues and, and things and you know, and private school, special ed.

It looks different.

Not that I haven't been in public schools, but I just felt like, you know, she really needs help.

I, I, I would love to be here for her and I want to be, but I think there's better people that would fit better, you know, for what, what she's looking for.

And so I think that's.

What occurred to me, like, what if, you know, what if we just made a really easy way for leaders like Nicole or or Melissa or whoever, all these people I was working with at the time, to go and find the right match for them, find the right from their context for the issues that they're dealing with.

Find somebody, but we just make it super simple and easy.

And that's been kind of the goal for Link Leaders over the last year is, is building a library of, of great talent, um, like yourself that's, that's available.

And, um, and then just clearing it as many roadblocks as possible so that that person that needs help.

Can find the person.

And I haven't really counted the clicks, but I like to say about three clicks.

They have a meeting set up with them.

Um, and it's super slick and and simple.

And that's been the goal.

The feedback I've received, um, from users is it is super simple and, and slick.

Um, and we have some great talent.

So, um, I'd love to see it used more because the.

People like you are out there and available for, for, for people that are, that are maybe just challenged and struggling and or just need someone to chat with that's been there and done that.

Yeah, and the focus that I've had for the last several years is doing principal masterminds where you get, you get the help every two weeks when, when we meet, but there's.

good about this is that those can still exist and they do exist.

And if you're interested in the Mastermind, you should go check out my profile on Linked Leaders and join it, because now it's free through the platform.

But then if somebody needs something with me, this is a really easy way.

To give that to them and say, Hey, I just need 30 minutes of your time.

Like, I don't wanna join the whole mastermind, but I would love to pick your brain for 30 minutes.

And this provides a way for them to be able to do that one and two.

For me to be able to serve people and help them out in a way that values and respects my time and my expertise without it being like, uh, okay, let me send you an invoice for this.

You know, because that's all built into the program.

And so people have credits that they can use and, and spend to, to meet with mentors and that's great.

And what I really like is there are a lot of times where somebody has like.

A small question and they want to spend, you know, 30 minutes just talking through that.

And I'm fine to, um, give that up and, and help people.

but the challenge is always like, when do we do that?

And if you don't already have my cell phone number, then you can't just, uh, call me up, which is honestly, what I love is just talking on the phone with people.

So, uh, people could do that too, but, mm-hmm.

But the other thing is, you know, there's, there's somebody who may have the exact answer you need and you don't need six hours of professional development.

You need one 30 minute conversation with somebody and, and that is really powerful.

And I can't tell you in my life how many times I've talked to somebody for just a short time and then it just like unlocked all these different things.

Uh, and made, made it possible for me to find, uh, success in what I was trying to do.

And one of those things was a podcast conversation that I had with somebody or a conversation I had about podcasts with somebody that made me finally decide to start this podcast, which has now been going for 12 years.

Isn't that wild?

It's crazy.

Uh, yeah, I can't believe you've been doing this for 12 years.

That's, that's, that's a feat in itself.

Um, but yeah, for sure I. Mean, I, I, I think one of the, I think, you know, foundational kind of truths with in school leadership is you never have enough time, period.

Like there is never enough time to do all the things that are expected of you as a school leader.

So that, so when you need assistance, you need help, or you need an answer to, to a challenge or whatever else.

Um, it.

We need to cr we, we need a system where it doesn't take a lot of time to go get that help.

And you're right, like, you know, the, the research says the traditional PD really doesn't have lot lasting impact in, in practice.

What really makes a difference is that.

Personalized coaching, um, where you're getting exactly what you need, when you need it.

Um, and that's, that's really the goal with Link Leaders is, is to, to be able to create that opportunity where without a lot of hassle, I can go and get the support I need right away.

Oftentimes you might have that in your, you know, if you're in a, a larger district or you might have that built in.

But what I've heard from many people, even if they do, it's sometimes really valuable to have outside perspective, to have another source to go to where there is no judgment, there is no, um, kind of inside, I guess, um, you know.

Trust issues, whether it's that or, or you know, could be that, it could be just, I just want an outside perspective, somebody that's do been doing this, but maybe not
in my district, because we kind of get sometimes locked into the, the way of thinking that, you know, we, we know and, and, and sometimes it's hard to break outta that.

And so I think the other value in this is to.

Talk to somebody that's outside of your district, outside of your school, outside of your state, you know, or whatever, and, and get that fresh perspective.

And, uh, so I think that's a, that's a healthy aspect of what we're trying to offer as well.

I.

And here's the other thing.

In schools, there are politics and there are like people who may want to see you fail.

would not give you the answers that you want.

And sometimes that's intentional, and other times that's just naivete and not realizing that that's a really messed up thing to do.

But that's a very real thing.

And one of the things that's been so great about the masterminds over the years is that people have said repeatedly, there's no politics here.

Everybody only cares about my success.

Nobody cares about like, Uh, the narrative that's been going on in our district or whatever else could be going on.

They're just excited for me to, to do my best and, and be successful, and that, that is really powerful.

And if you've never talked to somebody who has no interest in anything that's going on except just helping you in that moment, that is really powerful and, um, and, and it really does make a big difference.

I had the pleasure and I haven't done it consistently.

Um, but I, I want to but to go into one of your masterminds when you were meeting with, um, Jeff and Kenny, I think, I think with the.

Two different school leaders that you've been working with on link leaders and, um, the way you set it up and, and kind of zeroed in on, on one of the leaders' particular challenges, and they got to sh kind of be vulnerable and share kind of what they were they were struggling with.

And, and then, you know, yeah, it was, it was pure support.

Like everybody was there to kind of like, you know, get clarity.

Get clear on the, on the challenges and, and, and offer perspective and support.

And I think in my experience, you know.

Participating in that, it was like, this is really powerful professional development.

'cause it's like you take something that's top of mind for you, like, this is where I'm struggling.

Put it on the table.

Let some other people that are, that are very interested in, in helping you kind of solve that, that challenge.

And you walk away, I think with.

You know, clarity and new perspective, new ideas, and this weight that comes off of your shoulders.

I followed that similar model where we do in every other week.

Um.

Superintendent, or we call it district leader because it's superintendents, assistant superintendent, whoever wants to show up, but a district leader think tank.

Um, but the last couple times we've been doing it, we've been doing it kind of using the mastermind model that, that I learned watching, watching you.

Certainly not the, the expert that you are.

I haven't been doing it long enough.

Um, but, um, but very similar.

I mean, we had one of our district leaders share, you know, he had to cut, I think he said.

10% or something like that of their budget over the next two years.

And, and we had, I think seven district leaders, um, in addition to him.

And it was just like.

S so many different like ideas, perspectives, empathy, um, also a lot of affirmation because that school leader, you know, shared their problem, what they were trying to deal with, but also what they were already doing.

It's kind of in their process to, to to get, you know, buy-in or not buy-in, but, uh, understanding of the challenge, you know, with, with their stakeholders and things like that.

And so it was also just affirmation that, hey, you're doing a lot of the right steps, um, but here's some other ideas.

And so, uh.

It was, it was fun.

I mean, I, I love, and that's what we're doing in the fireside chats.

You know, we have a lot of those going every week.

And, uh, so the great opportunities for leaders to come together and, and in addition to the one-to-one mentorship, get that peer to peer kind of, um, support that we, we so desperately need as school leaders.

Yeah, so you mentioned fireside chats.

Talk about the, the features that are available and how people connect with others within the platform.

What does that look like?

I'll start with kind of our, our core.

Um, philosophy with, with link leaders is about, you know, real human connection.

So right now, and, and this might change what we'll add, but right now there's, it's not a library of like content where you go and watch a video or you go through, you know, an asynchronous course.

It's about what are different ways that we can connect.

Person to person, leader to leader in real time.

So we talked about the human library, the mentorship hub, where you can go and find, find somebody in your context and, and click, you know, two or three times and, and have a meeting with them.

But yeah, the other couple features that we have to connect leaders, uh, more in that peer to peer with a facilitator is our fireside chats.

And those are, um, you know, the.

Core idea of those is center around a topic that, um, people identify as, as, as an interest and common, maybe a challenge, bring people together, have a facilitator that's there to, uh, to kind of guide the conversation around that, that particular topic.

But it's not a sit and get webinar.

Um, I think people are tired of those overall.

I think there's still a place for that, you know, to where, where you have an expert that's sharing, you know, expertise, but that's not what the fireside chats are meant to be.

They're meant to be really a facilitated conversation and really the visual I always go back to just in the name, it's like, you know, when you get around a
fire with five or six of your, you know, colleagues or whatever are around the table and you're talking about a common challenge, there's a lot of value in that.

So that's one.

Um, we're doing book studies.

chats, we're gonna do one of those this weekend when we're together in Wyoming.

With me, you and the Kel Keys, it's, I'm looking forward to that fireside chat.

'cause one the, it's gonna

It.

and two, we're gonna be talking about all this stuff, which is gonna be really awesome as well.

So stoked to to, yeah.

I, I've, I've known you for now almost a year, and we've never been in the same room at the same time, but a lot of zoom time, or in this case descrip time, but whatever.

Same with Alkis, Eric and Aaron and, and Jeff.

And yeah, it's, it's gonna be great to, to connect with them.

Um, but yeah.

And then the, the book studies that we're offering, you know, we both, we have kind of your standard book study, um, meet two or three times discussed the book, but we
just launched this last week or so, uh, book study workshops where we're now offering, um, kind of book study premiums where you can go in and, and actually subscribe.

And, and reserve, you know, a space on one of these book studies, but you get two, um, continuing education credits.

Uh, right now it's through Boise State University.

Um, so if you're in a state that need where you need to recertify, like Idaho, what's the Washington, um, recertification requirements, Jethro.

To be honest, I don't know because I only have my initial principal license here and I haven't bothered, well, I haven't gotten a job and that's what you need to get to, to move up to the next level, so I have never figured that out.

Okay.

Yeah.

Every state's so different.

I've, I've, I've been surprised as I learned that, but in Idaho, every.

Five years to recertify, you have to have six um, credits and other, you know, which equates to whatever that is, 180 hours of continuing education time.

Um, so yeah, so our book study workshops, um, you meet five times live, um, to discuss the, the various chapters for that particular module and do some online.

Um.

You know, discussions, but one of the things that we built, we, we try to build into all these workshops is some of this time is actually doing tasks that you're
already doing in the school, but relating that or tying that back to the readings of the book to reinforce kind of the book, um, content, what we're, that we're reading.

So those are, you know, just another way to connect leaders around a particular, um, leadership book and, uh.

And so that's new.

And then, uh, online discussions, resource sharing are, are some of the other things that we, we have currently and with some other ideas down the road.

Yeah.

Lots of cool stuff.

And uh, and as I think back over what we have talked about, uh, with this over the last d. Year.

Um, it's been, it's been really interesting to see how this has morphed and changed.

And, uh, and if you would talk a little bit about how powerful AI has been in helping you, uh, create the website itself, because that is one of the things that, I, I think you said a couple weeks.

So like you could have never gotten this accomplished if you didn't have those tools available.

So talk a little bit about that too.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

Um, you know, timing matters and to, to do this.

Five years ago, I would've never.

Been able to, honestly, I mean, it would've been, you know, several hundred thousand dollars to be, to try to build what, what we have now with this full stack web application.

But yeah, so when we launched, um, in January, you know, it was a Frankenstein kind of system where I had a WordPress that I threw together that was super ugly.

I licensed a mentorship platform that was okay.

But I had no control over it whatsoever.

It was like, you get what you get and, and even when I threw a fit, it didn't matter.

Um, so you just had that Right.

But that's gave us an opportunity to kind of quick launch in January and uh, got some, you know, experience and kind of feeling things out.

But it was like, yeah, in March, I think it was where I realized like, we gotta do something different.

You know, we have to.

Be more, you know, create more opportunities for engaging leaders to leaders in, in addition, just to, to the mentorship.

And so, um, started looking and researching and ultimately discovered, um, bolt, um, which is a, a, uh, Claude based AI development platform and started playing with that.

And, um, over the course of March through May, um.

Was able to build a lot of this platform, including the backend database without, I mean, my coding background was some basic self-taught H-T-M-L-C-S-S just enough to like know and little but very, very little code and, um.

Built a, a bunch of it.

And then, um, hired a couple interns from Boise State University, um, that are in their fourth year as, as CS students.

And I've been working with, with a couple of them since May of last year, still working with, with them, um, paying them, you know, modest wages, uh, if you will.

But they're happy to have the work and they've been great to work with.

And, uh.

And Yeah, and we continue to iterate.

Literally every week we, we meet, I mean, every week we've met since I think the 1st of May.

Um, and just working on different aspects, different features.

Um, we just built, built out what we call, what we're now calling the Community Suites model.

See, that's new to you?

That's new to.

Uh,

Yeah.

listening to this, you're getting fresh stuff because I have never heard of this before.

Presses and what Community Suites.

The idea behind Community Suites is right now.

We, there's organizations, whether you're a district, you're a. A charter management organization, you're a state association that you're already do
trying to dabble and do a little bit of mentorship, and you're trying to connect leaders similar to what Link Leaders does with our Community Suites model.

Basically you, we can onboard you as an organization.

And you have kind of your own floor of Link leaders.

So think of Link Leaders as the building and, and as an organization you can have your own floor of the building.

What I love about it is it's not an or.

You know it's not, or it's not either or It's, and you can have your own floor of comm of link leaders where you onboard your own mentors.

You, you do your own private fireside chats, book studies, et cetera and so forth.

And in one click of the button, you're in the common area of the building and you have access to all the mentors and all the fireside chats.

I don't know if there's something, anything like that where you can, where you can have your own private space and then also have access to everything else.

And so what I see is as we add more organizations, the value of of, of the connection and, and, and, you know, the network effect becomes the.

Increasingly, if not exponentially, more valuable because if one organization joins, another organization joins now, the content that they're offering within their organization now becomes accessible if they choose to with two other organizations as well, as well as mentorships and things.

So I, yeah, I'm, we're really excited about, about where that can go.

Yeah, that's very cool.

And there's, there's a lot of other great stuff once you get in there and see what, what exists, resources that people can share and other things like that.

So, uh, if you haven't, uh, checked it out yet, please go check out Linked leaders.com and, uh, I'm gonna give you a little softball here.

What, uh.

is one thing that a principal can do this week to be a transformative leader like you?

Mike?

Love your questions.

Um, one thing this week is be curious and go learn something new.

Um, I think, I know it's, we're always strapped for time.

My tagline on every email forever has been always learning.

And I think as long as we're, we stay curious and want to learn more, um, whether it's.

You can take that in so many different directions, right?

Go learn more about one of the teachers in your building that you didn't know about, or go learn a new technology that's gonna make you more efficient as a leader.

Pick, pick, pick your poison, but just stay curious and keep learning.

Yeah, I, I think that's great advice.

And, and if you have that curious and learning mindset, opens so many doors for you in so many ways.

And you know, I was it.

Like I said, I coach a lot of principals and, and one of them recently was asking me like, how do I deal with this situation?

And, uh, it's complex and it's complicated and like feelings are gonna get hurt and it's gonna be difficult.

And it's like, you know what, just be curious.

Just like say, Hey, what's going on here?

And instead of being like, you really screwed this up, or You're a terrible teacher, or whatever, just be like, Hey.

I saw this.

I don't know how to interpret it.

Tell me.

And, and that's a really powerful thing.

So, uh, thank you very much for being here, Mike.

Thank you everyone for listening.

Please go to link leaders.com, go check it out, sign up for a free hall pass and give it a shot.

Come to one of my Mastermind firesides and just hang out with me for a bit and let's talk about some school problems and how we can solve them.

Uh, thanks so much for being here, Mike.

Appreciate you.

Have a wonderful day.

Appreciate you, Jethro.

Thank you as always.