Our Culture Blueprint
We've articulated below the intention behind our organizational culture. As you take it in, remember that in reality our culture is constantly under construction, constantly being built up by the small everyday choices of SCREDsters in our office building and across our member districts.
Leveraging Each Other's Strengths
Every SCRED team member completes the StrengthsFinder assessment and the strengths of every SCREDster are shared. We do this because we know that collectively we're truly stronger together.
In practice, this looks like SCRED team members leaning into their areas of strength and sharing them with each other through collaboration. Need a strategic thinker? Borrow one! Have a vision and need someone to help you execute it? Partner with a meticulous teammate!
A Learning Organization
Google's Project Aristotle revealed that "psychological safety" — a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking — is the factor most associated with team success. You can hear 🎥 researcher Amy Edmondson explain what led her to coin the term.
For SCRED to thrive, we need our teams to be "safe" places where people can experiment, take risks, freely share mistakes, and learn from them together. Our energy needs to be focused on learning, not "impression management" and worrying about our competence being judged. Watch 🎥 Simon Sinek explain how impactful this is on team performance.
This cannot be achieved without relationship building. We organize social events and optimize SCRED activities to create space for our team members to get to know each other, building trust and the capacity to be vulnerable.
Psychological safety is woven into a need for shared accountability. The graphic below illustrates that our optimal zone is one where a team is safe for risk taking and experimentation while also holding itself accountable for achieving positive outcomes.
"Less New, More Better"
"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
We want our processes and resources to be elegant — lean, simple, efficient, effective, and robust. To achieve this, we cannot approach problems by quickly throwing together additional documents or additional steps.
Instead, we strive to deeply understand the strengths and weakness of our current resources and practices — how stakeholders experience them and how we can evolve them to achieve a lot while asking a little. We also collaborate with each other transparently, not in "silos," so that we avoid duplicating work and making life more complicated for our stakeholders.
Sustainable Partnership
We interact with six member districts, and as a result, the system of how decisions are navigated and how tasks are coordinated between SCRED team members and stakeholders in our member district organizations is susceptible to uncertainty and cumbersome complexity.
As a curriculum director in one of our member districts has said: "Clarity is kind." Through workload analysis, refinement of our job descriptions, and optimization of our communication (including tools like the SCRED website), we create clarity.
We want our support to member districts to be reliable and effective, the work of SCREDsters to be sustainable and fulfilling, and decisions made between SCRED and our member districts to be navigated in true partnership.
Our Values
What do we stand for?
Solution-Focused Attitude: We value maintaining a balance between the exploration of obstacles to success and the identification of possible solutions. Together, these activities yield the most positive outcomes for our students.
Investigative, Growth Mindset: We believe that we improve through hard work and dedication, and we value the tenacious pursuit and synthesis of information that will help us arrive at the best answer or course of action.
Efficacy Criterion: We value educational methodologies that have been extensively investigated and have data to support their efficacy.
Meaningful Collaborative Work: We value collaboration because our students and fellow educators are a critical collaborative force that drives meaningful educational progress for all learners, including ourselves.
Student-First Decision Making: We value the sustainable use of data for making objective determinations that put students first and ensure equity for all learners in our practices.
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Connect
 Please reach out if you would like to discuss or have questions about SCRED's organizational culture.
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