So get comfy, because we've been on this journey of trying to almost audit, both internally with ourselves, but also literally within our companies, our organizations, our schools or districts. So where are you now? Are you close to operating a human centered business, or do you have a ways to go? It's all good. We're on our way, but maybe just start by getting comfortable in your seat, or if you're standing, moving a couple of stretches just to open your mind, open your heart. I'm reaching my arms up and out opening my rib cage. I want to transition from my last task and be as present as possible, and I invite you to do the same. So if you've been following the teaching wells podcast through We Are For Good, you've heard me run my mouth a whole lot about some of our favorite policies and the opportunities for play and innovation. We've talked about bereavement, reproductive, loss, first year of life supports, as well as our wellness and PD stipends. But today I want to talk about a policy that isn't fancy or cute, but it's one that really is significant. It means a lot to me as a restorative practitioner, and one that I believe creates a trauma informed or healing centered container for my staff, and that's the corrective progression. I'm put a little bit of tea. I'm going to try and keep it loose leaf organic here I find as someone who only recently, in the last four years, transitioned to the wellness field, right because the teaching well sits at the intersection of education and well being in the workplace, but many wellness orgs are real freestyle. Shout out to the healers of the world. I know healing is fluid, but orgs with no structure can perpetuate just as much harm as the traditional stereotype of a business. Micromanagement, punitive behaviors, carry your box out via a walk of shame. That's what the movies tell us about, especially corporate work. But what about when you have no job descriptions, no systems for evaluation or feedback, coaching or support? What about when there's no handbook? Conflict arises between teammates or compensation and rest policies and practices are unclear. This is a recipe for burnout, or for burning up relationships that are significant and have the potential to lead towards really rigorous collaboration and impact. As an educator, I believe kids crave structure, systems, policies and practices, when done well, can keep us safe and supported. There's a path to liberatory, human centered policies that still pass legal muster. And if you tuned in to our last episode, you know that Marisol and I were really talking about the tension and walking the line between liberatory and legally safe or sound policies. So homework from Episode Five, we encourage you to identify a policy that you'd like to create or that currently exists and isn't working for your team. I'd like to give you another example, as I mentioned, the corrective progression policy at the teaching well, and run it through our framework, just to help you have an additional at bat with this concept. So before I jump into that, I want to just give a tiny bit of context around what the corrective progression even means at its rawest form. When I was talking to my kids the other night about this, they're like, oh, it's how people get in trouble. And I was like, huh, sad that already the schooling system has taught my young children, elementary school and younger, that there are practices for punishment. I think about it really differently. I think about corrective progression as the opportunity to create, sustain and care for relationships, and when we are misaligned or off track, when we are not meeting expectations within ourselves, within our team, for our organization, how do we recalibrate? This is how we start with the corrective progression. Literally, this is the policy language. So when I tell you, we play, we play. It's our belief at the teaching well, that we are all lifelong learners with the capacity to grow. We also know that to be a restorative and trauma sensitive organization, it's best practice to hold consistent and predictable practices anchored in caring relationships. All teammates are assigned to a supervisor who, in part, is responsible for facilitating the support and accountability of supervisees by articulating a standard corrective progression, it enables us to mutually resolve employee performance challenges in order to retain employees as productive team members whenever possible. Let's unpack that last line right? Because, first of all, by articulating a standard corrective progression, it means that we are correcting for the very human nature of middle managers, supervisors, folks in charge leadership positions, from bringing in their subjective feelings, reactions or course corrections with their staff. We know change is hard, but we say at the teaching level it doesn't have to be traumatic. We want to sustain dignity, and I hold the belief that you shouldn't kick folks when they're already down. Shame and guilt are already heavy enough, so be good on purpose, even if your frustration is justified. As a supervisor, I've watched as clients who hold positional authority feel self righteous in their allocation of punitive actions, they project their feelings, almost even a vibe of parenting, onto their staff like this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you. Or do as I say, not as I do. It's icky. Restorative practices are not just an item to add to your plate. They are the plate. They're the holder for all relationships. One of our principals that we work with told us that her mother, who's a clinician, said, if you hold things in, you'll get sick. Then I wonder, What does micromanaging do? I'd speculate a reciprocal type of damage, both a picking away at the spirit, efficacy, self worth of the supervisee, but also chipping away at the true leadership potential of the manager and without calibration on these types of practices inside of your organization, your staff can experience a type of whiplash, especially if they change supervisors, and have a radically different experience. So in that policy frame that we provide in many of our human centered policies, where we've innovated, there's a little bit of a framing that articulates our values and our stance, but you heard it outright. Our mission, our goal internally, is to retain our people and have them be productive team members. We state that outright. So when I think about the corrective progression, and I measure it up against the framework that we articulated in the last several episodes, we visioned towards a policy Marisol and I said, there is no process when we arrived at the Teaching well, for equitable, ethical, responsive, but also clear boundary setting and support accountability in the face of performance concerns. Our vision is that this does not have to be punitive. Our vision is that especially folks who are neurodivergent or who are trauma survivors, don't experience a gotcha, but that they feel clear, contained and confident in getting back on track. We drafted the policy and we shared it with certain culture keepers on the team who we knew, especially in our context, had had employment trauma and would have feedback on the desired experience, because everybody makes mistakes. We have agency decide how we respond to them. Of course, we had our legal counsel take a look at it, and yeah, we got some feedback, and then we needed to broker a middle path, of course, we then followed it with some change management, socializing it with our team and retraining our supervisors.