Antiracist Leadership Competencies and Evaluation Process

Did you know?

PSESD launched its mission to become an Antiracist Multicultural Organization in 2008 which paved the way for leaders to build staff capacity and organizational infrastructure required to actualize the agency’s End: Success for Each Child and Eliminate the Opportunity Gap by Leading with Racial Equity. 

Puget Sound Educational Service District (PSESD) established a Competency-based Leadership Development and Evaluation System for our employees to create a culture of continuous professional growth and development and support the retention and advancement of a racially diverse and antiracist workforce.  

Last year, staff were invited to participate in the evaluation of the system.  As a result of staff feedback, enhancements were made. Staff were then presented another opportunity to provide feedback to determine whether the system met its intended purpose to: 

1. Build staff engagement and growth in cultural proficiency and Antiracist Leadership Competencies.
2. Establish a coaching culture through continuous feedback with an emphasis on meaningful goal-setting, setting expectations, providing timely and meaningful feedback, providing professional development to support employee performance and growth while also strengthening employee and supervisor relationships; and
3. Provide a system to support goal progress. 

In support of PSESD’s Antiracist Leadership Competencies, we understand that for a leader to support their team in becoming antiracist multicultural employees, a leader must understand their own journey in becoming antiracist.  The Antiracist Leadership (Supervisory) Training was developed to support ESD supervisors in the evaluation process.  Our professional development is a training series designed as a road map for individual journeys and as a deeper dive into each of the Antiracist Leadership Competencies: Cultural Proficiency, Racial Equity Advocate, Racial Equity Mindset, and Transformational Value.  The Antiracist Leadership Training is a series of six, two-hour sessions with Canvas for asynchronous learning that is offered to supervisors in winter.  Our first series kickoff in winter of 2021, 89 percent of our supervisors completed the series. The series outline is described here.

Session 1: Building the foundation to lead with racial equity: What is your why?

Session 2: Building our cultural proficiency: Understanding racism as a historical to present system of oppression

Session 3: Developing a racial equity mindset: Understanding patterns of internalization and flipping the script on deficit mindsets

Session 4: Becoming a racial equity advocate: White supremacy culture and dismantling institutional racism

Session 5: Leading with transformational values: Putting these values into practice

Session 6: Problems of practice and what is next with hiring practices