PMP457: Listening To Your Teachers with Karen Borchert

Meet Karen Borchert:

Karen Borchert is the founder and CEO of Alpaca, a company with a mission to make it easier to support teachers. Karen started off in secondary education, but most of her career is as an entrepreneur, helping to grow high trust, highly aligned teams. 

Karen started Alpaca to combine her passion for education with her experience in building employee engagement, leadership and management teams. Alpaca believes that asking teachers more about what they need, providing those things in delightful ways, and creating a way to show gratitude to teachers could change the way teachers feel about work. Alpaca is on a mission to create the first employee culture platform built just for K-12 educators. 

Karen holds a Bachelor’s degree in Secondary Education and Teaching from Wake Forest University and an MBA from Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. 

Before founding Alpaca, Karen had experience in operations, product management, and entrepreneurship. She held leadership roles at organizations such as ROKA, Flywheel, and Election Systems & Software, and co-founded Keen Guides, a platform for multimedia tours. Her professional journey also includes contributions in consulting and the nonprofit sector.

Today, Alpaca supports thousands of teachers across the country. Their unique model of semantic pulse surveys, and turn-key teacher recognition programs offers a new way to support educators.

Founding of Alpaca:

Karen shares the story of what inspired her to found Alpaca with Principal Matters listeners. Her years of work in employee engagement led to her desire to start a school related company. Throughout the process of founding Alpaca, Karen spent a lot of time interviewing teachers about their experience working in schools. She shares that she realized how many teachers purchase school supplies out of pocket, and decided to find a way to get those supplies into teachers’ hands easily. Thus the idea for Alpaca Packs was born. 

Cutting Through the Noise:

One area of focus for Alpaca is providing solutions to school leaders to build credibility with their teachers as being trustworthy and appreciative. Karen suggests that school leaders learn to cut through the noise that often accompanies their job by listening to teachers. Specifically, Karen tells school leaders that they should stop listening to solutions and start listening to teachers. Karen lays out five core values that Alpaca employs to help school leaders build credibility with their teachers:

• Listen to teachers
• Write thank you notes
• Tell stories
• Elevate every educator
• Bring out the best 

Listen in to the interview to hear Karen dive into these core values in more detail!

Recognizing and Celebrating Teachers:

Next, Karen Borchert shares practical ways that leaders can recognize and celebrate teachers, especially as they plan for a new school year. She encourages listeners to begin the school year by creating a cadence and a habit of listening to and supporting teachers. There are several ways that Karen shares leaders can create this cadence, through scheduling time to listen to feedback from teachers and then acting on it. Building school culture doesn’t happen because of one isolated event, but rather a habitual practice of building culture. 

Practicing What She Preaches:

Karen spends a lot of time traveling to events across the country to help leaders rethink the ways they can encourage and retain teachers. Furthermore, she applies those same lessons with her team at Alpaca. Once a month, the employees at Alpaca fill out a survey describing how they are doing at work. Each week, Alpaca holds a team meeting, during which Karen listens to feedback and lets the team know what changes will happen each week. The Alpaca team also constantly has calls with their customers to hear how they are using their products and what changes they can make. 

Staying Connected: 

You can find out more about Alpaca and the work they do on their website: www.getalpaca.com

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