- Schools are becoming increasingly complex. Many of the school heads I met faced huge challenges from day one. Like a tightrope walker, each was trying to balance getting to know and understand the new community, running the school on a day-to-day basis, and undertaking school transformation with a constantly shifting education landscape.
- Prioritization is difficult with so many challenges and opportunities occurring simultaneously. Knowing what to tackle and in what order is key to success, but that can be elusive, particularly when you are new to a school. Adopting a framework that provides organization and strategy, and acquiring hard data that gives insight, are key actions for leaders.
- Diagnosis of both challenges and opportunities is often inaccurate, taking the school community in unproductive directions. Lack of time and insufficient high-quality data and research often lead schools to implement solutions before a root cause is correctly identified. This can waste valuable time and resources and complicate an already complex situation.
I concluded my time at the summer institutes convinced that the shift from traditional hierarchical leadership structures to high-functioning team-based leadership can be a solution for many of our schools’ challenges. When we understand and learn to harness the power of a team, the potential for school success is unlimited.
Work Groups vs. Teams
Today, I think we are more likely to have highly functioning work groups than highly effective teams. Building great teams requires intent and the drive to nourish a team culture and structure across the organization. In the classic book, The Wisdom of Teams, authors Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith explore what is in the DNA of high-performing teams. They note, “Team potential exists anywhere hierarchy or organizational boundaries inhibit good performance.”Many researchers have studied the nature of teamwork and shared leadership and its importance to the nonprofit world. I suggest the following blueprint for schools to consider, based on the research and theories of many of these researchers:
1. Begin moving from a strong individual leader to shared leadership. Although having a strong head of school is important, building a team that shares leadership can vastly enhance performance. This entails moving away from the model of one leader through which all strategy flows to a model of collective responsibility. An important preliminary step is for the top leader to let go of control and for the group to build trust among its members. In addition, the group must hold joint accountability for the team’s results.
In the article “What is the Nature of Leadership in Flat Organizations,” the authors note:
“To understand leadership in flat organizations, we must first change how we conceptualize and measure leadership. Leadership no longer involves only a few people who hold formal positions steering the company. Rather, leadership is a social process occurring within a team, department, or organization that results in those collectives creating direction, alignment, and commitment for a shared goal.”
2. Differentiate the team’s purpose from the larger organizational mission. In working groups, we often find a collective of individuals working to fulfill the organization’s mission, while a team has a more specific purpose decided upon jointly. For example, in a school, there is generally a leadership team made up of key administrators who work together to fulfill the school’s mission. That group can be highly effective, but chances are the work is still siloed and not focused on a collective outcome. A team that focuses on one BHAG (big, hairy, audacious goal), such as the financial sustainability of the school or an opportunity to reinvent itself for a changing market can be more effective in addressing complex issues.
3. Restructure to focus on a collective outcome rather than individual outputs. We know from research that diverse groups make better decisions; thus, a group of diverse individuals can be more effective in finding a solution to a challenging issue or a new way to approach an emerging opportunity than individuals working solo on related initiatives. As in Gestalt theory, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
4. Run generative vs. solution-based meetings. Efficiency is often considered the hallmark of a good meeting. Yet taking a generative rather than a strategic approach — that is having less bias for action and solutions and more practice of asking probing questions and making sense of circumstances — may lead to more powerful team results. Recent research by Google identified that their most effective teams had qualities that many may see as the opposite of efficiency. In describing an effective Google team, the researchers noted:
"People may speak over one another, go on tangents and socialize instead of remaining focused on the agenda. The team may seem inefficient to a casual observer. But all the team members speak as much as they need to. They are sensitive to one another’s moods and share personal stories and emotions. While the team might not contain as many individual stars, the sum will be greater than its parts.”
5. Discuss, wrestle with, and produce outcomes together rather than delegate. Working groups get together and share individual results, while teams actually accomplish the work together. Thus, there is collective input, research, strategizing, prototyping, etc. This may seem like a time-consuming way to accomplish anything, but the time spent together usually produces much more high-quality results.
6. Measure performance by outcomes rather than outputs. Generally, goals are set to achieve certain outputs — increased enrollment, larger annual fund returns, etc. Although these are important measures of success, if we set our sights higher, that is on outcomes, the rewards will be much higher, too. For example, if school leaders are trying to improve staff recruitment, they could set a goal of raising salaries to the top 20 percent of the market, hoping that will increase the pool of high-quality candidates. However, if they set an outcome goal instead, they would redesign the total approach to recruitment. In this scenario, the desired outcome would be that the school becomes the employer of choice in that market.
The School Leadership Team Experience
I witnessed many of these team-oriented actions playing out at the NAIS School Leadership Team Experience (SLTE). Faculty members Anne Marie Balzano and Scott Bauer, of George Mason’s Education Leadership program, took school teams through three rigorous days of team building, root cause analysis, and research-based solution design. Each team came to the institute with a specific challenge or opportunity to explore. They refined those challenges as deliberations, and research moved them from identifying symptoms to diagnosing causes. What I found most energizing, though, was watching the transformation of these school units from working groups to powerful teams over the course of the institute.One telling exercise on the first day of the institute, Lost at Sea, demonstrated the power of teams over individual accomplishment. In the exercise, a group’s boat capsizes and the team is told that their chances of “survival” depend on their ability to rank a group of salvaged items in relative order of importance. Attendees first take the exercise individually and then as a group. Not surprisingly, in almost every SLTE team, the team scores were much better than the individual scores. In addition, those teams with the highest scores paused to develop outcome-based goals first and allowed each team member to speak to identify nautical acumen.
As we begin another school year, I urge school leaders to pause to think about the power of teams and distributed leadership. As Henry Ford so wisely said, “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.”
