Building Effective Teams

Let's talk about collaboration. The work involved in turning around a school cannot be done alone. It cannot be done in silos. It requires significant collaboration. What is collaboration exactly? By definition, collaboration is "a working practice whereby individuals work together to a common purpose to achieve business benefit." (http://www.aiim.org/What-is-Collaboration). Teams have to be able to build trust in order to be able to accomplish the significant work that faces them. But at the beginning of the school year, a group of people is thrown together and told that they are a team. They are told they have to make significant gains in student achievement and that they have to work together in order to do that. But, we don't do a lot to help the teams develop the skills necessary to collaborate effectively. In Patrick Lencioni's essential text, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, the author outlines the components of true collaboration.

The foundation of the pyramid is about an absence of trust. It requires that teams share a level of invulnerability. We have to be able to share our insecurities, our imperfections, and even our failures with the people on our team. Without this ability to trust, we cannot become an effective team.

As a leader, we must be aware of the dynamics of building collaborative teams and provide support and guidance for teams who do not develop trust or who struggle with conflict. When teams lack trust, they are unable to move forward. When teams are only friendly and collegial, they may have trust, but they cannot sustain healthy conflict. We need to have vulnerability in order to build trust. We need to have honest discussions in order to build true harmony. As effective teams, we must all commit to common goals and find the ways to see the strengths in each of us. We should be able to set higher standards for one another and hold one another accountable when we let the team down. It is only through our collaboration that we will achieve. Silos of achievement will not turn around our schools. True collaboration and honest dialogue is the only thing that can truly move our teams and our schools.