Summer events often provide inspirational anecdotes for school leaders when addressing their teams, in September meetings or assemblies. An underdog, against-the-odds story from the Olympics. A holiday anecdote that demonstrates or celebrates different cultural norms. Perhaps, this summer, it will be the resilience and collaboration of communities in the face of riots.
To my shame (or credit, depending on where you sit), I’ve used Band of Brothers, The Walking Dead, The Bear, The Count of Monte Cristo, and many other books, to launch an idea. I even have a notes page on my iPhone dedicated to things that might help me navigate or articulate an idea.
These anecdotes or analogies are, of course, a great springboard to narrate the team’s vision and purpose for the year ahead. The key is to match the inspirational story to an element of your team’s journey – to turn the intangible feelings from a great speech or story into the ways a team could actually work.
I remember my previous headteacher telling a story about how, at an all-inclusive hotel, the chief lifeguard for the first week, Marta, ran a very tight ship around the swimming pool. Clear rules, consistently upheld, with warmth and learning people’s names to build rapport. The hotel was an oasis of harmony. No pool-side disputes over towels or ball games! But week two arrived, and a new staff member took over, more interested in topping up his tan and controlling the outdoor music (which became louder!).
He let the visitors do what they wanted, wasn’t very polite, and the place became a bit of a circus. You can probably see the connection that the headteacher then made to us: how all staff needed to set the same rules and expectations, with warmth and love, so that the students in the school got a consistent deal and that we had a cohesive culture. This then fed into further conversations within teams about how to do this effectively.
Anyway, I digress! The point is, the start of the year is a great opportunity to define your vision, expectations, and purpose as a school or a team. (aside – start of year is a launch pad, sure, but ‘purposing activity’ should continue throughout the team’s life.)
Performance challenges:
But inspirational words are not enough on their own, and a clear vision doesn’t necessarily translate to actual work, if it isn’t filtered through goals and defined common approaches to teamwork. Sure enough, most teams will launch their vision along with overarching aims for the year, but sometimes these can be long term, slightly abstract, and don’t provide an immediate set of aims or tasks that the group will need to coalesce around. Worse still, the vision and faraway goals may be forgotten.
I recently read The Wisdom of Teams by Katzenbach and Smith, and was really intrigued by their assertions about teams needing clear performance objectives and challenges above everything else. They argue that teams don’t become teams just because they are told to, and won’t improve very much with teambuilding activities or a punchy vision alone.
Rather, “a demanding performance challenge tends to create a team. The hunger for performance is far more important to team success than team-building exercises, or extrinsic, special incentives”. They suggest that performance challenges energise a team, and bring them together through meaningful work, more than other approaches to team building.
Goal setting research:
This reminds me of some research I drew upon in a previous blog about importance of careful goal setting, especially regarding specificity of goals:
‘When setting goals, there needs to be an awareness of three things: the organisation’s overall objectives, a team’s collective objectives, and lastly the objectives of individuals within the team. The specificity of these performance objectives helps to facilitate clear communication, evaluation of effectiveness, and constructive conflict within the team. Specific goals allow a team to achieve small wins as it pursues its broader purpose, which in turn increase commitment.
They conclude by stating: ‘when purposes and goals build on one another and are combined with team commitment, they become a powerful engine of performance’.
In a meta-analysis of the effects of goal setting on group performance, Kleingeld, van Mierlo, and Arends (2011) found a large overall positive effect size of .56 for goal setting on group performance; that specific, difficult goals were more effective than non-specific goals; and that individually focused goals had a negative effect on group performance, whereas group goals had a positive effect.‘
The notion of setting goals alongside your more ideological vision all sounds rather common sense, but I’ve been in plenty of team meetings where vision and goal do not necessarily unite, and it isn’t clear how we will actually enact the vision.
It got me thinking, how can we ‘launch’ our teams this September so that they are hooked by, and contribute to, the team’s vision and purpose, but also have some clear performance goals and challenges that immediately provide motivation and the impetus to do great work together?
This means that we must consider what tasks we will work on as a team to pursue our goals, how we will do this, and which ‘persistent problems‘ we will overcome to both unite us as a group, but also to achieve our aims. This work, given that it pursues our team’s purpose, is as stirring and inspirational as the stories we tell.
I’d already pencilled in some plans for what I might say to my teams, but the book helped me connect the emotive with the tangible.
For me, this will look like:
• Forging a clear vision and purpose with my team(s)
• Discussing our overarching aims and journey for the year ahead
• Reflecting on our challenges form the previous year: what are we still working on and why? Do they need to fit into our performance objectives for this year?
• Mapping out some shorter-term performance goals and discussing how we will work on them as a team
• Discussing our ‘common approach’ to tasks and teamwork, so it is clear how we work together as a group (this encompasses how we will navigate discussion, conflict, etc)
• Exploring what we think we need to learn as a team that year – how will we map our team CPD, in addition to medium-to-long term research projects, etc. Then, we need to work out how our learning will feed back in to team processes
This is followed by the trickier bit as a team leader – ensuring that we keep up these discussions, talk about our goals and review / celebrate / debrief how we have got on with them. And, of course, linking our vision and purpose to these ever-changing goals so that we are staying aligned with who we say we are as a team.
This post has become longer than I envisaged, but my original aim was to write something that reminded me, as a leader, not to over rely on vision and purpose alone to motivate and inspire my teams. Certainly, I do want to celebrate the potential of discussing our vision, purpose, and ‘why’ with our teams.
But also I must remember that these need to be linked to the team’s goals and tangible work projects in the short term, too, so that the team can immediately transfer their ‘buy in’ to tangible work products and ways of working as a group.
I’m sure many of us are sitting down this summer to think about how we work with our teams for the year ahead. If you are at a hotel, I hope you have a Marta at the helm, and that you enjoy piecing this work together for your school teams. I look forward to hearing what you will do.
And my story for this September? It’s all about Master’s of the Air.
If you want to read more of my blogs on teams, find the series here: https://samcrome.com/tag/thriving-teams/
I also discuss these ideas at length in The Power of Teams
Thanks for reading!
References
Katzenbach JR., Smith DK. (1992) The Wisdom of teams. Harv Bus Rev
Katzenbach JR., Smith DK. (1993) The discipline of teams. Harv Bus Rev.
Kleingeld A, van Mierlo H, Arends L. (2011) The effect of goal setting on group performance: a meta-analysis. J Appl Psychol. 2011 Nov;96(6):1289-304
Sam Crome 