I recently enjoyed Tom Sherrington’s post on how we need to help our staff teams do brilliant work together if we want to see improvement across the school. He discusses how teams need time, structure, and a culture of high-quality feedback to help improve their work, amongst other things – please go and have a read!

It echoes with my own experience that school improvements and initiatives are only as effective as how they are implemented through teams across the organisation. If the senior leadership team create a wonderful behaviour policy, it will only work if each individual team across the school, both departmental and pastoral, implement it with the same understanding, consistency, effort, and belief.

A school, then, is only as effective as each of its teams, if our aim is to provide fantastic provision for all areas of a children’s education and development. We should not allow teamwork to be accidental or inconsistent; every team should follow guiding principles about what teams are here to achieve, and how, at our school.

And yet, I find that many teams don’t actually do that much work together. They attend meetings, comply with policies, and tend to get along fairly well. But to become greater than the sum of their parts, they must coalesce around shared challenges, and collaborate to create ideas, policies, lessons, or whatever they are working on, in order to improve how the team fulfils their remit.

So my first question for you is: think about the best staff teams at your school.

The teams that achieve brilliant outcomes, have purposeful meetings packed with open discussion, deliberate collaboration, and who learn a great deal together.

Are all the other teams in the school like this? If not, why? Do teams succeed because of the school’s curation of how teams thrive, or is it more accidental?

Introducing Superteams

This month’s Harvard Business Review has a fascinating article about what ‘Superteams’ do to excel, and to keep getting better.

The researchers surveyed more than 6,000 employees from a range of industries, and used certain metrics to identify which of them belonged to high-performing teams, which they called Superteams. These teams scored very highly on questions about beliefs in the team’s ability, and in rating their effectiveness and then comparing that effectiveness to other teams in their industry.

Interestingly, the Superteams shared three strengths:

1. They get more done than other teams by managing their time, work, and attention effectively

2. Their members help each other to improve

3. They learn and develop over time – they are constantly improving

One of the eye-catching findings was that Superteams were much less likely to continue doing things the way they always had, with 62% of them often ‘experimenting’ with new ideas and ways of working, with only 42% of average teams behaving like this. This might sound easy, but a team needs a culture of psychological safety and trust to try out new things; teams without this foundation tend to blame each other, or lack the conditions to overcome interpersonal issues created by failure.

Superteams: the leaders

Another finding was the Superteams tended to have leaders who were much more involved in the team’s work than a ‘traditional’ model of leaders making decisions and delegating. 78% of Superteams reported that their leader was actively involved in the work of the team, compared to 55% of average teams, while only 22% of Superteams reported that their managed took a distant ‘decide and delegate’ approach, to 45% of average teams.

My feeling is that this is good news for school teams, where leaders often (but not always) take a less hierarchical approach. We simply don’t have the resources for ivory tower leadership; but the findings are clear: teams have more chance of thriving when their leader is part of the collaboration and working process.

But the integral role of the leader doesn’t stop there. Leaders can set the tone for the way the team interacts by exhibiting behaviours that spread across the group. Here are a few fascinating statistics about leaders from Superteams compared with average teams:

· They are 33% more likely to acknowledge they lack knowledge and ask the group for advice, information, and answers

· They are 54% more likely to ask thoughtful questions

· They are 53% more likely to show interest in learning from their team members

As Friedman states in the article: ‘the belief that learning can come from anyone creates a team that is more open, adaptive, and committed to getting better’.

Finally, the leaders created a culture of healthy, productive feedback in their teams, by ensuring it is constructive but not critical. When leaders establish this as a safe, useful norm, not only do members take on the feedback and improve from it, but they begin to use this normalised safety to provide each other with feedback, and also seek it out from one another. That’s when teams really start to thrive.

The conditions created in Superteams from Friedman’s research essentially helps them to do productive, purposeful work together, with a focus on collaboration and healthy feedback.

My contention is that school staff teams often miss the mark here, behaving more like a group of individuals who meet together to go through operational agendas, than a genuine team that pools collective wisdom and experiences to collaborate.

Of course, you can argue that time is finite and there isn’t enough of it to spend every second doing potentially utopian collaborative work and to enjoy rich discussions. But there is enough time to dedicate a proportion of meeting time / work to leading a team in this way

So, what does this mean for us?

The research by Friedman is clear: the best teams get more done, learn from each other, and keep developing as a group.

How can you evaluate your own team(s) to explore whether this is the case at your school?

And, as I asked earlier, is there consistency across all teams? We can’t allow some teams to become Superteams while others just go through the motions.

Yes our time and resources are limited, but that’s why applying research-informed strategies can help us squeeze every bit of untapped potential from our teams. The Superteams we explored today end up doing more with less, while performing better and providing their members with thriving environments to work and learn in.