Educational Leadership - February 2016

re you part of a team at your school? Is
there an administrative team, an office team,
a 3rd grade team, or a team of social studies
teachers? Is your custodian on a team? What about
the people who work in the kitchen or supervise
students on the playground? How do you define
a team?
These questions arise from my reading of the
book Team of Teams, written by retired U.S. Army
General Stanley McChrystal. 1

He looks at how society has changed and the implications of these changes for leadership and teamwork. McChrystal writes, “The great successes— the creation of the computer, transistor, microchip, Internet—come from a ‘team of teams,’ working together in pursuit of a common goal.” He offers examples from the military, sports, and airline disasters (or near misses) to illustrate the power of teams. Schools are certainly among the many organizations where success requires collaboration.

We know that students learn best when faculty collegiality is the norm and when teachers and administrators learn with and from one another.

Conversely, everyone loses when schools are classroom silos with teachers engaging in parallel play.

McChrystal notes that the leader’s job is to inspire teams and ensure accountability: “An organization must be constantly led or, if necessary, pushed uphill toward what it must be.

Stop pushing and it doesn’t continue, or even rest in place; it rolls backward.” And “There’s likely a place in paradise for people who tried hard, but what really matters is succeeding.” He sure sounds like a general!

But McChrystal also recognizes that the role
of the leader must change radically in order to
develop and support the kind of teamwork that is
needed today. Creating teams that will collaborate
with other teams to solve problems is his goal. He
talks about pushing the decision making to those
who are closest to the situation. Recognizing that
we own the decisions we make ourselves, he says,
“I communicated across my command my thought
process on decisions like air strikes, and told them
to make the call. Whoever made the decision, I
was always ultimately responsible, and more often
than not those below me
reached the same conclusion I
would have, but this way our
team would be empowered to
do what was needed.”
Principals don’t order air
strikes (fortunately), but we
do make decisions that frame
staff behaviors and affect
student outcomes. Our deci-
sions will be better if our
school teams work together to
solve problems.

As leaders, we need to determine what collaborations can help students learn. Do your teachers meet to share strategies for student growth? Do math and art teachers gather to talk about how students learn in different situations? Do 1st and 5th grade teachers come together to share how children have grown over time? Talking about students’ progress and trajectory—what has and hasn’t worked—is beneficial for everyone. The more teachers appreciate that all of us are responsible for each child every year, the more ownership they will display in brainstorming strategies and supervising students in common areas.

What about your nonteaching staff—secretaries, maintenance, food service, teachers’ aides, and so on? It doesn’t make sense for support staff to be in all meetings, but it also doesn’t make sense for them to be excluded from every meeting. Too often, we fail to share information that will be helpful to them, and sometimes they see this as a lack of respect or appreciation. Their smiles,