It can be difficult to define what makes someone feel confident or at ease within their team. Some argue that a happy team is a productive team, while others say the opposite is true. In my years’ long pursuit of staff wellbeing and satisfaction, I’ve often leant towards autonomy, trust, and opportunities to collaborate as key factors contributing to healthy culture and team work.

In the last 12 months, I’ve read Amy Edmondson’s The Fearless Organisation, Dan Cable’s Alive At Work, and Andy Swann’s The Human Workplace, with all three titles advocating safe, open-minded workplaces that allow people and teams to flourish and succeed. It was in these books that I began to understand the concept of psychological safety as a tool for wellbeing, but also a necessity in productive, thriving teams.

So far in this blog series I’ve covered what makes a team, followed by team purpose and goals. So, given that we now know how to create a team and give it direction, it’s now time to explore how we can create and lead other enabling conditions for successful teams, starting with psychological safety.

What is psychological safety?

Psychological safety is a trusting behaviour that is defined as the team’s shared belief that it is safe to take interpersonal risks without fear of backlash (Edmondson, 1999). In other words, the team members have a collective understanding that they are safe to express themselves, to try things out, and to fail. Amy Edmondson has conducted many studies about psychologically safe teams, and the impact of those on the team’s morale and productivity.

One study by Julia Rozovsky looked at which teams at Google performed best, and analysed the teams’ hobbies, backgrounds, friends, traits and more – no trends emerged as to why some teams performed better than others. And then they looked at psychological safety, and everything fell into place. Even Google’s brightest, sharpest performers needed to be within a psychologically safe team in order to thrive (Edmondson 2019).

Psychological safety is not just a ‘nice to have’ or a box of biscuits, or even a reassuring smile. It raises standards in teams, with Edmondson’s studies finding that it increases candour, mutual respect, and trust. A psychologically safe team is a conducive environment to set ambitious goals and work towards them together. Put simply, having high standards and high psychological safety is a winning ticket, and natural combination, to help a team truly thrive.

As social beings, we tend to conform, and desire acceptance; we work out early in life how to avoid interpersonal risks. At work, we may avoid asking questions in order to look more competent, or may avoid challenging a colleague because we don’t want to be branded as someone who causes trouble or rocks the boat. Edmondson finds that the best teams create cultures of openness and curiosity, where staff are encouraged to question, report errors, and discuss the risks of failure – failure is considered an inevitable step in the journey, not as terminal. The team knows that their interpersonal risks are low when they belong to this team, and their inhibitions lower so that they can perform to their potential.

According to Salas et al, ‘it is critical that organizations, team leaders, and teammates create environments where psychological safety can flourish and be a mechanism to resolve conflicts, ensure safety, mitigate errors, learn, and improve performance’ (Salas et al, 2018).

How to build psychological safety

Building genuine psychological safety isn’t as simple as being a friendly face and letting people do as they please. It’s important to note that psychological safety isn’t just being nice to people or having low expectations about work; it is not letting things go to avoid a tough conversation.

Here are three prominent features of a psychologically safe team and their leaders:

Candour – constructive feedback is essential to psychological safety. In The Fearless Organisation, Edmondson cites Pixar and their ‘Brain Trust’ process, in which groups evaluate projects at early stages, and give constructive, impersonal feedback. The expectation is that all projects will need a lot of work and feedback to begin with – it is natural, anticipated, and celebrated. It’s important to ensure that leaders and team members are both comfortable to ask for feedback, and understand that it is vital to team growth and productivity. Netflix seem to do a good job here, too, as they ask employees to create memos to be shared openly across teams, so that they can gain constructive feedback from the outset of an idea or project. There will be a whole blog post on feedback and candour later in the series!

Freedom to fail – building on candour, it’s important to create an environment in which failure and fear are uncoupled. Where the emphasis is on failure not being something to avoid, but a natural part of learning and exploration. The team’s mindset needs to be solution-focused, with no blame culture. If the team has clear, purposeful goals, as discussed in the previous blog post, then any failures along the way are just steps to navigate. These failures can also become galvanising moments for group discussion and collaborative problem solving. It reminds me of playing Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega Megadrive with my brother in the 1990s – the fiendishly difficult final levels were like a Rubik’s cube to be discovered and puzzled over; every time Sonic met his doom we’d gasp (or cackle), return to the drawing board, and plan our next line of attack. 25 years on, those ‘strategy meetings in the bunker’ are some of my favourite memories. In High Challenge, Low Threat, Mary Myatt discusses how to earn trust within a team by saying ‘I think you can do this’, and ‘I’m here to talk things through’ if things don’t go according to plan (Myatt 2016).

Be a don’t knower – leaders need humility – they should admit what they don’t know, ask questions, and trust those around them. ‘Leaders who are willing to say ‘I don’t know’, play a surprisingly powerful role in engaging the hearts and minds of employees. In Adam Grant’s fantastic Think Again (2021), there is a great anecdote about introducing more psychological safety at the Gates Foundation, and the huge relief of employees when Melinda, who staff couldn’t usually get an emotional read from, announced that she goes into a lot of meetings where there are things she doesn’t know. The staff felt safer in the knowledge that their seemingly perfect leader had gaps in her knowledge, and was brave enough to admit it.

In Dr Kulvarn Atwal’s The Thinking School, he advocates a model of ‘high challenge, high trust’, whereby his staff work relentlessly for the benefit of the children, within the context of open dialogue, high autonomy, and a huge amount of collaborative work. Staff are encouraged to provide feedback to leadership, and then even more so to lead on projects and initiatives. Inviting staff to contribute isn’t a form of weakness, it encourages diverse thinking, loyalty, and greater staff buy in. Having visited the school myself, I saw how staff are encouraged to burst in with an idea, knowing that Kulvarn will talk it through with them (always asking first how it will benefit the children) and give them the chance to try it out and then evaluate.

Atwal cites research (including his own doctoral work) and interviews which suggest that teachers value working together in groups, as an effective and empowering form of development. In his school, Atwal’s staff gave me many examples of how they had split off into groups to work on research projects, joint planning, and similar, with trust and autonomy being the wind in their sails. It has made me rethink how schools can foster collaborative work across different teams, focused on curriculum planning, research projects, extra-curricular activities, student learning… the list could go on, but as Atwal says, it will develop a positive culture and high investment from staff. From what I saw, this created effective psychological safety across his staff body.

Action points for teams and team leaders:

Returning to Amy Edmondson’s work, she sets out three ways to introduce psychological safety into your team.

1. Set the scene: when working with your team on a project or set of work products, begin by clarifying the nature of the work, and acknowledge how failures along the way will be ‘currency’ for growth. In other words, be clear about purpose, but also admit that there will be challenges.
2. Invite participation: it’s important for leaders to admit that we don’t know all the answers, and to engage the team with this process and or project as a joint-learning opportunity. Jurgen Klopp (from 4.30 in the video) speaks particularly well about this when he discusses working with experts within his team whose knowledge he invites and must draw upon to be most effective. Fundamentally, leaders should acknowledge they are not, in fact, omniscient, and encourage open communication and feedback across the team, while also asking the team open questions.
3. Respond productively: as the project or process takes shapes, results will begin to appear. The work is in motion, and it won’t always go well. This is the opportunity to listen carefully, acknowledge and welcome those who flag up errors or possible improvements, and destigmatise failure.

How I’ve incorporated some of these ideas into a team I lead:

A team that I am very proud to work with is the group of Heads of Year and Assistant Heads of Year across our school and sixth form. I’m by no means a perfect leader, and I certainly don’t hold all the answers. My main priority for our team work is that they have a clear understanding of what we are working towards –both overall vision and day-to-day, operational targets – and that they feel completely safe within the team, knowing that  feedback, thoughts and reflections will be welcomed. There are a few methods I’ve used to develop this culture, although I must admit that the personalities across the team are particularly conducive to working together and pulling in the same direction.

Firstly, I like to ask the team their views and input on just about everything. Yes, I will outline my particular vision for a project and present the standards I think we should work towards, but those goals are often contributed to by the team. Asking the team questions and genuinely listening to, and acting upon, their suggestions is a key tenet of our team culture – they know that they have a voice, and are valued. Adam Grant (2021) advocates the use of ‘how do you know?’ as a question for any member of a team to ask; as a tool for asking a non-judgmental question that mixes curiosity with a desire to know more, and I try to model that sort of tool for others to use.

I also believe that the team will achieve greater psychological safety through learning and growing together. Every fortnight, I hand out some reading relevant to our roles (leadership, culture, pastoral work, mental health), and, two weeks later, we review that reading at the beginning of our meeting. Our meetings always begin with learning, discussion and sharing. In December, the team all selected a book, we bought them, and they will share their reading and learning from these books on a rota during our next 12 meetings this year. It’s this tangible sense of learning and developing as a team that makes us feel safer to ask questions or give feedback to each other.

In the last 12 months, we have launched a new pastoral curriculum; this has been exciting and purposeful, and we are beginning to reap the rewards. It also felt like stepping into the unknown. In the early planning sessions, we talked a lot about the potential of this curriculum, what we wanted from it, and some of the issues we might face. Key to these reflections was that these challenges would be both inevitable, and would always have a solution. We stepped into the hard work of the pastoral curriculum not expecting ‘results’ but a process; this means that when we review our provision, which we do and will need to do regularly, we aren’t peeking between the gaps in our fingers as we cover our faces in nervous anticipation, but that we embrace and celebrate the direction, opportunities and challenges.

Concluding thoughts:

In Putting Staff First, Jonny Uttley (and John Tomsett, 2020) provides the Education Alliance’s Ethical Leadership Qualities: Competencies and Behaviours. Here is a link to that framework. If all leaders aspired to these behaviours – including categories such as trust, wisdom, kindness, service – their teams would enjoy a strong sense of psychological safety and likely become productive and successful. This would be a good piece of work to discuss with leaders at your school when considering what sort of behaviours and values the organisation demands from its leaders and staff.

It’s invigorating to note that there is a plethora of evidence to suggest that psychological safety and trust in teams is not just about wellbeing, but also fundamental to the success of a team. Objectively, we must work as hard at this as we do on our other goals and metrics for success.

I’d like to finish with a wonderful quote from Mary Myatt, whose words I cannot hope to improve:

‘Top leaders create a safety net, where it is OK to make mistakes. There are no recriminations, only discussions about what might be better. A psychological safe space is the crucial element of creating trust. And a sense of humour, which means that nothing needs to be taken seriously. Because, after all, (mostly) this isn’t brain surgery, and no one is going to die’ (Myatt 2016).

Thank you for reading and following so far.

Sam

References

Atwal, K (2019) The Thinking School. John Catt, Woodbridge.

Edmondson, A (2009) Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly.

Edmondson, A (2019) The Fearless Organisation. Wiley, Hoboken.

Grant, A (2021) Think Again. Viking, London.

Myatt, M (2016) High Challenge, Low Threat. John Catt, Woodbridge.

Salas, E., Reyes, D., McDaniel, S. (2018) The Science of Teamwork. American Psychologist.

Tomsett, J., Uttley, J. (2020) Putting Staff First. John Catt, Woodbridge.

Every organisation has a purpose: a sense of why it exists and what it serves through that existence. For schools, this is perhaps obvious. The school exists to serve its children: to keep them safe, to help them to learn, to gain the best qualifications possible, and to prepare them for the world (add others as necessary!). Alternatively, I like the staff-centred approach from Jonny Uttley and John Tomsett (2020): ‘by putting staff first, you are on the way to providing for students the one thing that will help them make good progress in their learning: truly great teaching’. But for a team, a generic purpose or vision isn’t enough. Every team needs a compelling, specific narrative to increase their belief in, and commitment to, the school’s cause – they need leaders who create and communicate a purpose for their particular school and context.

Beneath this layer of organisation-wide purpose, the teams within the team also require their own purpose – their way of serving or contributing to the overall aims. Team leaders, let’s say Heads of Year, Heads of Department, SLT line managers, and others, need to set their own vision, purpose and goals for their teams.

The first post in this series discussed what a team is and can be, followed by exploring team composition and how we go about creating teams that stand a good chance of performing well. After that general introduction, it is time now to dedicate each post to an evidence-informed area of what helps teams to thrive. In this post, I’ll look at what evidence says about how having a clear purpose and setting team goals can have a profound effect on the way teams operate; this will mostly focus on:

1. Clarifying purpose and direction
2. Goals and team goals
3. Stages of a team
4. Role clarity

1. Clarifying purpose and direction

In the wonderful The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle (2018) examines healthy, thriving cultures in a variety of organisations, codifying his findings into three areas: building safety, sharing vulnerability, and establishing purpose. For the latter, he notes how, when you walk into the SEAL headquarters in the USA, you are met by physical examples of their purpose and mission: twisted girders from 9/11, or flags from moments of conflict; at Pixar, you are visually immersed into their movies with life-size statues and installations. Coyle notes that these types of organisations understand and communicate their purpose ‘about as subtly as a punch on the nose’. He argues that high-purpose teams and environments are filled with small, vivid signals to link the present moment and a future ideal. Here is where we are; here is where we want to go. We know from research that team commitment is enhanced by a clear understanding of purpose and specific team goals, so it’s worth reflecting upon how well your team could articulate these. As Coyle advises, we should be ten times as clear about our purpose, vision and goals as we think we need to be.

Hackman (2004) suggests that every great team needs compelling direction: this will energise, orientate and engage its members. Teams cannot be inspired or bring the best version of themselves if they don’t know what they’re working towards and don’t have explicit goals. The goals should be challenging, but also consequential, he argues; the team must stand to gain something, whether that’s extrinsic rewards such as pay or recognition, or intrinsic satisfaction or sense of meaning.

Beyond defining your overall purpose for being, effective strategy development is enhanced by unambiguous goals which we’ll go on to discuss in the next section. Pritchard (1995) and his colleagues developed and implemented a team-based performance management system called ProMES (productivity measurement and enhancement system) that spans purpose, goals, and evaluation, and focuses on identifying objective team outputs, as well as the level of these outputs required to reach various levels of effectiveness for the team. Teams receive feedback referenced to these outputs, and are encouraged to develop plans that would help them achieve internally or externally set goals; with this system in mind, every project starts with clear direction and purpose, knowing the processes to follow later.

Reflection for school leaders: it’s easy to make assumptions when we lead a team: that the team understands the organisation-wide, and team-specific purpose already. That once you’ve said it in a meeting, it will be remembered forever more.But our reflections here should centre around not just what we have done, but we are currently doing to communicate purpose to our team, and therefore if we are creating a compelling direction for them to move.

2. Goal setting and team goals

Ratzenbach and Smith spend much of their seminal article The Discipline of Teams (1993), extolling the virtues of purpose and setting specific goals. They begin by asserting that team commitment – that is, common commitment – is essential to the success of the team. This is a basic requirement to ensure that groups perform collectively and not as individuals. However, the direction and momentum of this commitment is shaped by meaningful purpose, with the responsibility for the setting of this purpose coming from leaders.

In their words ‘The best teams invest a tremendous amount of time and effort exploring, shaping, and agreeing on a purpose that belongs to them both collectively and individually. This purposing activity continues throughout the life of the team. By contrast, failed teams rarely develop a common purpose. For whatever reason – an insufficient focus on performance, lack of effort, poor leadership – they do not coalesce around a challenging aspiration’. (Ratzenbach and Smith, 1993)

The authors continue with this argument by suggesting that specific, tangible team-performance goals are important. Indeed, these goals will help to define a set of work products that are different from both organisation-wide mission, and individual job objectives. In that sense, 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’ (Ratzenbach and Smith, 1993).

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.

Reflection for school leaders: There are, of course, a variety of teams within schools. I’ve found that these teams are often time poor and task rich, and that a list of activities and admin often dominate meetings or briefings. Teams often begin in September with goals for the academic year, but how often are we referring to these goals, and do we bring in goals during specific projects? What sort of team-performance goals do your teams have? Are these an important part of your teams’ dynamics and commitment? What could you do next with regards to utilising these goals and referring back to them?

3. Stages of a team

It’s important for team leaders to have an awareness of the usual stages of team development so that certain interventions can be put in place. In the case of this post, our focus is on how we can communicate the purpose and goals of our team in its early stages, so that team members are aware of the team’s direction, and so that the team leader can predict and understand usual cycles of team development.

Drexler and Sibbett outline a team model which divides the life cycle of the team into two stages: creating and sustaining. Creating stages include orientation (why I am here?), trust building (who are you?), goal and role definition (what are we doing?) and commitment (how will we do it?). This leads to the sustaining stages, which includes planning (who does what, where), and then further stages for the team once established. It’s often tempting in a school, where there is a pressing amount demanded of our time, and in which we may inherit or work with an existing team, that we move straight into the ‘work’, before truly establishing our team in the creating stages.

The creating stages of this model are reminiscent of the early parts of the Bruce Tuckman model of team development: Forming, Storming and Norming (later followed by Performing and Adjourning). The forming stage involves team building, outlining roles, norms and expectations. Storming is then an inevitable stage where team members may become competitive, jealous, or experience conflict early on in the team’s life, which, when managed correctly, evolves into norming, where the norms and culture of the team are properly established. Performing is the team flourishing as a group, while adjourning is a period of closure.

Importantly, these models do not view any stages of team life as being irreversible. Teams move between stages when new tasks are created, new members leave or join, or leadership changes. Research supports the nature of these models, and should guide us to reflect on our own teams. Firstly, if the early stages of our team’s life, or indeed a project within that team, require us to orientate, build trust, set goals, and plan working methods – how successfully have we achieved this, and how much thought and effort did we expend on it? Secondly, like any set of expectations for pupils, or purpose and vision for staff, we need to over communicate them. The energising ‘creating stages’ of our team’s life shouldn’t be a distant memory: it’s vital that we regularly recap who we are, what we are doing, what our goals are, and how we work together.

Seth Godin (2008) suggests that we need to have faith in our team and its leader; we want to believe in what we do and who we are lead by. I will dedicate an entire post to psychological safety and trust in an affective sense during a later blog. However, the way a team is structured, and the purpose it is infused with, determines how much trust team members have in the team. For team members to trust in the team they must feel that the team is competent to accomplish their task. This reminds me of Doug Lemov’s Teach Like A Champion 3.0 (2021), in which he discusses how a teacher earns the respect and trust of their students not by merely ‘building relationships’, but by using their time purposefully and productively. The team members’ collective belief that they can be effective (Guzzo et al 1993) is known as potency, and has been found to predict team performance above group member ability.

Therefore, having a clear idea about the different stages of your team’s development allows a team leader to reflect on what might be required at that moment to ensure productive, effective team work and communication, and just as importantly, staff buy-in that the team is progressing.

Reflection for school leaders: it may be useful to ‘audit’ (my apologies, not my favourite word) the teams you currently lead or are part of. Can you identify a particular stage that team is at? I’d very much recommend looking more at the two models I have referred to, one of which is extended and adapted usefully by Andy Buck in Leadership Matters 3.0 (2018), to try and understand how your team is functioning now. This may throw up some challenges for you as a leader in the way you manage the team, but also may be useful in uncovering a few ideas about interventions that will help your team progress.

4. Role clarity

While there must be clear team-wide goals that increase commitment from team members, it’s also vital that each member of the team has clarity regarding their own role. Studies and anecdotal evidence suggest that teams benefit from a combination of individual members understanding their precise role within the team, but also understanding how other members contribute towards the team effort. We’ll look later in this series at how shared mental models and transactive memory can be utilised by teams to help them to self-correct and to be adaptable, flexible, and cohesive, but it’s fair to say that role clarity is a bedrock of those traits as a team. It is this individual clarity and certainty that allows teams to become adaptable, for example in the adjustment of task strategies or team behaviours in response to changes in the team or task environment. Hackman and Morris (1978, cited by Driskell et al 2006) noted that adaptability is one of the few universally effective group strategies, but a sense of clarity and competence is required first.

Interestingly, researcher Tammy Erickson (2012) found that when teams are collaborating, they benefit from a combination of role clarity, and being given independence regarding the ways in which they work. Without role clarity, team members are likely to ‘waste energy negotiating roles or protecting turf, rather than focusing on the task’. And yet, research also found that team members are more likely to want to collaborate if the path to achieving the team’s goal is left somewhat ambiguous. If a team perceives the task as one that requires creativity, where the approach is not yet well known or predefined, its members are more likely to invest more time and energy in the collaboration.

The leader’s role, therefore, is to ensure that the roles and responsibilities of the team members are clearly defined for the specific project. Leaders should help team members understand the project’s importance and objective but leave the exact approach to the discretion of the team.

Other research complements this, to a point. Dalenberg et al. (2009) found that members of military teams who engaged in a brief strategy discussion prior to mission engagement exhibited greater coordination and better overall performance, as the briefing clarified roles and procedures. Mathieu and Rapp (2009) found that teams that produced high-quality teamwork plans (regarding how the team will work together) and taskwork plans (regarding performance strategies for the task) early in their development achieved higher performance. Fisher (2014) further elaborated the distinction between taskwork and teamwork planning, and found that the two forms of planning produced distinct effects on teamwork processes. Specifically, taskwork planning impacted coordination, whereas teamwork planning impacted interpersonal processes, and both exhibited an indirect relationship to team performance. Sources from this paragraph are cited in Driskell and Salas’ wonderful paper ‘Foundations of Teamwork’ (2018).

Reflection for school leaders: role clarity can be difficult in school-based teams, because most teams will be made up of teachers whose role is predominantly to teach. How then, are we to assign roles within departments or other teams where members’ usual and main roles are teaching the children? If we consider a subject or stage team, we may do project-based work, such as developing an area of the curriculum or redesigning assessment and feedback approaches. This project will not be a permanent one, but nevertheless the team members need clarity about their role in the project – what they are expected to do, and what the specific goals are for their part of the team effort. If staff members do have specific areas of responsibility as part of their role, then this more permanent arrangement will require role clarity for what is expected of them day-to-day; again, this will include how they contribute to the team’s goals, and how their role differs from others on the team.

Concluding thoughts.

I have been guilty many times of getting carried away by tasks, admin, meetings, and the assumption that my team know what they are doing and have understood purpose that I am supposedly communicating via osmosis. Exploring the literature in this area has elevated both my awareness and understanding of the importance of communicating and considering team purpose and direction more, but also validated the notion that spending time on this area is vital for team commitment, bonding, trust, and therefore, performance.

We have examined some comprehensive findings on purpose and direction, team goals, team stages, and role clarity, and I hope that the links to a school context were enough to stimulate your own thinking about teams which you lead or are part of.

The next post in the series will explore creating a culture and environment that allows a team to thrive, focusing on psychological safety and trust.

Thank you for reading

Sam

References

Buck, A. (2018) Leadership Matters 3.0. John Catt, Woodbridge.

Coyle, D. (2018). The culture code: the secrets of highly successful groups. Penguin, London.

Dalenberg S, Vogelaar ALW, Beersma B. (2009) The effect of a team strategy discussion on military team performance. Military Psychology.

Driskell, James & Goodwin, Gerald & Salas, Eduardo & O’Shea, Patrick. (2006). What makes a good team player? Personality and team effectiveness. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice. 10. 249 – 271.

Driskell JE, Salas E, Driskell T. Foundations of teamwork and collaboration. Am Psychol. 2018 May-Jun;73(4):334-348.

Erickson, T. (2012) The Biggest Mistake You (Probably) Make with Teams. Harvard Business Review. The Biggest Mistake You (Probably) Make with Teams (hbr.org)

Godin, S. (2008) Tribes: we need you to lead us. Piatkus Books, London.

Guzzo, R.A., Yost, P.R., Campbell, R.J. and Shea, G.P. (1993), Potency in groups: Articulating a construct. British Journal of Social Psychology, 32: 87-106. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8309.1993.tb00987.x

Hackman, J. R. (2004, June). What makes for a great team? Psychological Science Agenda. http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2004/06/hackman

Katzenbach JR., Smith DK. (1993) The discipline of teams. Harv Bus Rev. Mar-Apr;71(2):111-20. PMID: 10124632.

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

Lemov, D (2021) Teach Like a Champion 3.0. Jossey-Bass, London.

Pritchard, R. D., Editor (1995). Productivity measurement and improvement: Organizational case studies. New York: Praeger

Tomsett, J., Uttley, J. (2020) Putting Staff First. John Catt, Woodbridge.

Each of us belongs to a number of teams, depending on your definition. A family. A sports team. A volunteer group. And, at work, you could be a member of several teams. Each team has its own purpose, dynamic, and tasks; each team’s success may be measured differently. Some of our teams may be healthy, focused, and successful. Others flounder or fail to gel. But why? Do we know enough about what makes a team thrive? This is a question I will attempt to answer over a series of blogs that examine the research behind healthy, thriving teams at work.

As a Deputy Headteacher, I lead some teams, and am a member of others. Each time I sit down with a group I can’t help but wonder: just what is it that is creating these conditions, or this atmosphere? But it is not enough to stumble upon accidental team success, or to fail without knowing why; we must understand evidence-informed approaches to teams, and then apply our own experience and values to that understanding.  My hunch is that, while we are enjoying a period of extensive deliberation on pedagogy and curriculum, we spend less time actually composing and improving the teams and genuine teamwork in our schools.

Being part of a thriving, purposeful team is a thrilling experience. Our innate desires to belong and socialise are met; serotonin and oxytocin pump around our bodies as we revel in shared understanding, psychological safety, and work towards clear goals. We look forward to finishing our teaching load for the day so that we can grab a coffee and collaborate with our colleagues in the pursuit of excellence. We walk into the room, not burdened by our fatigue or the anticipatory dread of having our precious time eked away by another meeting, but rather enthused and eager to make things happen.

This is blog post number one of a series that I have been researching and thinking about for months. The premise is simple: an evidence-informed exploration of how teams thrive and succeed, applied through my own experience to school-based scenarios.

What is a team and teamwork? A short literature review

Driskell and Salas (2018) define teams and their work in a couple of ways: ‘the enactment of team processes that support effective team performance’ or, alternatively, the ‘integration of individuals’ efforts toward the accomplishment of a shared goal’. Katzenbach and Smith (1993) suggest that there are 5 key areas of teams: a meaningful common purpose that the team has helped shape; specific performance goals that flow from common purpose; mix of complementary skills; a strong commitment to how the work gets done; mutual accountability.

Katzenbach and Smith also discuss a distinction between a working group and a team:

‘To understand how teams deliver extra performance, we must distinguish between teams and other forms of working groups. A working group’s performance is a function of what its members do as individuals. A team’s performance includes both individuals results and what we call ‘collective work products’. A collective work product is what two or more members must work together, such as interviews, surveys, or experiments.

Teams differ fundamentally from working groups because they require both individual and mutual accountability. Teams produce discrete work products through the joint contributions of their members. This is what makes possible performance levels greater than the sum of all the individuals’.

We don’t necessarily need to pick apart which of our teams fall into the working group category, but it’s safe to say that our team work may fluctuate between the two. What the distinction does allow us to consider is how much our teams are truly working together to combine experience and expertise to achieve things that are greater than the sum of their parts. In essence, that is what I’d like all readers of this research project to consider: are we getting the best out of our teams?

Andy Buck discusses teams and leadership at length in his excellent book Honk (2019), as he uses the model of geese in flight to understand the benefits of individuals working together to improve a whole. This model of team work covers: the importance of achieving goals, importance of working together,  sharing, empathy and understanding, and the importance of encouragement. Like Katzenbach and Smith, Buck examines the role of genuinely working together and sacrificing your own personal tasks to aid the team itself. This reminds me of Ryan Hawk’s Leading Learner podcast, recently featuring John Amaechi (2021), who said ‘teaming is a perpetual state of calculated selflessness.’ Again, as leaders we are committed to the development of our staff – but I for one have not spent enough time growing and improving the teamwork within my teams, but rather the individuals.

J. Richard Hackman (2004), an expert in organisational behaviour, conducted studies that found that certain enabling conditions exist to help a team thrive: compelling direction; strong structure; supportive context; shared mindset; the right mix of individuals, considering knowledge, experience, abilities and other characteristics. Bear in mind that this does not merely apply to a whole-staff body, but the teams within the team – all teams within your school need to create these enabling conditions. Each team is unique and needs to thrive in its own right, to contribute to the wider goals and success of the school as a whole. My tutor team won’t thrive just because the school culture and goals are thriving: as a team leader, I must carve my own path for the team.

Finally (for now!), Ryan and Deci’s (2000) model of psychological need, named Self Determination Theory (SDT), can help us understand how a healthy team could fulfil our needs at work. SDT purports that three conditions must be met so that we can thrive: autonomy: feeling that you have some control over your work and behaviour; competence: feeling that you are learning, mastering, and achieving in relation to your work goals, experiences, knowledge; relatedness (also called connection): people need to have a sense of belonging and connectedness with others. We’ll look at this model in more detail in the future.

We can already appreciate the wealth of a literature at our disposal regarding the way that teams and organisations can flourish. So the question is, how do we become more deliberate and purposeful in the way we lead and work within teams in our organisations and schools?

Team Composition – creating and shaping our teams

Put simply, some combinations of people work better together than others. There is a wealth of research, though, that can help us understand how team composition can influence teamwork. Future posts may discuss the detail behind some of the ABCs (as coined by Salas et al) of team composition, but for now we’ll explore a few headline ideas behind how to create an effective team.

It may sound obvious, but there are numerous studies (collected by Bell et al, 2018) that reveal the benefits of creating a team with certain characteristics in mind. Teams with members who value teamwork are more confident and cooperative than other teams; teams with conscientious members are more likely to evaluate when the team needs support and will step in to assist others in their work; teams with agreeable and pro-social members are also likely to share information, workload and have higher collective emotional stability. This isn’t to say that we must scour the market to fill your team with those who have these characteristics exclusively – but certainly we could be more deliberate about the range of skills, values, and traits we place into our teams.

Bell and Brown (2005) have conducted research into composing a team which has high team cohesion, by addressing their knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics (KSAOs). However, if an operational limitation exists whereby it is not possible to compose a team with these characteristics in mind, being aware of the team’s KSAOs mean that interventions and communications can be designed to complement these, and therefore help to improve cohesion. With this in mind, team leaders could consider auditing their team’s KSAOs to better understand what to address when either staffing the team in the future, or for the team’s future development opportunities.

Staffing a truly functional and thriving team involves examining individual-level issues, such as the ability of a team member to execute technical aspects of their role, while also considering team-level issues, such as the team’s KSAOs, and how the team contributes to organisation-wide success. Often, staffing strategies rely on individual-based composition models, for example looking at a candidate’s role-related technical skills and experiences, while possibly applying some generic teamwork skills and tendencies  (Bell and Brown 2005). Research suggests that composing a team with both individual and team member KSAOs in mind will affect team-level outcomes such as cooperation, shared cognition, information sharing, team performance, and team cohesion. A challenge for us as leaders, is how far do we explore the existing KSAOs of our team when hiring, promoting, or moving someone into a position?

Research has shown that a typically preferable number in a team is between 6-10, which is why organisations create many ‘teams within the team’. This number both allows the leader to manage the team effectively within their ‘span of control’, but is also an optimal number to build relationships, trust, and team cohesion between the group (Karlgaard and Malone 2015). The upper limit of effective teams within a larger organisation has been suggested as around 150. Both numbers ring true with approximately how many staff we might expect in a school (150), and the sub teams within the school (6-10). Going back to our friend Hackman from earlier on, ‘big teams just usually wind up wasting everybody’s time’.

Teams in schools

In schools, if the staff body makes up one team whose purpose and objectives align to drive the school forward together, then there are multiple teams within the team. And, unlike many organisations, a staff member may belong to several teams. For example, if I was an MFL Head of Department, I might belong to: my departmental team, a tutor team, the Heads of Department team, and perhaps an additional group or team, such as a Teaching and Learning group. Beyond this example, there are various other teams within schools: Heads of Year teams, support staff teams, the leadership team, ITT / ECT teams, and many others besides.

These teams are often thrown together, built either at random or out of the team leader’s control as individuals are added or removed because of circumstance, at different points. Creating optimal team composition is a difficult prospect at times. Often, the members of the team didn’t ask to be a member at all: we can’t guarantee that a member of our Year 8 tutor team wants to be involved, nor that the members were handpicked based on their complementary skillsets and experiences.

Secondly, without a leader to guide the rudder of a team, the focus can become task-orientated, with meetings being an opportunity to rattle through a to do list of admin, logistics, events, deadlines, etc. It’s not difficult to see how this happens, with teams often being allocated a modest amount of time to meet together, leaving a list of ‘to dos’ on the first slide.

But teams can be so much more; they can be pockets of unity, energy, and purpose. They can be that part of the day that unlocks a member’s autonomy, sense of relatedness, and foster a sense of a communal sharpening of the tools. Ultimately, a well-managed team who has clear aims and goals will have a positive impact on staff and students alike.

Our role, and the role of this blog series, is to question and unpick how we take the wonderful and dedicated individuals in our schools, and help utilise them in thriving teams which are greater than the sum of their parts.

Conclusions from blog one:

We all want to work in an environment in which teachers and school staff can thrive with good working conditions. The Teacher Development Trust’s working paper on School Culture and Working Conditions (2021) found that many of the best bets to ensure these conditions, also go hand in hand with thriving teams. Some of their findings suggested ‘creating opportunities for effective teacher collaboration; involving teachers in whole school planning, decision-making and improvement; creating a culture of mutual trust, respect, enthusiasm in which communication is open and honest; building a sense of shared mission, with shared goals, clear priorities and high expectations of professional behaviours and of students’ learning.’

This fascinating paper is pertinent food for thought for school leaders, who could use it help adapt their workload policy, wellbeing ideas, CPD curriculum, and general school culture. But I would argue that this paper also provokes us to engage with how well we lead and manage our teams within the team. Every team leader in the school could be engaged with this sort of working paper, to establish how effective their team is, both in terms of its outputs, but also how staff enjoy and engage as team members.

It is up to us to create and shape teams that are given time to work together, and to have clear goals whilst still providing autonomy and room for teams to grow and learn together. Above all, the sense of shared purpose, trust, and psychological safety from being part of a thriving team will ensure that staff feel a sense of positivity about their work, and ultimately this will lead to productive team outcomes.

So, what have we explored so far about thriving teams?

1. Some understanding of the literature regarding the potential power of teams
2. Team composition and how we can begin to think about the whole team when we are both staffing and developing our teams
3. The difference between working groups, individual success, and creating a team that is genuinely greater than the sum of its parts
4. How we can begin to reflect on the specific challenges and opportunities of teams within a school

Key reflections for both the author and the reader:

• How can we ensure we do more teamwork and less task work?
• Put some time aside to reflect on the core purpose and values of each team you work within or lead. Do these ever get diminished by day-to-day workload? Are we harnessing the potential of genuine teamwork?
• How have we organised and created our teams? Do we compose our teams with deliberate thought about complementary team members?

This has been an introductory exploration of the project to come. An initial dip of the foot into water. As I continue, the posts will be more specific, detailed, and focused upon how we can turn research into tangible solutions and ideas for schools.

This is what you can expect to read over the next couple of months, all rooted in research papers, books, and my own experiences:

Key research and concepts covered in future blog posts:

1.            Key features of healthy, thriving teams

2.            Team norms, roles, and behaviours

3.            Unhealthy teams and characteristics

4.            Team processes and task types

5.            Team development and interventions

6.            Debriefs, conflict, communication, and candour

7.           Being a learning team.

I’m still very much researching this on a daily basis. Please let me know if you’d like me to cover something in particular over the course of the series.

Thank you for reading

Sam

References:

Amaechi, J., Hawk, R. (2021) The Leading Learner Podcast. Link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/449-john-amaechi-the-traits-of-effective/id985396258?i=1000544034835

Bell, S., Brown, S. (2005) Team Cohesion: Advances in Psychological Theory, Methods and Practice Research on Managing Groups and Teams, Volume 17, 181209

Bell, S. T., Brown, S. G., Colaneri, A., & Outland, N. (2018). Team composition and the ABCs of teamwork. American Psychologist, 73(4), 349–362. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000305

Buck, A. (2019) Honk. John Catt, London

Driskell, J. E., Salas, E., & Driskell, T. (2018). Foundations of teamwork and collaboration. American Psychologist, 73(4), 334–348. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000241

Hackman, J. R. (2004). What makes for a great team? Psychological Science Agenda. http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2004/06/hackman

Karlgaard, R. and Malone, M. (2015) Team Genius. Harper, London.

Katzenbach JR., Smith DK. (1993) The discipline of teams. Harv Bus Rev. Mar-Apr;71(2):111-20. PMID: 10124632.

Ryan, Richard M., and Edward L. Deci (2002) Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being. American Psychologist, vol. 55, no. 1, 2000, pp. 68–78.

Weston, D., Hindley, B., & Cunningham, M. (2021). A culture of improvement: reviewing the research on teacher working conditions. Working paper version 1.1, February 2021. Teacher Development Trust.