The Art of Coaching Teams

Building Resilient Communities that Transform Schools

Elena Aguilar

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781118984161
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

The missing how-to manual for being an effective team leader

The Art of Coaching Teams is the manual you never received when you signed on to lead a team. Being a great teacher is one thing, but leading a team, or team development, is an entirely different dynamic. Your successes are public, but so are your failures—and there's no specific rubric or curriculum to give you direction. Team development is an art form, and this book is your how-to guide to doing it effectively. You'll learn the administrative tasks that keep your team on track, and you'll gain access to a wealth of downloadable tools that simplify the "getting organized" process. Just as importantly, you'll explore what it means to be the kind of leader that can bring people together to accomplish difficult tasks. You'll find practical suggestions, tools, and clear instructions for the logistics of team development as well as for building trust, developing healthy communication, and managing conflict.

Inside these pages you'll find concrete guidance on:

• Designing agendas, making decisions, establishing effective protocols, and more
• Boosting your resilience, understanding and managing your emotions, and meeting your goals
• Cultivating your team's emotional intelligence and dealing with cynicism
• Utilizing practical tools to create a customized framework for developing highly effective teams

There is no universal formula for building a great team, because every team is different. Different skills, abilities, personalities, and goals make a one-size-fits-all approach ineffective at best. Instead, The Art of Coaching Teams provides a practical framework to help you develop your group as a whole, and keep the team moving toward their common goals.

Chapter 1
Refining a Vision

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Humanities Team, 2008

We meet because all departments meet on Wednesday afternoons. We meet because our school has bad test scores and we're supposed to do something about that. We meet because—I have no idea, actually, why this team is supposed to meet. The department chair communicates information from the district—testing schedules, textbook changes, new initiatives. Then there's me, the coach, and I'm supposed to do what? When I came onboard, I asked the principal, “What do you hope I'll do with this department?” He said, “Get them to work better together.” So we meet on Wednesdays.

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To build something, we need to know what it is we want to build. I suspect that sometimes we struggle to build teams because we haven't even decided what we're trying to build or what describes this end goal. We need to start with articulating these elements of a vision before we start construction. The rest of this book offers you tools and strategies for team building, but in this first chapter we're consider the what, why, and when of teams. First: a quick clarification of terminology.

A Note on Terms

For the sake of simplicity and flow, there are sets of terms I use interchangeably in this book. First, I use team and group to mean the same thing—a unit of people who convene to work together interdependently for a shared, meaningful purpose.

To describe the kind of team I aspire to create, the kind I believe has potential to serve our schools and children, I also use a set of adjectives interchangeably: great, effective, high-performing, high-functioning, and successful. I don't want to confuse you, nor do I want to bore you with repetitive terminology. So if you wonder, “Well, what does she mean now when she says a team is high functioning?” I mean the same thing as when I say a team is effective.

I also use the terms leader and facilitator interchangeably. There are some differences between how we are identified by others—whether we are appointed to lead or facilitate a team, whether those in our team see us as a leader or a facilitator. Leaders often have more positional or situational authority, which often grants them more decision-making rights. Facilitators are more likely to guide a process and to have either decision-making power equal to the rest of the team members or no decision-making powers at all. Even though it's important to distinguish your role (and I'll return to this in Chapter 2), I hope that this book will have a wide range of readers—from site administrators to department heads to centrally based coaches to superintendents. Therefore, I'll alternate between the terms leader and facilitator so you know that regardless of your role I'm thinking of you.

What is a Great Team?

When I reflect on the transformational coach team that I led, I often think, “That was a great team, an incredible team, an awesome team that rocked.” For the sake of simplicity and transferability to other contexts (“rocked” might not translate in some places), I've settled on using great as the broadest and widest descriptor of the kinds of teams I aspire to create.

J. Richard Hackman's (2011) work assisted me in defining the following three dimensions of great teams. Exhibit 1.1 can help you to consider these as they relate to a team you are a part of now, or once were a part of. Here are the three dimensions of a great team.

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Exhibit 1.1: Dimensions of a Great Team: A Tool for Reflection

Dimension	Indicators	Yes/No
Product Something of quality gets done that is valuable, useful, and appreciated.	Was our product well received?
	Did our clients (students, teachers, parents, staff) think that our product was high quality?
	Did what we do make a difference to our clients?
	Do I feel proud of the work we did together?
Process The group's collaboration skills increase as a result of working together.	Did our ways of working together improve over time?
	Did our ability to communicate with each other, manage unproductive conflict, and have healthy conflict increase?
	If I was to continue working with this team, do I feel confident that our work products would continue to improve because we've figured out how to best work together?
	If the team has disbanded: If this team were to reconvene, would I want to rejoin it?
Learning The team experience is a learning experience that increases the skills and knowledge of individual team members.	Did I learn in this team?
	Did being a part of this team help me improve my skills in my primary area of practice (e.g., teaching, coaching, leading)?
	Did I feel I could take risks in my learning in this team?
	Did I trust the other people in this team most of the time?
	Did I feel like I belonged to a community?

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1. Product: A great team gets something done that is valuable, useful, and appreciated

For many teams in our context, our products might be hard to identify. However, this is a primary indicator of a great team: that we get something done. Furthermore, the opinions of the recipients of this product count, so we need to know what they think of the work we do and we need to meet their expectations.

An instructional leadership team (ILT), for example, may be responsible for building the instructional capacity of staff. The ILT's primary role is to design and deliver professional development and to lead department teams. In this case, the ILT's products would be PD sessions and department meetings. We can evaluate the value and usefulness of these products on feedback forms and surveys.

In some teams, it's harder to identify products, but it's still worth an attempt. A grade-level team might convene to address a range of business items, including logistical issues that arise in their band, specific students who are struggling, and curriculum. The product of their work together might be schedules, new agreements, or insights into instructional practices. Although these activities may be valuable, if a team needs to think about product it can push members to reflect on what they're doing together. We'll come back to this question of what we're doing together in Chapter 4.

The product for a team of coaches is the impact they have on the clients they serve. In the case of the transformational coach team, our primary clients were teachers and administrators, and we measured impact in many ways, including on anonymous surveys, through growth in teacher performance, and on feedback forms after professional development sessions. Given that during the two years we offered coaching support more than 95% of the feedback we received was positive and clients reported high levels of satisfaction, I conclude that our team did something valuable, useful, and appreciated.

2. Pro...