Leadership and Team Building

Posted: January 5th, 2023

Leadership and Team Building

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Leadership and Team Building

The collaborative culture is increasingly being recommended for schools challenged by low student performance. A collaborative school culture maximizes the human capital in educational settings by having all teachers working together to enhance students’ performance, without excessively relying on the schools’ administration or parents (Wijaya, Prajogo & Kusumawati, 2020). However, building such cultures in an educational institution is challenging, prone to a high likelihood of failure. Many teachers are socialized to handle their students individually and find teaching collaboratively unusual. In addition, teachers sometimes compete among themselves to secure accolades, rewards and recognition for their individual performance. Therefore, many teachers prefer to work individually to derive personal success rather than group success, whose performance is often challenging to appraise (Donohoo, Hattie & Eells, 2018). In turn, students may not derive the full benefit from the teaching staff in a school. However, there is a shift towards teamwork in schools, a phenomenon already occurring in other organizations and business sectors.

The ensuing discussion justifies why a collaborative culture is critical in contemporary schools by providing the benefits against the drawbacks. It also delves into the approaches used to establish a collaborative culture that instills team spirit among teachers and students. It also discusses the challenges of implementing such organizational change and the role of leadership in surmounting such drawbacks.  

Collaborative Culture

Educators increasingly realize that they are not the only reservoirs of knowledge and different teachers know different things that can be shared. This is a departure from traditional thinking in which an individual teacher was expected to know everything. In this regard, collaborative school cultures facilitate the creativity of teachers as they work together to help all students in being collectively responsible for their learning outcomes. Such an atmosphere discourages the traditional approach in which teachers rely on the school administration and parents for the success of students and blame them for student underachievement. Therefore, collaborative school cultures differ fundamentally from the top-down cultures that highlight the superiority of the school principal or administrator (Ogunlayi & Britton, 2017). Essentially, in collaborative school cultures, teachers support each other’s efforts to enhance instruction and take collective responsibility for the success and consequences of their decisions, while in top-down cultures, teachers are discouraged from challenging the status quo and instead direct blame to others for the failures and challenges (Sales, Moliner & Amat, 2017). In addition, in collaborative school cultures, teachers share ideas and develop synergy of their efforts as they improve one another’s instructional ideas, and evaluate new ideas to better achieve shared goals in student’s learning and outcomes. Contrastingly, in top-down cultures, individual teachers own pet projects and ideas, stifling instructional development, and often, these ideals are premised on long-standing time-tested principles and approaches in instruction (Ogunlayi & Britton, 2017).

Team teaching is an emerging instructional strategy in which several teachers instruct students in teams to complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses, in what is known as co-teaching (Wayman, Midgley & Stringfield, 2017). According to Wayman, Midgley and Stringfield (2017), the advantage of this instructional approach is that the weaknesses of one teacher can be covered by the strengths of the other teachers. The several co-teaching approaches include one teach, one support, station teaching, alternative teaching, and parallel teaching (Beninghof, 2020). This requires a high level of trust among teachers, allowing them to expose their weakness without fearing being victimized or ostracized (Chitiyo, 2017).

However, team teaching can be extended to the entire organization when it is adopted from an organizational culture perspective. Collaborative school culture is an atmosphere in which teachers are collectively responsible for the performance and success of all students in a school (Gilbert, 2018). Such teachers work as a team, supporting each other in all their instructional undertakings (Beninghof, 2020).

Organizational Change

Team Building

Team building is the process of transforming a group of individuals in an organization into a cohesive team of colleagues working together to achieve a common goal. Team building acknowledges that organizations are often made up of individuals with different dispositions, temperaments, communication styles, work ethics, and other personality traits (Schulz-Knappe, Koch & Beckert, 2019). Stark differences in individual characteristics can often lead to conflict at the workplace, disrupting organizational operations and outcomes. Therefore, organizations strive to engender harmony among employees by engaging in team-building exercises. In an educational setting, team building is critical for conceiving, initiating and implementing innovative instructional approaches directed towards a common collective goal. 

In this regard, team building allows group members to know each other and discover the strengths and weaknesses of one other. It also helps the members communicate with each other without being judgmental and address any relational concerns and challenges they experience at the workplace (Drew, Priestley & Michael, 2016). In the end, the intended outcome of team building is to have team members acknowledge and appreciate each other, respect each other, and develop a rapport that facilitates the fostering of a good working relationship. A cohesive team of employees is more productive than a group that works individually in a disjointed manner. These benefits can be transferred to an educational setting, in which teachers learn each other’s instructional strengths and challenges, and strive to maximize outcomes from their synergy (Polega, et al., 2019).    

Leadership Approaches

Organizational change is a complex, tortuous and challenging undertaking, which requires a systematic approach. The scope and depth of change determine the amount of effort required in the implementation process and the likelihood of success or failure in the end of the transformation process (Wiyono, 2018). Successful organizational changes are noted by their permanent and enduring shift in perceptions and behavior of the organization’s members. Such success can only be attained by having a change champion that is a strategic leader. Change requires leadership so that all the efforts are directed towards an intended outcome that is often articulated by the leaders. Therefore, leaders play a critical role during the organizational change process because their stewardship, direction, persuasion, and conflict resolution are critical for success (Donohoo, Hattie & Eells, 2018). In a school setting, the school principal or administrator and departmental heads are charged with the leadership responsibility. These individuals set the working environment and atmosphere in their schools, while teachers are expected to fit into the leaders’ expectations. In this case, school principals or administrators are responsible for creating the organizational culture and atmosphere in their school and often own the successes and challenges of performance therein (Wiyono, 2018). Therefore, they are also often charged with the responsibility of changing a toxic school culture into a productive one.  In this regard, they are often the change champions in their schools.

Effective change champions employ the transformation leadership style. This style is preferred over the others because it inspires the followership to aspire to their highest performance using idealized influence (Anderson, 2017). It also achieves exemplary transformational results in an organization by stipulating the members intellectually and persuading them to imagine the proposed state of the organization following a successful implementation of the change (Anderson, 2017).  A transformational leader also provides inspirational motivation to the followership, thus encouraging them to share the leader’s vision.  Besides, a transformational leader demonstrates individualized consideration of all those that would be affected by the change process (Anderson, 2017).  By attending to the individual concerns of the followers, a transformational leader can develop trust and cooperation from the followership, which facilitates the uptake of new ideas suggested by the leader. Therefore, school principals and administrators wishing to implement a collaborative school culture in their institutions need to be competent at change management. By using transformational leadership, school principals and administrators are keen on involving teachers in the change process. Specifically, they plan for change with the teachers collaboratively, chart the implementation schedule and solicit buy-in from the teachers to facilitate an institutional-wide change.

In addition, transformational leaders encourage their followers to accept change and entrench it in their occupational practices by mentoring and coaching the followers that struggle with the new setup and operational expectations (Eisenschmidt & Oder, 2018). They encourage autonomy and creativity among followers enable them to reach their highest potential (Drew, Priestley & Michael, 2016). This approach is critical in a school setting because the change approaches and initiatives are transferable to the teaching and learning process. Teachers can employ the transformational leadership style exhibited by the principal or administrator as a change champion to improve instruction and student outcomes as students are also inspired to strive for excellence and achievement of their full potential (Anderson, 2017). Therefore, transformational leadership skills are critical in schools that have a toxic culture, experience high teacher turnover, and exhibit suboptimal performance (Sun & Wang, 2017). Besides, transformational leadership enhances teacher satisfaction at work and encourages continuous learning while fostering camaraderie in the faculty to promote continuous striving for excellence. In this regard, transformational leadership promotes teamwork as one approach to improving personal and institutional outcomes.

Challenges and Remedies

Implementing a collaborative school culture is a challenging undertaking and at risk of failure if the challenges are not identified and addressed in advance. The biggest challenge is resistance from teachers. Some teachers may have become so used to working individually that they become apprehensive at the thought of working collaboratively with colleagues in class. Such teachers are used to resolving their own issues and approaching the school administration when challenges arise. This silo mentality can be a big impediment to implementing a collaborative culture (Morris, 2020). Besides, teachers could be apprehensive of the unknown because they are unsure what the new state would entail. This is common with novel and unheard-of ideas from those being affected directly by the change process and the new state of the organization. 

The lack of administrative support can also disrupt the effectiveness of the organizational change process. The school administration should provide material and moral support to the change champion and the entire school fraternity, including teachers and students (Morris, 2020). However, withholding such support can frustrate the change process and the change champion, leading to a failed attempt (Mathews & Linski, 2016). Therefore, transformation into the collaborative school culture can fail despite being a brilliant idea accepted by all stakeholders just because the school management withheld the necessary facilitation to the change steward.

These challenges can be overcome through effective leadership. Transformational leadership can help convince teachers to abandon the traditional approach to instructions and embrace the collaborative approach. They employ charisma to persuade teachers to embrace change as part of their professional and personal growth. Transformational leaders demonstrate individualized consideration, thus address the concerns of individuals, while allaying their fears emanating from the apprehension about a collaborative teaching atmosphere (Anderson, 2017). In this case, a school principal or administrator practicing transformational leadership would address the concerns of each teacher, especially those premised on the belief that co-teaching is necessitated by teacher weaknesses rather than the capitalization of collective knowledge.

 Besides, the leader can secure employee buy-in by communicating with the teachers effectively to explain the planned change and its importance to teachers and students (Schulz-Knappe, Koch & Beckert, 2019). In the same vein, all the stakeholders involved in or affected by the change process should be involved in planning and making decisions about the intended change (Anderson, 2017). Teachers and students should participate in the planning and implementation processes because they will be directly affected by the new culture at the school. This means that school administrators should avoid imposing the change on the school fraternity in a top-down approach because it is likely to experience resistance and sabotage, increasing the risk of failure (Anderson, 2017). Nonetheless, during the planning process, the school principal or administrator has the opportunity to share his or her vision with the teaching faculty and persuade them on the necessity of embracing the collaborative school culture (Louis & Lee, 2016). During the planning meeting, the teachers also have the opportunity to critique the proposed change and disclose their concerns and fears (Pratt, et al., 2017). In the end of such meetings, the principal or administrator and the teacher arrive at and cement and agreement about the proposed change and develop a cohesive plan to implement the change together. In such as case, the outcome of the change process is likely to be successful while failure possibilities are minimized. In turn, the school can save valuable and scarce resources directed towards the change process because wastage from a failed change management project is unlikely.

Similarly, school principals and administrators can improve their team building skills to foster teamwork among the teachers. The skills that these leaders possess are usually insufficient for addressing the needs of the 21^st century school setting, which face complex problems, including the multicultural environment, increased student performance demands from parents and society, and new regulatory environments requiring the assurance of education quality and relevance to enable students face the complex, competitive and first changing work environments (Sairam, Sirisuthi & Wisetrinthong, 2017). In this regard, the school administrators and principals can prepare for change by upgrading their team building capabilities, because a cohesive team is likely to embrace change with minimum or no resistance because decisions are taken collectively. The administrators would also learn how to motivate and evaluate the performance of teams, while discouraging the free-rider effect common in poorly managed teams (Sairam, Sirisuthi & Wisetrinthong, 2017). Besides, the principals and administrators can identify individual teachers that can act as change stewards to help in the change implementation process (Williams, 2019). These stewards are more likely to succeed at implementing change because they will have secured collaboration from their colleagues following a successful team building exercise.

Conclusion

Collaborative school culture can improve the operations and outcomes of educational institutions because it maximizes the synergy from the individual teachers. Teachers help each other and complement each other’s abilities, leading to better school outcomes. Besides, the collaborative school culture fosters belongingness among the faculty and student body, thus reducing incidences of conflict a staff turnover. Implementing a collaborative school culture requires the school principals and administrators to act as change managers by championing the change process and managing prudently. Therefore, the principals and administrators need to be transformational leaders that shepherd the change processes by motivating, coaching, mentoring, and supporting the teaching fraternity in their schools. These change champions should have good team building skills. In the end, the successful school culture change should deliver teachers willing to work together for the benefit of their students and employ their unique strengths to maximize the outcomes of collective effort. Such teachers can readily embrace team teaching or co-teaching. In turn, the collaborative team culture among teachers will influence students to work collaboratively towards their academic success. This culture would help students achieve higher academic performance. In the end, the collaborative school culture will be entrenched once teachers and students fully embrace working collaboratively. In turn, schools will secure their social license to operate once parents and communities are satisfied the schools’ high education quality and student performance.

References

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