The Human Centerıng of Team Leadership

Tom Hughes (right) joined Northern Arizona University doctoral graduates Dean Packard and Rachel Hockheim following a presentation at a conference of school administrators in Phoenix, Ariz. PHOTO COURTESY OF TOM HUGHES.

Approximately 30 years ago, my superintendent challenged me, a young school psychologist, to look into team building. He didn’t offer specifics about how to proceed, who to involve or why to pursue it. Nor was there an internet to quickly locate book studies or leadership-style inventories that are popular today. But it was a starting point.

My quest and resulting discovery drew from a combination of reading, observing and participating in professional development. As my role grew, I regularly took part in designing and leading team development training as well as setting up practical in-field learning experiences. These offerings proved effective within the moment and spurred ideas for refinements.

Two Possible Paths

The journey that brought me to the superintendency twice and now to higher education has made me keenly aware there genuinely is an art and a science to developing team leadership. We often seem to proceed in one direction more than another, but we need both. Sometimes we must readjust our bearings. When our local sensibilities are at odds with standardization and the push for uniformity, the dissonance it creates can prove quite challenging.

Professional learning communities, or PLCs, provide powerful insights into the dynamics of developing team leadership. The work of the late Richard DuFour originally drew heavily from the art of leadership. His focus inspired ongoing involvement from people who were invested in collaboratively identifying challenges and solutions.

DuFour’s emphasis on creating capacity stood in stark contrast to structural-functional school improvement efforts that prioritized management processes and the development of smart goals.

After years of favoring PLCs, I was the only superintendent in Wisconsin who opted to participate in a state-sponsored training of trainers delivered by DuFour’s company. Oddly, what stood out most throughout the months-long experience was the puzzling emphasis placed on mastering terminology. It was evident from interactions with other participants that the approach to program dissemination was making the underlying focus of PLCs a bit blurry.

Still worthwhile, the emphasis on terminology and rules felt out of place. It was beyond an effort to add balance — and an apparent attempt at replicating their famed approach to fidelity ahead of stressing the human side of PLC development that made it work in the first place.

Losing Sight

Federal requirements from the past 20 years have placed momentous emphasis on implementing researched programs and pre-packaged interventions. In our zest to be accountable to the mandates that inundate our schools, it is evident that we have displaced the human side of team building and leadership with a management to fidelity mentality, apparently even with PLC training.

Directly encountering this mindset remains my most vivid memory of moving and inheriting an aging strategic plan that represented state mandates like Response to Intervention as local vision and elevated them to levels of districtwide preeminence.

With minimal opportunity to contribute to its development and well-established expectations of unquestioned adherence, building-level administrators frequently confided that they were told what to think and expected to publicly support the plan. Daily interactions with staff yielded mounting questions about the plan’s relevance. So diffuse was the overall stake in the plan, even governing board members who were outwardly supportive privately confessed they could not articulate a single goal.

The at-best passive acceptance that I witnessed came to underscore my broader understanding of the all-too-familiar and impersonal expression “buy-in.” As I have experienced it pertaining to goal setting, this references something well short of the “inspiration” and “investment” regularly witnessed with effective professional learning communities. Both by intent and execution, succumbing to a compliance mindset not only impedes the human side of leadership, it prevents it.

Expecting staff to quietly acquiesce to a plan they had no say or stake in is less than compelling.

What happens when instead you embrace human motivation and empower a cross-section of veteran and newer teachers to envision the future course of school district challenges, limitations and possibilities? They conduct themselves respectfully, independently and productively. They more than “get it” and are passionately invested in the reality everyone is facing.

Is that form of distributed leadership too dispersed or too PLC? The answer depends on local conditions, circumstances, motivation and interests. Having brought such a situation about, I literally felt some administrator uneasiness within the room as the results of capacity building, teamwork and investment, all of which validated the benefits of the human side of leadership — without validating the need for titled leadership. 

Tom Hughes led his course on the principalship online at Northern Arizona University this fall because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Power of Emotions

As we strive to produce high-performing teams, the legislated mindset we answer to these days seems to align us with fidelity more than our insights and feelings. But building team unity, promoting team leadership and inspiring the investment of others requires us to draw from our shared humanity more than ever.

In one school district where I worked as the special education director, I learned of the sudden need to create additional space for our students with profound disabilities. The long-time regional educational facility was slated to become an early-learning center by the much larger host school district. Our initial planning was going nowhere fast.

With a clear need to better embrace the humanity of the situation, the school board agreed to visit the facility to see “their kids.” After the tour, we assembled in the parking lot. In the silence of light Wisconsin snow coming to rest on our heads, the moist eyes throughout the group confirmed the team had reached consensus through this powerful experience. The next year our students came home to the district’s custom-designed middle school classroom suite that paved the way for development of a model program.

Lessons Learned

During the quest to learn about team building and leadership, especially amid increasing emphasis on accountability, one thing stands out most. Those who tap the human side of team building inspire more broadly and more genuinely. More frequently, they are able to secure the investment of others in a commitment to a shared cause. In so doing, they consistently exceed the outcomes generated by those angling for passive acceptance and momentary buy-in. The early success of PLCs, along with those that are effective today, is grounded in the human side of leadership, not the memorization of key terms and planning steps.

The other lesson that stands out is the incomparable benefit of incorporating hands-on or “experiential learning” in team building. The essence of this approach is to get people interacting physically and mentally as they access powerful insights through their shared problem-solving experiences.

Leadership is a shared experience — not about vying to be recognized as the star. We can discover more about ourselves and learn to identify ways to best contribute to group success through practice in planned, nonthreatening situations.

Experiential education facilitates that growth in a supportive and efficient manner.

Team building that connects us at a personal level can inspire investment and commitment far beyond the buy-in we often have settled for in the past. The first professional development focus I planned as a superintendent was a team-building day for the entire staff at the start of the school year.

Some people were surprised that the focus went beyond the leadership team. They were reminded that leadership is an inclusive under­taking. We used activities from Cowstails and Cobras 2 (see Additional Resources below) to break down barriers as we worked on building teams and introducing informal opportunities for leadership.

The response to the day was overwhelmingly positive. However, success depends on committing to an approach and developing it — not relying on a single event at the start of the year. Leaders from the bargaining unit considered staff members’ involvement and opportunities to collaborate during the facilities planning effort — for the first time — to be a much more significant signal from leadership that there would be more balance than there once was.

I have used the human-centered leadership development approach with athletes, administrators, teachers and community members at various points in my career. But this approach always was only part of the equation as the art and science of leadership are both vital paths to be followed.

Inspiring Investment

I began by stating that team building that connects us at a personal level can inspire investment and commitment far exceeding the buy-in we have often settled for. People are our strength. As education leaders, it is our responsibility to develop and nurture future leaders. The more we can do to inspire investment and nurture the abilities of others as we build our teams, the higher our capacity to succeed with the unknown challenges we face.

That is why developing team leadership through a human-centered approach is a necessity.

TOM HUGHES, a former superintendent, is an associate professor of educational leadership at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Ariz. Twitter: @TomHugh34300405