I found three portions of your blog to be particularly interesting and well presented. First, your summary and analysis of Larson & Fasto’s outline of characteristics of team effectiveness was succinct and accurate (cited in Northouse, 2019, pg. 368-372). Secondly, your description of your workplace situation, leading a group in a work context you identified, the necessity of strategy, the need for goals, tasking each team member with assignments and the need to establish the correct strategy to address questions raised by team members, as all being necessary elements of team leadership. The third component of your posting, which interested me the most, was your question: “How can a team concept be applied to staff members who have a common overarching goal of educating children and carrying out the vision of the school but very different day to day objectives?”
I feel that to answer this question, you have to ask yourself a separate, fundamental question, “Do all staff members employ the same methodology of obtaining the goal of educating children and do they all define the goal the same way?” In my opinion, I feel that some of your team members might have different ideas about how to achieve the goal and even further different ideas about what the goal actually is. The basis of the two aspects of my question are based off John Dewey, who has been heralded as the “chief prophet of progressive education” (Sasse, 2017, pg. 24). For Dewey, “school would become the everything – the literal centre of the world” (Sasse, 2017, pg. 26). His dream was that instead of “supporting parents … [school] would become instead a substitute for parents” (Sasse, 2017, pg. 26).
I would suggest that some of your team members have biases, whether conscious or subconscious, about how to best educate students or have different goals in mind for their students. To better understand your team members’ potentially contrasting views about the process or goals, I might suggest that you consider asking gentle questions in a one-on-one context, about their own educational philosophies and belief. Hopefully, from these conversations, you might yield insight that will lead to more predictable and rewarding outcomes from your team’s efforts.
Reference
Northouse, P. G. (2019). Leadership: Theory and Practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Sasse, B. (2017). The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis-and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Griffin.