A department’s relationships have broken down and unprofessional behaviour has become normal
Poor relationships in a department are no longer between particular people. They have become how the team operates.
The difficulty in this department is not traceable to one disagreement or one pair of colleagues. Meetings are unproductive or quietly avoided, information is withheld, and conduct that would be challenged elsewhere in the school passes without comment here. A capable colleague joining this term would learn the pattern rather than question it.
Presenting symptoms
- Conduct that would be challenged elsewhere in the school passes without comment inside this department.
- Colleagues who joined recently have adopted the pattern rather than questioned it.
- Departmental meetings either do not happen or produce nothing that is acted on.
Possible causes
- An earlier conflict may have gone unresolved long enough to become the team’s ordinary way of operating.
- The department’s own leadership may be inside the pattern, either by taking a side or by avoiding it.
- The department may have been left alone for years because its results were acceptable.
- A real structural grievance about workload, rooms, timetable or allocation may sit underneath what is presenting as a relationship problem.
Nothing has ever been named. The behaviour has simply never been challenged.
Your most useful next step: State plainly, to the whole department in one meeting, which specific behaviours stop now, and then address the next instance within a day rather than at the next review point.
Lead behaviours
The department’s leadership is inside the pattern rather than outside it.
Your most useful next step: Deal with the leadership question first and separately from the team. Nothing you ask of the department will hold while the person leading it is part of what is being asked to change.
Lead behaviours
A real grievance sits underneath it that nobody has dealt with.
Your most useful next step: Separate the two issues. Begin correcting the concrete unfairness, whether that concerns timetable, rooms, allocation or workload, and state at the same time that professional conduct remains expected while it is resolved.
Lead behaviours
The team has no shared purpose left to hold it together.
Your most useful next step: Give the department one piece of work that genuinely requires them to succeed together, small enough to finish this term, and lead it yourself until it is done.
Lead behaviours
Core behaviours
This is a standards problem before it is a relationships problem. What a department tolerates becomes what it expects, and nothing else in this record will hold until the tolerated behaviour has been named as unacceptable.
The pattern persists because it has never carried a cost. Accountability here means addressing the next instance immediately, which is what demonstrates that the position has actually changed rather than been announced.
A department in this state is a set of individuals sharing a corridor. Rebuilding requires work they can only complete together, because shared purpose is what a team is, and it cannot be restored by asking people to get along.
Everyone will be watching how you conduct the first difficult exchange. A leader who is sharp, exasperated or visibly partisan in that moment confirms that this is simply how people behave here.
Departments in this state produce strong and contradictory accounts, and a leader usually arrives having heard the loudest ones. Establishing what is actually happening, including any legitimate grievance, is what stops a fair intervention landing as an unfair one.
Secondary behaviours
Use this after the standard has been reset. A norm re-forms within weeks unless the new expectation is applied every time, including when the person who breaches it is the colleague you can least afford to lose.
Use this alongside the shared task. A department with nothing it is collectively trying to achieve has nothing to organise itself around except its own relationships.
Use this where a genuine grievance underlies the conduct. Involving the department in fixing what is actually unfair is what converts compliance with a new standard into agreement with it. It does not buy time on the behaviour: the grievance and the conduct are separate matters, and treating the first as a reason to defer the second teaches the department that poor conduct is a negotiating position.
Use this where the question is whether the current leadership of the department can lead it out of this. The judgement is about whether the post and the person still match, and anything that follows from it belongs to the school’s own formal processes rather than to this guidance.
A useful first action
Spend a week in the department. Sit in a meeting, walk the corridor at changeover, and ask the two newest members of staff what they worked out was normal here. That gives you the pattern rather than the accounts.
Suggested approach
- Establish the pattern for yourself, from observation and from the newest colleagues, rather than from the accounts of those most invested in it.
- Find out whether a real grievance about workload, rooms, timetable or allocation sits underneath the conduct, and begin correcting it if it does, saying at the same time that professional conduct remains expected while it is resolved.
- Settle the leadership question separately, before asking anything of the department as a whole.
- Name the specific behaviours that stop, to everyone at once, and address the next instance immediately rather than at the next review point.
- Give the department one piece of work it can only finish together, and stay close to it until it is done.