Everyone is working hard, but they are working separately
Effort is high and relationships are fine, but people are solving the same problems separately and good practice is not spreading.
Staff are committed and busy. What they are not doing is sharing: the same problem is being solved three times in three rooms, practice varies without anyone intending it to, and something that works well in one team is unknown in the next. Nobody has fallen out. They simply have no occasion on which working together is the obvious thing to do.
Presenting symptoms
- The same problem is being solved separately in more than one team.
- Something that works well in one area is unknown in another.
- Meetings that bring teams together are used for information rather than for work.
Possible causes
- There may be no occasion in the week on which collaboration is the obvious thing to do.
- Time given to working together may have no task attached, so it fills with reporting.
- Teams may be accountable for separate outcomes, so sharing costs them time and returns nothing.
- What people have to offer may never have been made visible, so nobody knows who to ask.
There is no occasion. Nothing brings the right people together.
Your most useful next step: Create one recurring slot with named people and a specific shared task, rather than adding a standing item to a meeting that already exists.
Lead behaviours
There is time together, but it is spent reporting rather than working.
Your most useful next step: Give the next joint session one problem to solve and something to leave with, move the reporting into writing beforehand, and let the group decide how to solve it rather than arriving with the answer.
Lead behaviours
Teams are accountable for separate outcomes, so sharing costs them and returns nothing.
Your most useful next step: Give two teams one outcome they are jointly accountable for this term, and one measure that only moves if both of them act.
Lead behaviours
Nobody knows who has what, so there is nothing to ask for.
Your most useful next step: Make one piece of practice visible each fortnight, named and attributed, so that people learn who to go to instead of being told to collaborate.
Lead behaviours
Core behaviours
The people here are not a failing team. They are a set of well-run teams. The move is to form one group around a task none of them could complete alone, rather than to ask the existing teams to share more.
Silos are usually rational. Where each team is accountable only for its own outcome, time spent helping another is taken from its own, and no amount of encouragement changes that arithmetic.
Collaboration spreads when people can see who is worth going to. Naming specific practice and attributing it publicly is how a school builds the informal map that makes sharing possible at all.
Joint sessions fail when the leader arrives with the answer and wants it distributed. What makes people work together is a problem that is genuinely still open.
The time is often already in the calendar. What is missing is a task, so the session fills with reporting, which is the safest thing any group can do when nobody has said what it should produce.
Secondary behaviours
Use this where two teams are given a shared outcome. A measure that only moves if both of them act is what makes joint accountability real rather than stated.
Use this where nothing in the calendar brings the right people together. Collaboration that depends on goodwill and spare time happens in September and stops in October.
Use this where the school has stopped looking at its own practice. The nearest source of a better method is usually two corridors away and unknown.
Use this to close joint sessions. A meeting between teams that ends without a named action produces a pleasant hour and no change to practice.
A useful first action
Pick one problem you know is being solved separately in more than one team, and put the people solving it in a room for an hour with that problem as the only item.
Suggested approach
- Find one problem that is being solved separately in more than one place, and use it as the first shared task.
- Check whether the time already exists. If it does, the issue is the task rather than the calendar.
- Give joint sessions something to produce, move reporting into writing, and close with named actions.
- Make one piece of practice visible each fortnight, named and attributed, so people learn who to ask.
- Where sharing costs a team time and returns nothing, change what they are accountable for rather than asking harder.