Creating Collaboration: The New Way of Working in Schools
By Rosabeth Moss Kanter, rkanter@hbs.edu.

Public school systems are increasingly discovering the power of collaboration to produce higher student achievement. Once isolated in their classrooms, teachers are increasingly made to feel part of a team whose members support one another – sharing teaching tips, managing a group of students together, or serving on task forces contributing to the life of the school.

The spread of teamwork isn’t surprising. It’s been proven that high-performing organizations in sports and business operate more collaboratively. But for some schools, and the teaching profession, this idea is revolutionary.
Collaboration starts with five leadership actions


Use convening power to structure conversations. In many ways, any organization is just a vast series of conversations. The structure of who talks to whom, and how, determines the likelihood of success. Leaders can get the right people to the table and get them talking. That’s why well-regarded principals rearrange the schedule to provide a common time during the school day for teacher groups to meet.

In addition to encouraging more communication among people in the same department, leaders nurture relationships across fields, to support commitment to collective goals for the school as a whole. Leaders can augment formal assignments with flexible, sometimes temporary, groups that open relationships in multiple directions, slicing through the organization chart vertically, diagonally, and horizontally.

The manager of the Chicago Cubs, Dusty Baker, felt that conversations across positions help his team win baseball games. “I want my pitching coach talking to my hitters about things and my batting coach talking to the pitchers about things, because if the pitcher doesn’t know how the hitters think, he’s not going get them out. It really helps, the more communication you have,” he said.

Promote the natural connectors. Every school and every organization contains people who instinctively reach out to form relationships. They should get prominent leadership roles. A school principal in Memphis tries to recruit people whose enthusiasm and sunny smiles attracted other people to them. On a championship women’s college soccer team, the coach named a captain who connected people to one another, even though the coach called her one of the least athletic players he had ever seen. In a California company, a person without a technical background was put in charge of a technical area, because she was known for her relationship skills.

Give groups important work. There’s nothing like a huge responsibility and a deadline to focus the mind. When people are given tasks with big consequences, they are more likely to bond quickly, forgetting their differences. Task commitment, not people’s social attraction to one another, creates high team performance, as social psychologists have found. Group cohesiveness is the result of success as much as the cause of it.

Important work makes people proud that they can stretch to meet challenging goals. Even getting the assignment in the first place is a confidence-booster. All of the Exemplary school principals tend to use staff meetings to make sure that teachers are involved in projects considered essential for the school as a whole. One talks of how the pride teachers felt when their grant proposal was funded spilled over into better classes.

Every leader wanting to increase performance must ask people to put in more effort – more practices, longer hours, more sacrifices, all the stuff of saving a sick group and moving it to better health. When people know that the work is important, they are more likely to show up to do it.

Expect respect. Respect is signaled by leaders in how they treat people, and how they expect them to treat others. Leaders can set ground rules for discussion and decision-making. They can foster the language of contribution rather than blame, insisting that people seek solutions and value each other’s potential to contribute.

Of course, dissent or cynicism might go underground while people fake politeness in public, and some rituals seem artificial at first. But soon the consistency principle kicks in – if people hear themselves say certain things often enough, they start to feel the associated feelings.

Practice inclusion. In low-performing organizations on losing streaks, decisions are made in secret behind closed doors; inequalities among people reflect favoritism not fairness; and some people are always left out. Leaders of high-performance teams reverse that pattern, seeking collective goals and benefits for all..

When a new superintendent began the nationally-recognized turnaround of a failing urban school district, he asked teachers what changes they most desired, and acted on those that would affect the largest number. In the turnaround of Continental Airlines, Deborah McCoy, head of flight operations, reinforced both respect and inclusion by letting pilots hire pilots and flight attendants hire flight attendants.

In several other cases, leaders replaced long tables with a clear head with round tables at which everyone is equally well-positioned. The symbolism of the round table seems to work. (It also passes the try-it-at-home common sense test: When my husband and I replaced a long dining room table with a round one, the first 25 people to see the new dining room all exclaimed spontaneously that round tables produce better conversations.) When people feel understood and heard, their commitment grows.

The payoffs from collaboration are palpable – higher energy, higher aspirations, and a team that can lift everyone’s level of play. To help raise student achievement, it’s essential that education leaders weave collaboration into the daily work of their schools.

--Rosabeth Moss Kanter holds a chaired professorship at Harvard Business School and is author or co-author of 16 books, including her latest bestseller, Confidence: How Winning Streaks & Losing Streaks Begin & End, recently published by Crown. Find her frameworks for leadership in public education, developed with Dr. Barry Stein of Goodmeasure Inc., at www.reinventingeducation.org.
© Copyright 2005 by Rosabeth Moss Kanter. All rights reserved.