MiddleLeader: Meeting Facilitation
Teams that step on the gas too hard at the start of the year and forget to let up will burn out. You can preserve and build on the goodwill that every team experiences at the beginning of the year, the “honeymoon period”. To avoid burnout and preserve that goodwill be on the lookout for these 'burnout' symptoms:
Teams members are late to or distracted in meetings;
Meeting interactions become transactional – task management;
Disagreements surface in inappropriate ways; and
Team members begin to distance themselves, becoming more passive.
Meetings will make or break a team. It is where we hope teachers will realize the proven impact that collaboration has on teaching and learning. But, if your meetings only focus on managing individual team member tasks, the meetings will soon be perceived as a punishment, not a “nest” where teachers can seek solace, recharge, and return to their classrooms with fresh ideas and tools.
60-90 days into the school year is when the above symptoms begin to surface, this is what Bruce Tuckman identified as the Storming Stage of team development. This is when team leaders need to pay more attention to interpersonal relationships, throttle back on the tasks, and focus more on reinforcing the purpose of the team.
In this issue, I have curated content specifically to help middle leaders navigate the Storming Stage.
First, I want you to self-assess your team’s clarity of purpose. The importance of a team being clear about its purpose can’t be stressed enough. A team getting derailed two to three months into the school year is highly probable. So, take time now to assess if your team is clear about its purpose and working interdependently to achieve it.
Second, facilitating collaborative meetings requires the team assessing it’s own performance relative to it’s purpose. To help you facilitate a team performance discussion read this article I wrote on the 3 questions every team should ask at least twice per year.
Effective team meetings keep the team focused on it’s purpose, ensure team member activities are aligned and empower team members to take steps to achieve that purpose.
