Got Goals? Activate Your Executive Committee—the Right Way!

Stephanie Rogen

We’ve been talking a lot about goal setting lately—for boards and executive leadership. Not surprisingly, that conversation raises questions about how goals get set within a board. It leads me to offer some thoughts on Executive Committees—and how they can lead, collaborate, and drive effective goal setting. 

Many boards have an Executive Committee (EC). It’s typically composed of officers and/or committee chairs. Sometimes, depending on the board structures, it can comprise as many as 8-10 members—even half the board. Most often, this is what we observe:

• The EC meets only when an issue arises, particularly if sensitive or confidential information needs to be discussed.

• The EC meets prior to board meetings to review the agenda (most often prepared by a CEO or leader) and ask questions or discuss topics of interest.

• The EC meets perfunctorily as a “mini board meeting” to hear updates from leadership and pre-game how issues will be socialized and/or decided by the full board. This scenario is most common with overly large Executive Committees.

Do any of these characterizations describe your EC? If you feel like your Executive Committee is, in essence, symbolic and of little value, that’s a problem. If you believe that the good work you are already doing could be amplified, you are right! Boards that thrive reimagine and activate their Executive Committees to lead, engage, partner, and collaborate with all board members and, importantly, your chief executive and senior leadership. And that’s a strong foundation on which to build meaningful goals. 

Board leaders’ next question is always: What does that look like? Followed by: And how do we prevent being a shadow board? 

Here’s how!

The best way to become a high functioning EC is to get to work—to activate, learn, and build capacity. A few tips to get started working in new and better ways:

1. Set the Table: Discuss with your board and leadership the role of the EC and develop a shared understanding of how it can improve transparency, coordination, and effectiveness for all members and for senior leadership. You may want to renew the charter for the EC in order to help clarify its role. For more on this, read The Case for The Executive Committee.

2. Design for Success: Meet regularly with leadership to build a plan for board meetings. How can the upcoming year of meetings advance the organization and engage trustees more effectively? How can meeting agendas focus on strategic topics, maximizing board dialogue, learning, and work—and minimizing report-outs? What connections are you making in the work from meeting to meeting? What formats and practices yield the best results? 

3. Start with Vision, Work Backwards to Goals: Executive Committees drive focus to vision, mission, and strategy; examine what work lies with the board and what lies with leadership; and assess the overlaps. In this role, the EC fosters shared purpose, role clarity, strategic dialogue, and clear direction for the entire board. Work with your leaders to negotiate goals in ways that clearly align to vision, mission, and strategy. Use your opening board meeting to propose goals for the board and leadership, refine them, and agree on where you will focus time, energy, and resources. Too often, we assess boards to discover only a few really know what their leader’s and their board’s annual goals are—and it’s hard to build a governance team with that gap in knowledge. 

The Executive Committee can drive coordinated work to develop goals—facilitating processes among the chief executive, leadership, and committees. We offer the following framework with a focus on understanding how a leader’s goals and board’s goals intersect and drive institutional goals and priorities with a focus on mission, vision, and strategy. 

For more on goal setting, see Setting Goals? Tips for Success

1. Measure What Matters: Let’s say you’ve defined the right goals! These are useful as long as you can assess both progress and accomplishment. An Executive Committee can drive the work to establish clear measures and/or evidence the board will seek to support effective execution—often this can yield a high-level dashboard that, when utilized, can promote healthy dialogue about progress, when and how to adapt goals and tactics, and how to evaluate performance. Use your EC to coordinate the conversations between committee chairs and senior leaders, and ask them to consider the evidence (both lead and lag indicators) that they feel they need to accurately gauge progress. The EC and leadership can then propose high-level measures that both will track, translating that to an effective dashboard for board oversight. 

1. Promote Learning: Activated Executive Committees can support goal setting, execution, and strategy iteration by engaging the board as a learning body. Most not-for-profit and school organizations have no or limited resources devoted to research and development—and the board can play a high-value role to fill this gap. Use your EC to explore topics for research, analysis, and discussion. Propose an agenda for R&D to the board and leadership—and consider how you might harness talented board members, community members, and employees to tackle these topics. The Executive Committee coordinates the work and ensures the board and leadership are invested and informed—driving the board’s capacity for long-term planning, increasing its foresight, and positioning the organization for continuous improvement and innovation. 

GLP has developed many tools for chartering and activating Executive Committees, and for developing strategy, goals, and metrics. Let us know what you are learning, and please contact us if you’d like to talk a bit or access more information.

Setting Goals? Tips for Success!

By Stephanie Rogen

Summer is often a time for refreshing or renewing goals, and negotiating expectations and performance measures. You may be a board crafting annual goals, a board member developing committee goals, a chief executive working with a team to set goals, or a leader developing personal and/or professional goals. 

Oftentimes, goal setting seems simple until you really dive into the work. Clear, measurable, and relevant, high-impact goals are often harder to articulate than we realize. So, whatever the context for goal development, we offer a few tips below to make the process of goal setting work for you.

• Start with the big picture—It’s easy to begin by building a list of the things you have to do. This may be useful, but it’s not where you will ultimately need to focus attention and energy in order to move the needle. Start by grounding yourself in the organization’s vision and strategy so that your individual and team goals are aligned with and support the overall direction. Ask what are the three to five things we must do this year to make real progress? If you are building personal goals, build a vision of success for yourself in the many dimensions of your life, and think hard about what will really help you move towards that vision. 

• Utilize divergent and convergent thinking—Now you can build the list! Use a wide-ranging brainstorm to identify possible goals. In this phase, don’t edit or evaluate—just gather ideas. Divergent thinking will help you avoid feeling stuck, thinking small, or overlooking new insights. Next, use convergent thinking to narrow your focus to the best, most crucial goals. You might group the ideas together in categories and look for overarching themes—which might then be articulated as goals. As you hone in, utilize analysis and critical thinking to understand the practical requirements, risks, and potential benefits associated with each idea or goal. 

• Don’t confuse goals with tactics —You’ve honed your list, but you’ll likely need to iterate and winnow even further. We see too many leaders smothered in too many goals—10, 15, even 20! As the number of goals go up, focus and impact decrease—and suddenly the laundry list of to-do’s obscures the more important, most impactful work. 

  • Why? We think it’s because tactics are conflated with goals. Goals are the ultimate accomplishment, while tactics are the steps or actions you employ to achieve the goal. Organize accordingly and discipline yourself to no more than five big goals. Three? Even better! Ask if the goals you’ve identified are actually tactics or actions that can be detailed underneath the goal. Make sure that those goals drive your strategy forward in a coordinated way—keeping you, your board, or your team focused on the big picture, and less likely to be distracted by seemingly urgent or unrelated tasks.

• Supercharge your goals with clarity and specifics—Goals are meaningless if they don’t clearly state what will be achieved in ways that can be fairly assessed. We see too many goals that are vague, such as “increase satisfaction” or “improve operating efficiencies.” To make progress, goals need to be more precisely articulated, with some hint to the tactics you envision to achieve those goals.

  • For example, when you state your goal, quantify or qualify it with precision and include “by _____” to describe a bit of your how in the blank. For example, “increase annual giving by 10% (specific and quantifiable) by ensuring donors have a range of weekly and monthly opportunities to engage with programs, staff, and experience that connect their giving to mission impact (how). Perhaps people don’t want to be hemmed into a specific metric or number or a pathway to success, but without it, you may come to the end of the year and find that expectations are widely mismatched. Better to set a clear and specific goal and then talk about progress along the way—and adjust if need be!

• Pressure test your goals—Finally, finish where you began and bring your goals back to your vision and test for alignment. Ask yourself: do these goals work in combination to move us/me towards our/my vision? What does success look like at the end of the year if we achieve our goals, and are these the best goals to drive us forward? If the answer is not a definitive yes, go back and refine your work.

Next Up: How to Measure What Matters Most

• Why You Need Both Lead and Lag Measures

• Measurement Is Not Just for Tracking Results, It’s Also for Learning and Adaptation!

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STEPHANIE ROGEN

Stephanie is a governance and leadership expert. She brings an innovative approach (and more than 35 years of experience) to helping educational and not-for-profit boards and leaders successfully pursue mission-driven strategy.

For more insights, subscribe to our free monthly newsletter The Blueprint, a thoughtfully curated reading list that concisely distills the most important resources for educational leadership and governance.

Don’t Forget Purpose: Yours and Your School’s…

Following our interview with Charles Fadel, we found ourselves examining the many questions schools need to confront if they are to thrive in conditions that are less than predictable and often highly volatile. Practically speaking, how do schools stay ahead of problems, navigate the unexpected, and sustain real progress? Before we get deep into school design, pedagogy, and curriculum questions, we think schools have to recenter themselves in purpose with ever more clarity and precision. 

What is the purpose of school in the volatile context of the social, political, and economic forces at play and their ripple effects in our educational communities?

Worried about the 2024 election? Free speech? Hot war? Cold War? Social unrest? Mental health? Social media and screens? AI? The quest for talent? Are you wondering if your board and your community are prepared to weather the storms and their aftermath? How do we navigate these issues in service of students and guard against the currents that take our schools off course? 

Not surprisingly, we’ve witnessed a significant uptick in boards who want to sharpen their systems, structures, and practices in hopes of managing risk and becoming more resilient. We embrace the arrival of a new era for governance, and our position is that much of the conventional wisdom offered to NFP boards is outdated, reductionist, and inadequate in the face of so much complexity. We hear trustees asking “Can’t we do better?” and leaders who are trying to understand how to engage their boards in new and constructive ways. We also understand that there are counter forces: resistance to change, structural limitations, external pressures, and economic realities to name a few. 

In order to improve the work of your board, there is a foundational first step: recommitting to, affirming, or recalibrating your mission.  

Mission is often taken for granted—and it goes unexamined. Do you have an actionable, clear mission that truly shapes the daily life of the school? Living the mission is nuanced, complex, and challenging. Having clarity of mission and values provides common ground for your school community in a world of increasing fragmentation, polarization, and turmoil. It also means that when challenges arise (in your inbox, the news, or on campus), your community is able to navigate the small and big decisions in ways that move you forward rather than derailing progress and detracting from learning. 

Leaders can direct and guide their boards, but ultimately the question of purpose—and the alignment of the organization’s actions to its mission and values—is an essential responsibility of the board.

So we begin here: Grounding ourselves in the question of the purpose of education is essential context for the associated question of how leadership and boards create conditions for success.

Confidence in Purpose

It’s hard to prepare for the future when so many of our institutions face a crisis of confidence. Higher ed and public education are often a harbinger for issues faced by independent schools, so we offer some perspectives on public sentiment. Gallup’s 2023 research in higher education shows American confidence since 2015, across Republicans, Independents, and Democrats, is declining and tracks fairly closely to what we see in the public K-12 sector. 

Today, college campuses are navigating complex questions about free speech, free assembly, and protest. The public questions safety and wonders why students are not in classrooms. Independent schools may have retained more confidence but are not immune to criticism and controversy.

At the macro-level, David Brooks addressed this trend in 2020, and his insight is still relevant: when trust collapses, the threat to society is “existential.” In other words, confidence in and openness to each other and to our institutions matters—and if we can’t create or sustain it, we are in trouble.

So as colleges close abruptly and students question the value of a college degree, confidence in schools and universities is also eroding—on the inside and the outside. In some cases, jurisdictions are taking hold (Florida is the most visible example), and in private schools, leaders are playing whack-a-mole as they respond to critiques, concerns, and questions about everything from their policies (from gender to mental health to discipline), DEI programs, responses to national or global events, and to foundational standards in their curriculum.

In this climate of widespread tension, it is more important than ever to preserve and restore confidence in education. Our schools are essential to building a healthy society—in which we prepare ethical citizens with the skills and knowledge to think critically, sustain themselves and their families, and contribute to their communities. 

How’d We Get Here?

We think it’s helpful to examine the changes in climate and the breakdown of confidence in our institutions through the lenses of free speech, freedom of expression, and academic freedom. One only needs to read the news to know that even our most venerated educational institutions are at risk. These unfolding stories offer object lessons in how easily and quickly a seemingly strong, well-protected educational environment can come under significant duress—and raise fundamental questions about the purpose of school and the responsibilities of governance and leadership. 

Understanding where we are may begin with a widening of our apertures as we return to the primary mission of education. In a worthwhile and wide-ranging podcast interview, Larry Summers observes and articulates what we’ve mused about for a long time:

“I think one of the aspects of how this has happened is that while on the one hand we think of intellectual communities as being the most broad-minded of communities, on the other hand they are actually among the most narrow, insular and inward-looking in the way they evaluate themselves and in the way they think of the necessary decision making.”

He continues, with more precision—with a particular focus on governing boards:

"I think, unfortunately, with considerable validity—that many of our leading universities have lost their way; that values that one associated as central to universities—excellence, truth, integrity, opportunity—have come to seem like secondary values relative to the pursuit of certain concepts of social justice, the veneration of certain concepts of identity, the primacy of feeling over analysis, and the elevation of subjective perspective. And that has led to clashes within universities and, more importantly, an enormous estrangement between universities and the broader society."

Some of our educational communities are here, in part, because boards and leaders took their eyes off the most fundamental idea: that the purpose of school is to broadly educate, to pursue knowledge and truth, and to model the way for a civil society with relentless inquiry, evidence-based reasoning, open and respectful discourse, and rigorous scholarship. The school’s intellectual purpose is primary—and it is in service of social good

Even if an educational community has managed to keep their eyes on mission and values, what it means to live the mission each day is dramatically harder due to the surrounding societal and technological changes.

Nuance doesn’t go viral. With social media, everyone has a microphone, and conflict is what draws attention. The loudest, most emphatic voices can hijack a school’s focus. As Ben Sasse observes for higher ed, “Instead of drawing the line in speech and action, a lot of universities bizarrely give the most attention and most voice to the smallest, angriest group.” We see this reality play out, in response to a variety of issues and demands, in our k-12 schools.   

Schools can and should survive these storms. When boards and leadership are sustained by ample resources, strong institutional memory, sage advice, and a desire to work in partnership, the opportunity for growth and improvement is ripe. Future-focused boards and leadership are taking stock, and sharpening their efforts to affirm their missions, align their choices, assess the student outcomes and experiences that matter most, and strengthen the structures and practices that drive them.  

Governance and leadership must align actions to values

Private and public K-12 schools may have escaped some of the heat, but a great many are in or have experienced some version of community controversy over what to say, and how to educate, and what identity or group to publicly support. The strategy for handling these questions seems simple: respond, communicate, and decide in alignment with mission and values. However, not every school espouses, or clarifies, their mission or values with precision. Additionally, it is the execution that becomes a lot more complicated—even for a school with a clear mission.

Every decision and practice is a manifestation of mission and values.

Pressure comes from countless constituents (often segmented in small but highly vocal numbers): high profile donors, passionate faculty members with strong ideas about what to cultivate in learners, concerned parents who feel usurped by decisions implemented in classroom curricula, and boards who have never had to interrogate decisions and controversies related to the core: why, how, and what to teach.

At the highest level, much of the controversy can find roots in the “stance” of the institution, and how that plays out inside the classroom and in the larger learning community. Regarding higher ed, the Kalven Report reminds us that colleges are not critics—they are “the home and sponsor of critics.” Sage advice for our K-12 schools who lay the foundation for educating young people to become constructive and wise critics! 

When a university itself takes a position on political debates, the report says it risks being “diverted from its mission into playing the role of a second-rate political force or influence.”

Words matter a lot, and that’s where the arguments begin. Definitions for the concepts of academic freedom, free speech, and free expression—and ways in which we uphold free speech and expressio n in service of mission – also bear examination. As this essay from the Provost at the University of Austin points out, it’s easy to conflate and/or confuse these ideas, and that can lead our educational institutions off the path of mission–making the case simple with this statement: 

“But at universities, the right to free speech stops when speech impedes higher education's essential calling: the pursuit of truth so as to preserve, transmit, and extend knowledge.”

In these perspectives, we see that free inquiry, speech, protest, and pursuit of truth are not in conflict–provided they advance rather than inhibit these aims for all. This central idea requires extraordinary clarity and consistency in mission-aligned policy and practice—and it might be the one central idea that will help our boards confirm and guard mission, and determine how to assess fidelity to and delivery of that mission.

Navigating the details - the realities of how everyday choices and actions align to mission - is where a strong, open, and transparent understanding between board and leadership comes to bear. The best governing boards and heads understand how these small choices serve or do not serve mission and values—and strong leaders engage their boards in robust dialogue about how mission delivery happens, upholding culture and purpose. 

What Next? 

K-12 schools—like colleges and universities—have community members who wish for us to act as a political force or influence. This works if everyone shares the same opinion about what that force or influence means, or what ideas undergird it, but in the absence of strong shared principles about how to engage with these differences, taking a particular stance is a misguided activity.  Learning—and education—is the exploration of these viewpoints, arguments, and rationales, supported with research, evidence, and strong reasoning. Affording space for rigorous inquiry is the principle, and getting back to basics is the best means to assert and restore mission. We appreciate the work of author John Austin of Deerfield Academy, and the EE Ford Foundation for this framework to guide independent schools and a reminder that:

“Schools exist to serve students, and meeting their needs must come first. Further, providing the foundation for students to think for themselves, test their views, and empower them to ‘grow into distinct thinking individuals’ is a worthy aspiration for every school, regardless of its mission.”

We hope you will share your perspectives, arguments, insights, questions, and suggestions with us!

Plan or Strategy? (Hint: You Need Both!)

We’ve had a lot of inquiries of late from school and NFP leaders who want to launch a strategic planning process.  We always start by talking with them about their why: Why now? Why a plan? What do they hope will happen as a result?

Once we have a sense of what brings them to us, we talk a bit about what we feel is important to communicate about our approach. Simply stated, that a plan is not a strategy. Perhaps strategic planning can be reimagined as an umbrella term to describe the creation of strategy and the act of planning to execute.

I’ve written a lot on this topic, but think it’s helpful sometimes to refresh these ideas in new ways. Here are a few key differences between a plan and your strategy - what did I miss? Let me know in the comments!

Scope and Timeframe:

• A strategy is wide in scope and conveys a few key choices or decisions that move you towards your vision over the next few years. 

• A plan is narrowly targeted, short term and lays out tactics and actions as you move forward. It’s incremental.

Orientation or External vs Internal Focus:

• A strategy orients your school externally and defines your unique value proposition  - as Roger Martin describes “where to play and how to win” - as you achieve a vision for impact. 

• A plan orients you internally - what systems and capabilities are we building and what steps are we taking to fulfill our strategy? They are related, but different. 

Commitment and Flexibility:

• A strategy is about making commitments - a few key decisions that focus resources and in turn, clarify what you won’t do. It can endure over several years as you move towards your vision for impact- even as your short term tactics adapt.

• A plan is prescriptive in the short term, but flexible as you learn, gather new data, and iterate. You prototype and pilot, refine, and redirect. If you are strictly crafting and then adhering to a plan over say, two or three years you’ll likely find much of it gets trashed as you reconfigure to navigate conditions you could not or did not predict. 

Imagination and Objective Certainty:

• A strategy requires creativity - making bets and forming a hypothesis about how to succeed that cannot be grounded in data or a look in the rear view mirror. In other words: “what got you here won’t get you there”. Strategy demands new thinking, innovation, and a testing of underlying assumptions 

• A plan considers what you do know, based on data, your SWOT analysis, and how you take action in the present tense. You may need to close some gaps, align to values, and respond to immediate threats. But with a strategy, you can design tactics that attend to the present as they evolve you towards the vision you have for success.

Visuals can help. We like Amy Webb’s framework to convey how a plans (tactics) are related to, but different from, strategy.

Maverick -- Who’s Your Goose?

Imagine a new Executive Director, President, CEO, or Head of School as they enter their new role: who to meet, what to learn, how to get up to speed? Imagine a current leader, balancing the demands of their external-facing activities, an active board, and the day to day strategic operations of their organization.  Whatever the context, every leader needs a trusted wingperson navigating alongside them -- a Goose to their Maverick. 

Many years ago, I suggested to a Head of School that the creation of an executive office is what’s needed to thrive in leadership.  Build the office around a Chief of Staff (CS) to the Head (or CEO) who might then manage a shared administrative assistant for the inner team. Further, I imagined the CS role as a coveted leadership development position -- perhaps a 2-3 year role for aspiring heads. He liked the idea in concept, but couldn’t imagine a break from the traditional organization.

Now, more than ever, I think this model has a lot of advantages: 

1. It directly supports, at the strategic level, the expanded and increasingly complex responsibilities of modern school and not for profit executives

2. It presents an opportunity to build an economically sustainable and strategically coherent way to address key activities that often get distributed to new positions and/or spread across multiple leaders (organizational sprawl)

3. I creates a leadership development pathway currently unavailable in most schools and NFPS

4. It expands capacity, and increases support, for leaders in any context

Let’s start with the distinctions between an executive assistant (EA) and a chief of staff (CS).  Both jobs are important – and to be clear, a highly competent and seasoned EA often functions, at least in part, like a Chief of Staff. There are a few key differences in my conception that really matter, highlighted by the descriptions of each role.

What does an EA do?

An EA is largely a trusted gatekeeper - with a clear understanding of how to both protect and manage the time of a leader by coordinating their schedules and keeping them connected and on track on a daily basis.  EA’s have strong executive function, are organized, and attentive to detail. EA’s, like a chief of staff, are a “vault” and are able to protect sensitive or confidential matters with elegance.

What does a CS do?

Like an EA, a CS ensures a leader is prioritizing time well - but the CS has an enterprise-wide sense of where a leader’s expertise, skills, and strategic vision have the greatest impact.  Moreover, a CS can coordinate the strategic priorities of the organization and support execution by interfacing with senior leaders and trustees, driving agendas, and facilitating open communication and productive collaboration.  A successful CS is a facile negotiator, project manager, and pattern detector -- able to facilitate productive work and help a leader navigate dynamics and tensions that impact progress and culture. The CS operates with agency and autonomy often interfacing internally and externally as a representative of leadership. Because a CS operates at the intersections of the organization and its primary functions, they quickly build knowledge, expertise and experience that most individuals can’t access.  And the extraordinary access to leadership exposes them to a broader context for mentorship, problem solving, and coaching than a functional leader might experience. By definition, to be successful the CS must demonstrate the ability to build good will, trust, and strong supportive networks. An added benefit? The CS works on long term projects and helps the EA and other assistants make day to day decisions in support of the bigger picture - creating a more efficient system of support in the executive suite.

How might your life as a leader be different with a great CS? How might your organization benefit?

Why Do You Want a Strategic Plan?

Everyday, we hear from prospective clients who want support in building a strategic plan, many of whom offer a detailed RFP. We don’t fulfill RFPs. Instead, we ask: Why do you want a strategic plan? We ask this question because we’ve learned there are many reasons organizations decide they want a strategic plan. We also know that designing strategy and strategic planning are different activities. Sometimes, our quest to understand what the organization really wants means we don’t win the business. And that’s a good thing. Because the why matters.

To simplify, we generally see three overarching reasons driving the requests for strategic plans: 

BETTER MARKETING: For some organizations, strategic plans are often desired to combat declining enrollment or revenue growth: the plan is envisioned as the “silver bullet” to drive better marketing, branding, and advancement. We see this most often with  organizations who want to better articulate and promote what makes them valuable, special and distinctive. We hear things like “we need a strategic plan so we can do a better job of describing and communicating who we are — and we need to push that message out successfully”.  Often these organizations also want a feel good process that involves stakeholders to “bring everyone along”. When we hear this “why” we challenge clients to examine their assumptions. Have they defined the problem correctly? Is there a root cause or an issue of quality  they may have overlooked? If not, we steer potential clients to marketing, branding, and communications strategists.  

A NORTH STAR: For other organizations, the desire for a strategic plan is grounded in an optimistic sense of opportunity, and the need to orient everyone towards a  “North Star”.  In schools, there may be an accreditation cycle that gives the extra push -- and a recommendation that the school develop a clear purpose. It’s also not unusual for this “why” to correspond with an upcoming leadership transition or with the entry of new leadership. The organization feels like it’s on solid ground, and is eager to develop a vision for the future as it leans into its assets and strengths-- clarifying its own purpose and imagining a bold new future.  These kinds of strategic plans are also often inclusive exercises — but they  are a heavier lift — actively engaging people in affirming what matters most, and designing and testing new ideas to support effective execution.  

A WINNING TRANSFORMATION: Then, there  is the plan driven by a deep sense of importance and urgency: a sense that the current operating model may not be viable for the future --- that the conditions for success are changing — and a sense that the needs and interests of stakeholders are changing.  In these cases, organizations want to consider the changing landscape and scenario plan; they want an honest diagnosis of current operations, and a reasonable and compelling treatment recommendation. Sometimes the value of the program and the product is under serious examination, and the relevance of mission needs to be tested. Most often, questions regarding the capacity of leadership and talent surface, as do elements of culture: can the people and the culture we have now take us where we want to go? Transformation and change are the core of this planning endeavor, it’s a deep, long partnership, and the design of strategy happens within the execution of strategy -- and the plan is an iterative working approach to execution. It drives the organization towards new success. 

You may see parts of your why in one or more of these buckets: often, we find clients begin with one why and discover another why as we set out on the journey together. Our work focuses on the NORTH STAR and the TRANSFORMATION projects because that’s what strategy is all about. Goals, tactics, and laundry lists of to do’s that drive effective execution follow the creation of a winning strategy. What is your why?

Who Plays, and What to Do When You Don’t Have the Right Players: Part 3 of a Three Part Series

Parts One and Two of this series addressed the principles and practices of high performing teams. This final installment addresses the question of “who” – who you need, how you assess performance (of the team and each member), and what to do when you find you don’t have the right players. 

Who You Need 

Building a team is strategic and disciplined work. Whether you are building a board, an executive team, or a functional team, composition matters.  And composition is the careful curation of mindsets, abilities, and behaviors that empower the team to be greater than any one particular member.  

The first step is to decide what you need in terms of mindsets, abilities, and behaviors. No one person can fulfill all your needs, but there are certain “need to have” attributes for every member that help you build the culture and disposition of the team.  You’ll likely seek evidence of collaboration skills, critical and systems thinking skills, and communication and interpersonal skills that promote productive group work. You’ll seek in each person a particular ethos and values set that mirrors the organizational ethos and honors the contributions of each team member. 

Once you’ve outlined these core needs, you’ll want to seek particular functional or technical skills and expertise that round out the team – most often mapped to the areas of organizational focus and strategic choices that drive the enterprise. Don’t let the functional organization, on paper, drive the composition of your team. You may have a wider collection of senior leaders who represent the core functions and/or business lines, and you will recognize them as such, but your executive team needs to work closely with you to drive enterprise wide priorities. 

For example, you may have multiple programs or divisions in your school or organization. The assumption that these leaders need to be on the executive team can be tested. You may prefer to have one leader who unifies this group and directs them in ways that ensure tight focus on institutional strategy. Similarly, you may lift up a leader, like a director of communications, who also reports to your Chief Operating Officer, to be part of your team because they exhibit both the core capacities and the particular expertise you need.

A note on who’s on the team (or in the room where it happens): as a leader, you walk the challenging line of being clear about roles and responsibilities, while also fostering inclusion, collaboration, transparency, and an authentic sense of agency and purpose in all your leaders and staff. Your executive team shares in this responsibility and together, your actions must attend to these aims.  

A small executive team that works effectively can, at its best, create more space and access for robust vertical and horizontal collaboration within your organization. A CEO or Head of School with strong distributed leadership is naturally in a better position to coach, mentor, and communicate more broadly inside and outside the walls of your organization. So, work with your team to attend to communications that keep everyone in the loop . Ensure transparency and clarity about the decisions that affect your people.  And work hard together to seek involvement and input from the many talented people that make it happen in your organization each day. 

How to Assess  

You’ve done your best work to assemble a great team – or perhaps you are working with what you inherited or have for the time being. In any case, assessment and feedback are essential tools in developing and composing the best team you can build. Too often, effective feedback and assessment are entirely overlooked, or sporadic and informal at best. 

To develop and evaluate a team and its members, you want to ensure frequent reflection and feedback, coupled with more formal assessment.  Talk with your team about how this work is designed – without it, the team can’t improve and you lack sound data to make good people decisions.

Informal and ongoing feedback stimulates correction, learning, and growth. It happens in real time, through observation and dialogue. Formal assessment is best accomplished with a thoughtfully designed tool that, in effect, measures that for which you provide informal feedback.  Your team can help you build the tool, and by involving them you explore together what will drive collective performance and foster ownership for an accountability system (designing together also models how they can engage their own teams to do the same). Most good tools include assessments against the core criteria you value for team members and assessments of progress on strategic goals (see the figure below).

You’ve built criteria for team members, and your charter names areas of responsibility and key strategic goals (ideally with measures of success). Build these into your tool and update the tool annually so it works as a dynamic instrument to capture growth and development over time, and more specific performance on organizational goals. Remember to use clearly stated scaled and open-ended queries that assess both the function of the individual and the function of the team as a whole. 

Engage the right people in the process of assessment:  if you limit formal evaluation to your own perspective, you lose valuable insight and perspective on both individual and team performance. Who might have experiences, observations, and insight that help you assess? Consider peers, direct reports, and collaborators when you administer formal assessment.  We prefer to steer away from terms like “360 degree review” which often implies wide scale feedback - sometimes from the whole organization. What we do encourage is that you solicit thoughtful feedback from people who interact directly with members of the team and witness their leadership.  

When You Don’t Have the Right Talent

Sometimes you inherit a team member who just doesn’t want to play by the values and norms you’ve established, and sometimes these folks are toxic to the team. Or, despite your best efforts, you’ve discovered that the person you are coaching is not likely to master the capabilities you need, and while well-liked, frustration within the team is mounting. Maybe you have an open position or an emerging gap and you need to fill it – and until you do everyone is working harder, but not smarter. Know that the team is never static, and you will likely be dealing with one or more of these realities often, if not all the time, in the course of your leadership.

If you have a player that needs to be moved off the team, but you are not sure how or when to do so, the most important thing to ask is:

How is this individual’s performance 

impacting the people who lead us forward? 

In the effort and time it takes to figure out how and when to move on a poor performer, we often lose sight of how that person is impacting others over time – and we delay the hard decision or construct unsustainable workarounds.  Often, leaders underestimate the cost to the team, so if there’s one thing to remember it’s this: 

Preserve optimism and energy in the people who will lead you forward

by acting humanely and decisively on the people who cannot.

If you have attended to feedback and assessment purposefully, your job is made easier. If not, you’ll need to work quickly, with the right support, to either remove or redirect a player in order to protect the morale and focus of your team.   If this person is harming team culture or breeding real frustration, delay is costly, and too often we see leaders who prioritize their concerns for that individual over the needs of the team.  In the end, no one is better off.

Leaders need partners who can help them address these talent issues. Who helps you? Not-for-profit and school organizations often lack in-house strategic human resource leaders to advise them, and if this is you, make sure you have an external resource to guide you.  But remember, the hard part is taking decisive action – once you decide, the tactics will follow. 

Finally, if you have a gap in your team and need to fill it, you may look both within and without your organization for talent. The key here is twofold:

1. Do this with your team: develop a shared understanding of what you need and the profile for the role. Involve your team in the interview process, and agree on decision-making criteria.

2. Be accountable to a timeline: the long, dragged out processes to find the perfect person can really bring your team down.  Find the person most likely to “fit” and “grow” – don’t expect perfect. And have a back up plan (perhaps outsourced or attended to by a junior “interim” team inside your organization).  Know your best alternative to a great hire and implement it early, so that if things don’t pan out in your first efforts, you know what to do in the interim. 

In the end, knowing you have a team and coaching it to success is never-ending work! Teams, like organizations and people, are living organisms that need to continuously learn, evolve and adapt. As a leader, your attention to the health and function of the team is one of your primary responsibilities.  Let us know if we can help!

We Call Ourselves a Team, But...Part 2 of 3: Rowing Together

In part one of this series, I outlined five principles for building a high performing team.  Agreeing on these is the easy part. Becoming a team, and functioning well as a team day in and day out, is hard work. This post outlines some “how to” tips to put these principles into practice!

But first a note to you, the leader: You model the way, deciding when to direct, when to coach, and when to step back and let others lead without you. Ideally, if your team is thriving, times to direct are minimized, and times to coach or simply stand back are maximized. But you are responsible for insisting on the conditions to make this happen.  So let’s assume the one place where you will surely be authoritative is in explaining and then ensuring fidelity to the principles. From there, there are a range of ways in which you can participate, coach, and simply stand back as the team learns, collaborates, and “plays” to win!

Principle 1: Collective performance must trump individual performance in order to make progress. 

As a leader, you want to establish this idea off the bat. But you’ll need feedback and suggestions from team members about what this looks like in action. Lots of dialogue in the early days of teaming can go a long way. Work with your team to explore why you can accomplish more if you function as a team - and how that differs from being merely a group of leaders. Once you've established why collective performance matters most, you can identify the conditions needed to ensure this can happen. It might start with questions like:

• How do we want to feel as a team?

• What do we need to know as a team?

• What do we want to be able to do together?

• How will we assess and measure our progress? 

• What do you need from me, your leader, to make this happen? (this is an important question and encouraging your team to offer you honest feedback - and receiving it with gratitude - is essential)

As you explore these questions, you’ll likely name the behaviors, practices, and mindsets that either encourage or inhibit collaboration towards collective performance. 

The next step is to establish norms. Norms are agreements about how you will work together as a team, and they name the mindsets and behaviors that drive teaming. Norms we’ve heard teams create include “assume positive intent”, “share the air”, and “hard on content, soft on people.”  Your team will craft its own -- and team members will be creative and thoughtful.

Once you can agree on norms, you’ll also want to talk about methods to course correct when someone steps out of the norms – make it fun, non-punitive and easy to implement. Many teams have a code word or signal when someone strays – and use it with joy!

Creating a shared commitment to collective performance and then establishing the conditions for success is step one. 

Principle 2: Teams thrive when each member has a valued role with clear, shared purpose. 

A team charter is a useful tool for making your team’s purpose explicit – and mapping individual roles against the goals you pursue together.  You’ve established conditions and ground rules but now you need to determine what you are trying to accomplish and how each of you will contribute to the overarching goals. We encourage teams to draft a charter that includes a statement of mission, a delineation of roles and responsibilities, and priority goals or areas of focus. The charter should recognize and address every member of the team – speaking to them through the lens of their collective performance.  

Once the team has established its charter, each team member has a clear sense of what matters most – and how their role as an enterprise wide leader is paramount. But they still have functional domains, and the crafting of a charter models an exercise they can do with their own teams – this is how leaders knit together the work up, down, and across the organization.

We have a helpful toolkit for building a team charter. Let us know if you’d like to use it!

Principle 3: Trust is the foundation, but you can’t win the game without shared understanding of strategy. 

Trust is a core condition for success -- one that must be built and nurtured over time -- so attend to practices that build confidence both in you as the leader and among the team. Trust doesn’t develop through ropes courses, clever team building games, and fun social events. Sure, these things can help, but the real work is in building confidence through consistent experience, and working together to understand and pursue the strategic aims of the organization.

As a leader, first explore with your team what practices (for meetings, communications, collaboration, etc.) help build confidence in your ability to achieve your goals. Remember, you’ve identified behaviors that hinder or encourage great teaming – so design your practices to meet those needs and ensure all team members feel valued and clear with respect to their roles. 

Teams are not afraid to experiment with new practices – so talk about how they work. Are they advancing you towards your goals? Are they modeling collaboration and shared purpose? Recalibrate often, and as a leader, know when you need to work with a particular team member who may not be fulfilling their potential.  

What are practices? Think meetings, agendas, schedules, project management systems, and organizational structures like committees designed to make work happen. These practices are not meant to be static – but they often slowly cement themselves into organizational life. Model the way for agility in your organization by trying new ways of working to stimulate progress.  

Often, as teams explore what’s in the way, they find an audit or assessment of systems and practices can help to redesign ways of working that support talent!

Principle 4: Players need to train, and teams need to practice. 

Practices are supporting structures. But practicing as a team is where the learning and development happens. As the “leader as coach” your job is to create space for the team to 1) practice without you on the field and 2) reflect on their performance. As a coach, you’ll do this with them as a collective and as individuals.  So, take out your charter, look at your goals, and ask them to talk about it. 

• How were we going to get there? 

• What’s our strategy to make this happen? 

• How did we do? 

• What needs to change? 

• What do you need from each other? From me? 

Real time feedback and a next cycle of practice develops the team.

Each team member also needs attention, and has particular strengths to leverage and weaknesses to manage.  As a coach, how can you help that performer grow – and support them with targeted skill building? How can peer coaching and collaboration target skills and leverage strengths? 

As a leader/coach, nurture your players’ success by ensuring each individual not only understands their role in advancing the work of the team, but also by aligning their personal  goals, feedback and assessment to maximize their contribution to the team’s performance.

 We help teams and the team members from the get-go to develop and utilize coaching skills - we think it's the single best skill every leader has to unleash potential within themselves and with their colleagues and direct reports. Build a coaching culture and your practice will be a lot more effective. 

Principle 5: High functioning teams model the way and shape culture.  

When you draft your team charter, don’t forget that this principle is at the core of your mission. Your overarching job is not to accomplish the goals, it's to build and cultivate an organization of talented people who together can do the job. That’s why coaching skills are so important to develop in your leaders. 

As a regular part of reflection with the team and with your team members ask: 

• How are you developing your peers and your people? 

• How are you modeling for them the work we do as collaborators? 

• What practices are you spreading and scaling in your functional work to help build the culture we need in our organization? 

Finally, assess yourselves both as a team and against this critical element of purpose. If you don’t measure it, you’ll lose sight of it. Systems for assessment and evaluation need evidence based approaches to help you make progress. And don’t assess once a year. Make this a regular part of your work - with informal check-ins and formal efforts to solicit feedback - from your team and from other members of the organization. Return to the questions we offer at the top of this blog as an entry point for predictive reflection.

A word on formal assessment: Measurement is hard – and establishing leading and lagging indicators for performance can be confusing. But a leadership team that doesn't hold itself accountable to how it develops talent across the organization is a team that is working at a fraction of its potential.  

In Part three of this series we will dive deeper into assessment of team and team member performance --  how to measure, and what to do when you just don’t have the talent you need on your leadership team!