Prepared by Diane Tavenner

Author:Diane Tavenner
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2019-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

simply transport systems and ways of doing things from our previous experience into our new school. Rather, every single thing, from how we served lunch to how we calculated grades, had to be designed to match our values and drive toward our desired goals.

None of us were sleeping very much and all of us were engaged all day long in an effort to establish relationships and expectations as quickly as we could with our students. It was emotionally exhausting work and we were all a bit stressed. Five minutes past the time that our meeting was supposed to begin, everyone sat at the conference table except Adam. He was late again.

Kelly was visibly agitated. “He’s always late,” she remarked under her breath just as Adam entered the room. Sensing this could mushroom into something more, I reminded Adam of one of our core values, respect, and that arriving on time and ending on time was one way to show respect. He earnestly turned to the group and said, “I’m sorry. There’s just so much to do, I don’t have a minute to waste, so I make sure everyone is ready to go in the meeting before I come in.”

I thought Kelly might explode. “So I’m supposed to waste my time sitting here getting ready for you to enter, so you don’t waste your time? How is that fair?” At the time I didn’t understand the phases a team will go through to get to a productive and collaborative rhythm.

If I had, I would have felt more comfortable with the discomfort, or storming, and led productively through it.

Instead, I said the first thing that popped into my mind to try to lighten the moment. “This reminds me of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, when Jeff Spicoli’s teacher says he’s wasting his time and Spicoli says, ‘If I’m here and you’re here, doesn’t that make this our time?’ ” No one laughed. We didn’t need stupid movie lines, we needed real tools to work together.

With the help of some experts, Kelly, Adam, the rest of the team, and I came together to learn and implement

some basic tools in the third stage of teams formation,

“norming.” We created a booklet of shared expectations so we could work together more effectively, and “start on time, end on time” was not only an item in the book, it became a mantra, ultimately one of the expectations of our culture that persists to this day.

We also created a simple but powerful decision grid.

It’s easy to come to consensus when everyone is going along to get along, but without a structure for efficient decision-making, the second there’s disagreement it falls apart. Our decision grid clearly and transparently communicated who had the authority to make which decisions (D), who could veto a decision (V), who could make a proposal for a decision (P), and who could simply give input (I). We wanted to make important decisions by consensus, but we also were pragmatic about the sheer number of decisions we had to make each day.

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