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Working as a Cohesive team

Anna King

National PTA/President

Yvonne Johnson

National PTA/President-Elect

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Our Shared Mission

To make every child’s potential a reality by engaging and empowering families and communities to advocate for all children.

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PTA Values

Collaboration: We will work in partnership with a wide array of individuals and organizations to broaden and enhance our ability to serve and advocate for all children and families.

Commitment: We are dedicated to children’s educational success, health, and well-being through strong family and community engagement, while remaining accountable to the principles upon which our association was founded.

Diversity: We acknowledge the potential of everyone without regard, including but not limited to: age, culture, economic status, educational background, ethnicity, gender, geographic location, legal status, marital status, mental ability, national origin, organizational position, parental status, physical ability, political philosophy, race, religion, sexual orientation, and work experience.

Respect: We value the individual contributions of members, employees, volunteers, and partners as we work collaboratively to achieve our association’s goals.

Accountability: All members, employees, volunteers, and partners have a shared responsibility to align their efforts toward the achievement of our association’s strategic initiatives.

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Learning Objectives

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2 minutes

Yvonne – go over learning adjectives –Today you will leave with a better understanding of working as a cohesive team and why it is important.

- Learn 5 strategies to building a cohesive team not just for you and your President Elect but for your entire board

-You recognize that teamwork really does make the dream work as what you learn today can be used as you build all types of relationships within your board, your governance, and your community at large.

Ask - What is team cohesion and why is this important? Well, before we can jump into how it can be cultivated, it's important to understand what team cohesion means.

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What does Team Cohesion mean?

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Team Cohesion

Is when a group of individuals in an organization share a strong sense of common identity.

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Image by Learning Unlimited

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Trust

Create an environment that does not punish each person’s vulnerability
Vulnerability
Confidence
Do what we say we will do as a team
Have team exercises

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3 Minutes

Anna –

Being a cohesive team is not built overnight. It's a continuous process that requires patience and dedication. Whether you are building a brand-new board/team or are looking to make your existing team more cohesive, there are steps you must take.

Trust is the base line in order to be effective. Most of us have been on boards where there was no trust and know how painful that can be.

Now let’s talk the 5 ways you can build a cohesive team. Step 1

When board or committee members are genuinely transparent and honest with each other, they can build their team with trust and respect.

1. Creating a safe environment is important. When a leader feels they can share their perspective or life story and not be judged will help build their confidence. You want to be the leader that creates the space for true vulnerability in safe environments in which people feel welcome to be themselves.

2. When people are willing to be their authentic self, they’re also more willing to take creative risks, share their perspectives without fear of a consequence, and make valuable contributions that can only be expressed within a culture that values trust and inclusion. Is it easy being vulnerable? No, but this is what help your team grow.

3. Team confidence creates an environment where people aren’t afraid to speak up. The voice in their head changes from “Are you sure that’s right?” to “I’m sure something’s not right here”. Also, building confidence in your board or committee will help your team members to speak up against bad behavior, and come to the table with solutions. If they stay silent, you miss the opportunities to grow, or worse, create a toxic environment. Everyone should feel valued on your board or committee.

4. This one is simple, follow through on what you create as team. Actions always speak louder than words.

5. Why are team exercises important? They foster creativity and learning, brings your leaders together, makes people more accepting, helps to resolve conflicts, improves culture and most importantly, it builds trust.

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Having No Trust will….

Leaders will dread attending meetings or events
Hold grudges
Hesitate to offer help outside their own responsibility
Hesitate to ask for help or provide feedback

Fail to works as a team!

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Conflict

Debate of Ideas
Don’t make it personal
Be humble
Listen to learn

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3 Minutes

Yvonne –

When there is trust as Anna just spoke about, your board/committee members can engage in a constructive debate of ideas when setting goals. But, if I don’t trust somebody, I’m not going to have healthy conflict with them.

1. Debate of ideas helps promote problem solving and innovative thinking. Sometimes, when people feel strongly about their opinions, they tend to, often subconsciously, resort to dodging the questions, and sharing bad facts. Remember, a healthy debate isn’t about who cares more, who’s the loudest, or who’s the most powerful. It’s allowing diverse thinking and disagreements to help make progress with goals and create solutions.

2. Arguments tend to fracture when people feel like their ideas or identities are coming under attack. Emotion and ego begin to play a much bigger role, and everyone becomes less likely to appreciate each others’ points of view, which greatly reduces the potential for innovation or problem-solving as a board. There should be no personal attacks, stay away from questions that cast judgment on people, and give people the benefit of the doubt.

3. For healthy conflict and idea sharing be productive, leaders need to be willing to respect every viewpoint and change their minds when necessary. Listen to and respect every person and their perspective, even if you disagree. This is the definition of humble.

4. It is important to listen to learn from each other, not listen to respond. When I first was elected President Elect, I wanted to do it all but Anna taught me this very important ideology that listening to learn about an issue or situation is more productive then listening to respond to the situation.

A cohesive team doesn't mean that conflict never arises among team members. However, strong team cohesion allows conflict to be resolved effectively by ensuring all team members are heard and feel safe sharing their perspectives and ideas. The more cohesive a board is, the better the members are at conflict resolution and avoiding major disagreements that can cause less cohesive teams to fall apart. The key is to collaborate when making decisions.

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Commitment

Align Mission
Communication
Clarify Roles and Responsibilities
Allow For Failure
Celebrate Success
Ask for Commitment

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3 Minutes

Yvonne –

We know that in order to get people to buy in and to have clarity of what we are looking for, we really need to have healthy conflict. Because if we don’t have healthy conflict, people won't buy in or weigh in the discussion. Nothing is clear and no one commits.

Everyone has a direction of where they are going and the decisions that must be made. A true commitment requires the foundation of trust, and the ability for your board members to productively work through conflict to reach a decision.

Commitment does not require that everyone totally agrees with the direction or a decision. It does require that they can have their ideas heard, so they can be more willing to support the decision even if they are not in full agreement.

You can promote commitment by:

1. Discussing the association’s mission, and your own and how you can help move it forward. Allow each member to question what the goals are in a safe space.

2. Decide how each person communicates more clearly, more concisely and timely.

3. As a group, discuss the strengths and talents board members bring to the table. What are the skills and talents, roles and responsibilities? Define your roles.

4. Make it clear that setbacks can be planned for, learned from, and overcome. Set the expectation that your leaders will get up if they fall; if a pitfall is spotted ahead, anyone seeing it is expected to call it out.

5. Set a goal as a team that’s within reach and can be executed quickly. Reward success and then review why success was achieved by the board. This is who we learn.

6. This is simple and is sometimes overlooked. Ask for commitment to the board, to each other, and to the association.

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Commitment means everyone commits to the decisions made, regardless of whether they agreed or disagreed.

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Accountability

Create Board Norms
Problem-solve together
Provide Feedback

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3 Minutes

Yvonne -

How do you hold others accountable? This is really about peer-to-peer accountability. If everyone agrees and commits to our mission and our values, then we can hold one another accountable in the process.

Accountability is a value you want all board members to develop and share. Leaders who point out their peers on performance or behaviors that might hurt the board are demonstrating accountability. Those who don’t show caring, trusting, and supportive behaviors are not demonstrating accountability, but are rather being bullies or working only toward their own goals. They are not thinking of the association as a whole.

1.The board commits as a group to the behaviors they want to prioritize and encourage. These should be behaviors that will have the biggest impact on the board's performance. Keep this number small and let everyone help create these. These are often referred to as board norms.

2. Problem solving as a board and addressing problems together will give everyone practice demonstrating the behaviors they want to promote. Problems can include those that everyone are working on together and those around achieving the results they have committed to.

3. Some boards are great at building each other up but have a hard time giving tough feedback. Other boards forget that positive feedback is important, too. Create surveys for each board meeting. Make each other accountable( use our own board as a example)

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Results

Collective Outcome
Failure
Purpose
Values

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3 Minutes

Anna –

Now, when you everyone is accountable, and committed, you’ve had healthy conflict, there is solid trust, the results is what’s left.

In Jim Collins’ book “Good to Great”- he emphasizes the importance of having the right people by comparing a company to a bus with the leader as the bus driver. The leaders of good associations do not figure out where to drive the bus, and then get people to take it there. Instead, they first get the right people on the bus and then figure out where to drive it.

1. When your board focuses on collective outcomes as a team, and not individuals, they are quick to point out the contributions of others. They see the bigger picture as a ONE team. This isn’t just about your finances, but about expectations and outcomes of goals set as a board.

2. When a board fails to achieve their goals, each member takes personal responsibility to improve the boards performance. They talk through their failures and learn from them together as a team.

3. Great boards have a purpose that inspires each member to perform with passion and commitment. When your board is driven by purpose, they are focused on doing whatever needs to be done to achieve that purpose. Their perspective is so much broader than a set of procedures to follow or a series of tasks to perform. And the results they achieve will be so much more impressive.

4. When board members are committed to a set of core values, there is no need to control them. You can trust them to do the right thing and to ask if they need clarification.

The whole purpose of building a cohesive team that has great trust, conflict, commitment, and accountability is to achieve results.

Some boards might have results and have a dysfunctional environment. They succeed despite themselves. They might get some results, but if everything else is broken in the pyramid and all the other cohesive behaviors don’t exist, they won't be repeatable results.

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Image by Collidu.org

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Image by Collidu.org

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DI4zp7yeuMU

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THANK YOU FOR ATTENDING!

The Next General Session

Will Resume @

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