Great teams get more done.
Great teams don’t get that way by accident. Our work with teams is designed to help you be more intentional as a group.
We help teams build a common purpose and sense of identity, gain common tools and language, and learn to identify the patterns of interaction that serve them — as well as those that don’t. Along the way, they become more effective, fulfilling, and human.
Building Strong Leadership Teams (Team X)
Team X is a year of learning experiences that build leadership capacity, strengthen relationships, and achieve shared goals among a team of 5-8. Anchored by richly human, in-person retreat experiences at the beginning and end of the year, your team will continue those conversations throughout the year in a pair of facilitied virtual experiences.
This isn’t a one-shot event. It’s a year of intentional work to make your team the best it can be.
By the end of the year, your team will have:
Developed practices for ongoing group maintenance that leads to healthy, joyful collaborative work.
Become more connected to one another and to their own inner landscape.
Developed skills, mindsets, and habits that will strengthen their capacity to create solutions to messy problems, make decisions and implement change.
Made progress on a strategic project.
Most trustees know that their primary role is to hold the school in trust and to steward it into the future. However, most boards tend to be focused on the present and – at best! – think about the next 5-7 years.
Thinking like futurists allows boards to consider a longer term direction and be more likely to shape the future rather than simply react to it. How can you sustain an organization for 50 years? 100? 1000?
There is no singular recipe to long term existence and evolution, and adaptation looks different in different industries, but, trustees should be thinking about playing the long game, and thinking like a futurist is a mindset that we can develop, practice and apply to board work.
Futurists do not predict the future. They aren’t telepathic, they have no crystal balls, and they don’t rely entirely on quantitative data to envision the future. Instead they practice the art of forecasting. Think of them as weathermen who give you a general probability of the way the weather might look over the next ten days.
In a year-long engagement, usually kicking off with a full day board retreat and then continuing with virtual touchpoints, your board will have the opportunity to practice a little futurist thinking with all of you, identifying the signals of our possible futures, using scenarios to sharpen their strategic thinking, and mapping out possible and preferred futures for the school.
The result? More engagement, more fulfilling work, and a board that is focused on strategic thinking and generative governance.
Futureproofing Your Board
Design for Culture
Talking about school culture can be a bit like wrestling with a shadow. It’s ambiguous and hard to grasp. Still, it’s hard to avoid – culture is at the heart of school success.
The greatest obstacle for schools when it comes to the healthy evolution of their cultures is the inability to honestly see it—or to clearly articulate it. When this happens, schools get stuck, and it becomes hard to see the levers we can pull to drive change.
Design for Culture can help you avoid this trap. A Leadership+Design facilitator will lead your team through a design thinking process to unearth new insights about your culture and generate actionable steps to shape your culture.
By the end of this experience, your team will have:
Learned shared language for talking about school culture
Gained shared insights into how your culture is experienced now
Developed a set of actionable, shared cultural aspirations
Generated potential initiatives to shape your school
Prototyped an actionable set of initiatives and received feedback to help launch them
Ultimately, a Design for Culture experience can help your school advance student retention and engagement, employee retention and satisfaction, diversity, inclusion, and belonging, mission alignment, and academic innovation.
Read Leadership and Design’s article on school culture here.
School Memberships in L+Doers Unite!
School membership in L+Doers Unite is a cost-effective way for schools to maintain an ongoing relationship with Leadership+Design and the L+D community.
Build Capacity: Membership creates access to professional learning for an unlimited number of team members.
Make Connections: Everyone on your team will have opportunities to connect with other innovative schools and educators.
Create Conversations: Through e-mail and events, you can build common language and tools for thinking about teams, change, and the future of learning. Our events will spark ongoing conversations that you can leverage to drive positive change.
For $999 annually, member schools receive:
Membership in L+Doers Unite! for an unlimited number of school employees (located in the same metropolitan area and using the same school email suffix.) This includes invitations to at least six L+D online professional learning events a year, access to a Slack workspace with other L+D edu innovators, and six virtual care packages including L+D tools and inspiration
A 10% discount on attendance at all open enrollment L+D programs for all school employees, including the Santa Fe Seminar ($140+ value), Wonder Women! ($200+ value), The Reset Head’s Program ($200 value), Leadership Lab ($79+ value)
An invitation for your Head of School to participate in a biannual, facilitated Head’s Debrief
Participating schools are encouraged to name a L+D site coordinator who can help you build engagement with your school community. This is a great opportunity to develop a member of your team who is looking for additional leadership and learning roles. L+D will offer support to help them connect their community to the benefits of membership.
“I just could not let the day go by without writing to thank you for an exceptional two days with our team. Our learning was real and lasting.”
— Paul Burke, Client