Shifting Sands: Solidifying Staff Culture through Development, Strategic Input, & Distributive Leadership
John Clark • Cahn Fellow 2022
Our Cahn Project is a focus on how important it is to have collective ownership and a strong development plan when it comes to building a strong and healthy team. We know and acknowledge that this is not a surprise to anyone, but in the years since coming out of the pandemic and in seeing a large shift in our staff makeup, we realized we had missed some opportunities to help our team to be more cohesive and to have stronger buy-in in getting the results our kids deserved. In many ways, we had created a staff that was waiting for its leadership to give it answers and a leadership team that wasn’t cohesive enough to give them the answers they needed.
On the whole, our project really represents a missed opportunity to build a strong sense of team among a new, young staff that had lots of potential but not enough guidance to optimize its talent. There were a lot of factors that played into this - paternity leave early in the year from the Principal, decisions around staffing and shifting leaders to other campuses by our central office team, a few long term absences among the leadership team, and generally a lack of continuity and consistency.
Still, there was much learned from our dilemma that will continue to be applied at the school and has already led to strong results related to team health and cohesion early in this school year. You will see that naming the importance of better and more consistent development of our teammates, along with a better process for involving our team in decisions and owning the results of our work have been a large part of what the team at Montview is working on this year. While I am no longer the Principal there, I believe that much of the work we did to shift staff mindsets, to encourage folks to leave who weren’t eager to be part of a strong team, and to recognize the need for strong work related to staff coaching and development has and will lead to an even brighter future at DSST Montview.
