4 Ways to Increase Your Leadership Team’s Problem-Solving Capacity

Without question, today’s schools operate in complex, dynamic, and challenging environments. Schools must contend with rapid advances in technology, high levels of accountability, increasing diversity, debates about pedagogy and instructional materials, concerns about student and staff mental health, fiscal challenges, and a public increasingly impatient for school improvement and change. All this has made it impossible for a single school administrator to act as the lone decision maker. Instead, the situation demands the skillful use of school leadership teams working collaboratively to improve outcomes.

The shift from hierarchical, top-down leadership to distributed, team-based leadership represents more than a trend—it’s a necessity as schools confront multifaceted challenges. Research demonstrates that high-performing leadership teams can improve organizational capacity for problem-solving, staff engagement, and innovation. However, effective teamwork does not emerge by chance. Instead, school leaders need to nurture and guide teams in ways that increase team problem-solving capacity and build a collective sense of efficacy.

Increasing Your Team’s Problem-Solving Capacity

1. Establish a clear purpose. High-impact teams begin with a clear understanding of the purpose of their endeavors: a shared vision of their goals and prerogatives. The importance of this starting point cannot be overemphasized, as it defines the school’s or district’s broad intentions and constrains the tendency to wander off topic. Shared vision should be the starting point for numerous school leadership efforts, including, among many others, curriculum redesign, wellness initiatives, strategic planning, and revising transportation schedules. In all of these cases, the thorough consideration of alternatives is necessary, yet must be balanced against the tendency to wander beyond the immediate needs of the situation.

As an example, let’s consider a school seeking to implement project-based learning across grade levels. To start, the principal would call the leadership team together and frame the initiative through a direct connection to the school’s commitment to providing every student with learning experiences that are engaging, rigorous, and connected to the world outside the schoolhouse. Having established purpose—the “why”—in this way, the principal would then clarify the scope of the work by identifying deliverables for the team’s report.

This might include descriptions of exemplary programs, professional development plans, piloting options, stakeholder engagement considerations, data collection protocols, and assessment strategies. The principal would also identify a timetable for the project, as well as the degree of flexibility offered to the team (e.g., the extent to which the team can make decisions without needing ratification from the principal). The clarity provided by connecting overall purpose to desired specific outcomes provides the team with direction and criteria for evaluating its success. It also reduces the likelihood of “orbiting,” the often-experienced phenomenon whereby teams meet incessantly to talk around a topic but never reach closure on it.

2. Build psychological safety and trust. Teams cannot function at optimal levels without psychological safety, the shared belief among team members that open communication is valued, risk-taking is encouraged, and recommendations will be received and evaluated with respect. Psychological safety fosters trust.

Leaders play a critical role in developing and sustaining psychological safety and trust. As role models, they must demonstrate empathy, consistency of purpose, and actions that align with their espoused values and priorities. They also need to model openness to feedback, a willingness to acknowledge mistakes, inquisitiveness, and a deep commitment to continuous improvement. Significantly, leaders must recognize that they cannot ask team members to take risks as they search for creative solutions to school problems if they, too, are not willing to take on those risks themselves.

As school leaders, we tried to remain aware that trust is difficult to build and easy to shatter. Staff often mentioned transparency as the key factor in maintaining trust, and we took this to mean placing an imperative on making our decisions and the reasoning behind as visible as possible: This includes explaining the “why” behind decisions but also the “how.” When confronted with a question that could compromise privacy or confidentiality, we acknowledged our limits, a practice that built credibility. Modeling active listening and genuine interest in the welfare of others also supported a culture of caring and collaboration.

3. Create structured protocols for decision-making. Team productivity depends on agreement about discussion and decision-making protocols. Agreed-upon procedures facilitate constructive dialogue and deliberate examination of multiple perspectives. At the same time, they promote equity by encouraging all voices to be heard and reducing the possibility that conversation is dominated by the loudest—or the most persistent—voices.

Team protocols need not be complicated, but they should be clearly stated to ensure that each team member understands what the norms look like and sound like in practice. For example, teams (both virtual and face-to-face) can establish expectations for engagement (camera on, screen-focused in the case of virtual meetings; respectful body language and avoiding emails, texts, and other distractions during in-person sessions), speaking (raising hands, round robin, equal contributions from all), and social connections (providing time for members to interact directly with each other, rather than through the team’s leader). Research suggests that these factors are more important than the individual characteristics that team members bring to the table.

In our workshops, we also emphasize the importance of team members’ agreeing to use nonjudgmental terms when responding to the comments of others, keeping contributions concise and to the point, and using imagery to help explain new ideas, as when a team member presented Rob with a quick sketch of a new arrival and dismissal traffic pattern rather than a detailed verbal explanation. Additionally, team protocols should be developed for determining when decisions require consensus and when a simple majority will suffice. As a final note, teams should build calendars that include regularly scheduled points for assessing their performance, perhaps through a reflective group process or individual, anonymous exit tickets.

4. Use a variety of data to inform decision-making. Even with a firm shared vision, team members can stray into leaning on intuition or popular opinion instead of sound consideration of key factors. To counter such tendencies, team members must develop data literacy to recognize valid, reliable data from a wide variety of sources and interpret their implications; they must also be able to recognize the limitations of “hard” data to tell the whole story.

For example, a leadership team addressing low levels of apparent student engagement in classrooms might begin by examining attendance patterns, formative assessment data, and observation reports. To fully understand the issue, the team would also need to gather qualitative data (e.g., student and faculty surveys, focus groups, individual interviews) to dig deeper and uncover root causes that could include the curriculum relevance, classroom climate, or student health and safety needs. In the end, conclusions and recommendations must be accompanied by evidence and skillfully communicated so that the reasons behind group decisions are transparent, credible, and inspiring to the stakeholders.

The collective talents of team members, operationalized and embedded in robust team processes, are needed to address the multidimensional challenges that schools confront today. Leaders who can build and support leadership teams will empower their schools to thrive in unsettled times, foster student growth and development, and continuously strengthen their school communities.