Los distritos de la escuela de América están en un cruce de determinar si dependerán de gran líderes para transformarse las escuelas o si reconocerán y desposarán un liderazgo distribuido (Spillane y el Diamante, 2007) perspectiva. ¿Pero qué hace falta para construir la capacidad de liderazgo con equipos de gran rendimiento en escuelas contemporáneas? Convocar un grupo es relativamente fácil. Aunque individuos en grupos sean conscientes del uno al otro, interactúen con el uno al otro, y piensen en sí mismos como un grupo, los equipos son diferentes en que influyen realmente el uno al otro hacia el logro de un objetivo organizativo (Diamante y Diamante, 2007). Más específicamente, los equipos son considerados como individuos unieron para lograr objetivos y objetivos comunes. El trabajo de equipos es considerado generalmente ser acciones conjuntas que permiten a cada persona para contribuir a los objetivos y objetivos aunque ellos quizás tengan habilidades diferentes, los intereses, las opiniones, y maneras de expresión. Tal diversidad los permite realizar mucho más allá de logros individuales. Con la presión aumentada para dirigir las escuelas con estudiantes que son cada vez más diversos en la cultura, la posición económica y estilos de aprendizaje, líderes de siglo XXI deben ser obligados para construir la capacidad de liderazgo a través de sus escuelas con alto- los equipos de desempeño.

America’s school districts are at a crossroads of determining if they will rely on great leaders to transform schools or whether they will recognize and espouse a distributed leadership (Spillane and Diamond, 2007) perspective. But what will it take to build leadership capacity with high-performance teams in contemporary schools? Convening a group is relatively easy. Even though individuals in groups are aware of one another, interact with one another, and think of themselves as a group, teams are different in that they actually influence one another toward the accomplishment of an organizational objective (Diamond and Diamond, 2007). More specifically, teams are regarded as individuals united to achieve common goals and objectives. The work of teams is generally considered to be joint actions that allow each person to contribute to the goals and objectives even though they might have different skills, interests, opinions, and ways of expression. Such diversity allows them to perform above and beyond individual accomplishments. With increased pressure to lead schools with students that are increasingly diverse in culture, economic standing and learning styles, 21^st century leaders should be compelled to build leadership capacity throughout their schools with high- performance teams.

This paper tells the story of the state of collaboration among school leaders as reported by three sections of candidates enrolled in a pre-service leadership program. Candidates examined Lencioni’s (2002) components of effective teaming (trust, conflict, commitment, accountability and results) to determine the collaborative efforts in their schools. Candidates also identified the leadership style of their school principals as it relates to the effectiveness of an academic team. The results of the study indicate that the vast work to be done in schools beckons a proliferation of leadership (Fullan, 2006) among the ranks of key, internal stakeholders.

School districts traditionally teem with transactional leaders and staff isolation. With today’s strident pleas for transformational leadership, however, school personnel are duty-bound to segue into collaborative communities for the purposes of student achievement and overall school improvement. The conceptual framework for collaboration and community among school leadership teams is corroborated in the body of work on professional learning communities (DuFour, DuFour, and Eaker, 2008). The concept of professional learning communities has three big ideas, one of which is a culture of collaboration. Professional learning communities are deemed to be powerful teamwork that is systematic, analyzes and improves learning, and leads to higher levels of academic achievement. With the understanding that the work of schools is distributed across multiple school personnel, school leaders should ensure that everyone belongs to and is functioning effectively in a team (DuFour, DuFour & Eaker, 2008; Fullan, 2006).

With the demands on school principals, it is becoming increasingly evident that a school leader alone cannot transform a school. Nonetheless, districts have been too dependent upon principals for the success of schools. In the face of compelling evidence and best practices, many school principals and teachers continue to work in isolation (DuFour, DuFour, and Eaker, 2008). Therefore, emerging school administrators must learn to develop teacher-leaders and work with them to expand leadership capacity and engender organizational intelligence (Perkins, 2003) for the collective purposes of the school.

One of the key elements of a collaborative school culture is that of trust. The results of Bryk and Schneider’s (2003) study indicated that in schools characterized by high relational trust, educators were more likely to experiment with new practices and work together to advance improvements. Moreover, they saw teachers learning from one another, saw collective decision making with broad teacher buy-in, as well as reform initiatives being diffused broadly across the school. Most significantly, those schools were more likely to demonstrate marked improvements in student learning. In contrast, low-trust schools showed evidence of sustained controversy and were rarely able to resolve relatively simple problems. Besides, schools with weak trust relations saw virtually no improvement in their reading or mathematics scores. In essence, low performing schools were almost always low-trust schools whereas high-performing schools were almost always high-trust schools. Trust, then, can be considered to be a key determinant in reducing the sense of risk associated with change and therefore a powerful discriminator between improving and non-improving schools (Bryk & Schneider, 2003).

When trust is reinforced, team members can debate issues more fruitfully and in turn resolve and manage conflict more effectively. However, the first step in dealing with conflict is to realize that conflict is not innately negative. Conflict fosters self knowledge in that it can push individuals to closely examine their goals, help them understand the things that are most important, sharpen their focus, and enhance their effectiveness (Mind Tools, 2009). Since teams inevitably face conflict, their challenge is to take advantage of the opportunities inherent within conflict to strengthen mutual respect and a renewed faith in their ability to work together.

Organizational researchers and social psychologists have determined that individuals have varying levels of organizational commitment (Hahn, 2007; Kanter, 1993; and Smith, 2008). Kanter (1993) suggested that commitment is a personal promise of action and is determined by whether organizations are structured for employee empowerment. Without the ability to air their opinions in the course of passionate and open debate, team members rarely, if ever, buy-in and commit to decisions, even though they may feign agreement during meetings (Hahn, 2007). People become committed to an organization to the extent that they perceive some beneficial or equitable exchange relationship and thereby dispense their capacity to act in ways that meet the organization's goals and interests (Smith, 2008).

Holding others accountable when commitments are broken is difficult if there is little trust, if there is fear of conflict, or if there is little commitment. Rather than eliciting the resistance that accompanies accountability, people tend to feign compliance, remind others of the limitations of their job description, justify inaction, excuse ineffectiveness, and even rationalize poor performance (Quantum Learning Solutions, n.d.). To reduce such behaviors, teams must be taught to recognize when they are acting accountably, and when they are not. These strategies might liberate team members to move away from casting aspersions and toward greater personal accountability. A culture of accountability empowers employees to overcome their challenges, excuses, and biases to build morale and at the same time call their peers on actions that seem counterproductive to the good of the team’s goals in order to produce desired results (Bryk & Schneider, 2003; Lencioni, 2002; and Perkins, 2003).

The Leadership Institute (2005) suggested that the results organizations receive are almost always the consequence of a dual design of structure and people. They noted that proper structure, plan, goals, and the right employee skills are important in the quest for peak performance but organizations must also give attention to matters of the heart. One of the best strategies for improving results, according to Filson (2005), is connecting with people's deepest, heartfelt hopes and dreams. As contemporary leaders must demonstrate effective leadership traits and achieve results, they must be able to motivate individuals to behave in ways that are profitable to the organization (Ulrich, 1999).

School leadership programs should prepare candidates for the full scope of leadership challenges and opportunities that lay ahead. Future school administrators will be leading complex organizations where pervasive leadership capacity and organizational intelligence are essential. This would include team leadership. Transformational leadership (Bass, 1990; Burns, 1978; Flumerfelt, 2006) is viewed as one of the means by which school cultures can segue into professional learning communities for the purposes of student achievement and overall school improvement (DuFour, DuFour, and Eaker, 2008). Transactional leadership, to the contrary, focuses on leadership as a transaction where goals are clarified, agreements are made, and contingent reinforcement is provided to followers for carrying out their assignments. Although these kinds of transactions can be constructive, they are not thought to be as effective as transformational leadership in the context of functional teams.

Three sections of students, enrolled in a pre-service leadership program, explored essential leadership knowledge and skills in their training to establish and sustain fully functional school-based teams. The students engaged in a discussion of Lencioni’s (2002) Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable. Although the book was written from a business perspective, it was chosen for the presentation of the following fundamental principles for functional teams: 1) trust, 2) healthy conflict, 3) commitment, 4) accountability, and 5) attending to results. These principles are applicable in any setting where teams of people have been charged to participate as professional learning communities. Additionally, Lencioni (2002) provided a questionnaire that could be used to identify dysfunctions a team may experience in order to assist with making improvements. After the book study, the following assignment was given: Part 1 was for each candidate to survey an academic team in their school and use the results to analyze their effectiveness and make recommendations to improve the team’s performance in ways that nurture a professional learning community and support the school’s vision/mission. Part 2 was for candidates to identify the leadership style of the school principal using one of two descriptors, transactional or transformational, and evaluate the principal’s impact on the team’s effectiveness.

Data were gathered using the Team Assessment included in Lencioni’s book and included 15 statements about team behaviors (see Appendix A). The scale used to indicate how the statements applied to the participant’s team was 3 for usually, 2 for sometimes, and 1 for rarely. The scoring table was used to compute the team’s mean score for each of the five dysfunctions (see Appendix B). The characteristics of the five dysfunctions are:

A team’s mean “score of 8 or 9 indicates that the dysfunction is not a problem; a score of 6 or 7 indicates a probability that the dysfunction could be a problem; a score of 3 to 5 is probably an indication that the dysfunction needs to be addressed” (Lencioni, 2002, p. 194).

Based upon Lencioni’s scoring table, mean scores in the 6 to 7 range would indicate that a dysfunction could be a problem, and mean scores ranging from 3 to 5 would be an indication that the dysfunction needs to be addressed. The reported range of the mean scores from all the teams surveyed suggests that the teams were not high-performing teams. Moreover, the dysfunctions of Avoidance of Accountability and Inattention to Results consistently received the lowest mean scores for all analyses conducted in this study. According to Lencioni (2002), if dysfunctions four and five are identified, team members trusting each other may be problem. Trust, as described by Lencioni (2002), is possible “only when team members are truly comfortable being exposed to one another that they begin to act without concern for protecting themselves” (p. 196). Furthermore, trust is the foundation upon which all other team functions are built. This corroborates that until trust is established at a fully functional level (a score range of 8 to 9), team members will find it difficult to hold one another accountable and to attend to results.

Three noteworthy trends were observed with regards to the team descriptors. In particular, each of the dysfunctions was found in all small teams, in all high school teams, and in all teacher only teams. There are several issues to consider. Working on a small team, of three to five members, has advantages and disadvantages. While camaraderie is more easily established in small groups, such congeniality may make it more difficult to confront one’s peers and therefore team results may go unmet. High school teachers are typically isolated due to the departmental structure that is traditionally found in high schools. With that structure they are less likely to have time that is officially set aside for teaming and therefore might have much less experience functioning as teams. Perhaps teacher-only teams need more direction, oversight, and wide-reaching perspective to ensure that they remain positive and goal-focused. These results suggest that individuals who are expected to operate effectively in teams must be trained, given the proper structure, and perhaps greater relational and leadership attention in order to avoid team dysfunctions.

With these considerations, school leaders could also model their teams after those group categories where widespread dysfunction was not found. Those teams in this study included grade-level teams, elementary and middle school teams, medium sized teams, and those teams with a combination of teachers, administrators, and/or others. For instance, elementary and middle school structures lend themselves to teaming much like grade-level teaming initiatives. Medium-sized teams are large enough to distribute work more evenly, and they have a greater chance of not being as closely-knit as smaller teams. This affords medium-sized team members the confidence to hold one another accountable. Teams with school leaders, by virtue of their everyday responsibilities, feel the weight of accountability and understand the futility of justifying inaction, excusing ineffectiveness, or rationalizing poor performance. These data may suggest that small teams, high school teams, and teacher-only teams require more training, a proper structure, and relational and leadership attention to become functional teams. However, the data presented in this study do not imply that all teams resembling these characteristics experience similar dysfunctions.

According to the results of the team study, the characteristics of the transformational leadership style should be noted and valued as the style that is most conducive for sustaining functional school-based teams. Transformational leadership has the potential to establish a school culture where teams are able to perform in a highly functional state. The transformational leader capitalizes on the soft skills (Fleenor, 2003) of leadership by focusing on building positive relationships, a climate of trust, and a commitment to the team’s work. Finally, the transformational leader is better able to build the capacity for shared leadership in a school setting where team members are empowered to trust one another, to engage in unfiltered conversations, to commit to their efforts, to hold one another accountable, and to attend to the results of their work.

So, what does it take to build high performance school-based teams? As noted, there is a passel of research on building functional teams. However, the answer is two-fold: one building block concerns the structure of teams while the other element relates to the people populating the teams.

Forming high performance teams begins with the structure of teams. This includes thoughtful consideration of team composition, team size, and organizational support such as continuous training on teaming, designing master schedules that accommodate common planning time, and the measures for oversight that detect warning signals of distress to provide direction and attention as needed. In essence, constructing high performance teams requires integrative thinking that takes into account not only the desired outcomes, but all the intricate activities, behaviors, and situations along the journey.

The other and most challenging element of building high performance teams concerns the business of people. When requiring people to collaborate, a culture of trust must be cultivated as the cornerstone of team functionality. Trust allows a team of diverse individuals to view conflict as a way to push deeper into issues for the best outcomes and to freely voice their opinions which is needed for commitment and accountability so they will have less tolerance for inaction, ineffectiveness, and poor performance. Instead they will function effectively to achieve the deepest, heartfelt hopes, and dreams of the team.

Just as a winning athletic coach does not convene players, send them out, and tell them to win, school leaders cannot simply appoint school personnel to teams and expect functional teaming to occur. Much like the winning coach who teaches, supports, mends injuries, practices, monitors, encourages, redirects, builds a collective thought process, celebrates victories, learns from defeat, observes diligently, and motivates, so must school leaders in order to lead fully functional, winning teams. What does it take to build high performance school-based teams? It takes synergetic leadership that affords smart people to become smart groups (Perkins, 2003). Using collaborative structures and transformative leadership, school personnel can be released to append their individual intelligence with the power of team intelligence.

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Scoring: Combine your scores for the preceding statements as indicated below.