Excellence with Elephants

Chalfont Saint Peter School, where the French Revolution has been in full swing with a mostly home grown production of Heads you Lose, a musical based on A Tale of Two Cities. They sang me the finale in assembly and it was tremendously vibrant, rollicking and powerful.
Lots of things in this school are vibrant, rollicking and powerful — the place is humming. They do whole school exploration projects about other parts of the world, most recently Japan and India, that really draw children into music and art as well as geography and culture. They engage intelligently with global social responsibility concerns that some schools chicken out of. Various learning areas sported Indian elephants, but this African one caught my eye.

Languages are alive and well, including Spanish as well as French. Readers were excellent on every level, including world classics as well as more standard primary school fare. Sport of all kinds is thriving, and this school seems to have made a bit of a habit of winning national gymnastics championships. Naturally, most work is done in classic form groups (20-30), but I saw really focussed learning going on in groups of various sizes between 2 and 90! The school’s relationship with the parish, including its inspirational Vicar, Charles Overton, is warm and fruitful.

The use of the building is really enterprising. Victorian school room roof space, usually left for dead in schools, has been turned into an excellent computer learning zone — the picture shows only the smaller of two fully networked suites.

Great school — great head. It’s not rocket science. John Underwood has been there 16 years, is really committed, and although he shuns Dilbert slogans about “teamwork” he does have a way of getting colleagues to work together so as to bring the best out of everybody. Talking through how staff plan whole school work together, and seeing how they share material using laptops and interactive whiteboards, I began to understand how the school achieves its very high all round standards. The buzz that produces it comes from maximising every individual’s potential and valuing their contribution, staff or student. Lots of people talk dirty about this sort of thing — CSP has raised it to an art form!

Aircrew or Snakes on a plane?

In every area of life Teams draw the best out of people and get the job done better. Sadly, many teams aren’t really teams — just clumps, playing out their inability to get on together, and fouling each other up. That really matters if the Benedictine principle that best discipleship comes through community works. It does.

Linda Gratton and Tamara Erickson have published a helpful (current) HBR article on Eight ways to build Collaborative Teams. Biggest foul ups?

1. Size — too big in business (too small in Church?)
2. Badly managed diversity
   
3. Virtual working: doing most things by email rather than personally
   
4. Herding Cats: High education levels and overactive Egos

With a spiritual twist, these foul-ups can be radically upsetting and intractible. You end up with a team that isn't a team, just the Vicar’s fan club — or, even worse, anti-fan club. So what? Gratton and Erickson suggest eight ways of fighting back and making your team a real team:

1. Investing in an environment to support real teamwork — in business, designing working space appropriately. In Church, taking the pews out (in various senses).
2. Modelling collaborative behaviour — The same issue in any context. Leaders and senior staff have to do what they commend to every one else. Just do it.
   
3. Creating a gift culture — supporting social and professional networks, and mentoring. In Church growing cultures of generosity rather than a demoralising rationing mentality that kills off all joy.
4. Training to raise emotional intelligence. Good news — anyone can acquire people skills if they work at it. Bad news — they have to work at it. Focused learning works infinitely better in this area than happenstance and good intentions.
5. Working to grow a strong sense of community. People often look to churches for community, but it has to be worked at hard, especially in dormitory communities of pressurised people. ‘Christians are people who pray and have parties.’ (Bishop Jack Nicholls)
   
6. Assigning leaders who are task and relationship orientated. Brits tend to be task driven and relationship weak (stand offish and/or implicit).
7. Building on heritage relationships. In business, putting people who know each other together. In Church, bearing in mind the baggage, and using positive baggage to hold luggage that needs transporting. Also, avoiding year zero thinking, and using the (usually abundant) history for blessing and enrichment not cursing and limiting possibilities.
   
8. Role Clarity/ Task ambiguity. With fuzzy generalised idealistic expectations, and the way they load all accountability on to the few, along with their tendency to no agreed metrics and high judgmentalism, churches are almost conspiracies to foster Role ambiguity and Task Clarity!

So, team ministry or ministry team, ask:

• Is our team a team?
  
• How is this so?
• If not, why not?
  
• What's the single thing I can do to make us more what we say we are?

First Day Leadership Summit Top Four learning points Day 1

A very high quality learning day, beginning with a brilliantly graphic and moving Video/rap production that told the story of Church as lived reality. Sadly it doesn't seem to be on Youtube... yet! It's called Fast Forward

1. Activist Leaders don't like it, but the only way to cast visions that amount to anything is PROCESS. Solo "Mount Sinai" styles of vision casting make people feel undervalued. They undervalue people and wreck teams!
   Bill Hybels
   
   
2. The Hireling looks just like the good Shepherd (the one with ownership, for whom it's personal) and in normal circumstances may well do pretty much the same things. When things hot up, the differences of motive and outlook will show up. The single most determining factor in people owning the vision is whether they really believe you own it. They'll only take a bullett for it if they believe you will...
   Bill Hybels
   
   
3. Carly Fiorina talked us through her famous HP Shenanigans, with a moving clarity, honesty, and realism. She seemed remarkably calm unrancorous. The core of leadership was about Character and authenticity. It requires both passion and dispassion. She also raised some teasing gender issues around work and business. There is gift in everything, if only we will see it.
   Carly Fiorina
   
   
4. Marcus Buckingham rekindled my interest in the positive psychology movement, and basing my view of people on their strengths, not their weaknesses. He drew attention to three ghastly lies, and the truth about them:

• RUBBISH — "As you grow your personality changes"
  TRUTH — "As you grow you become more of who you really are"
  
  
• RUBBISH — "You grow most in your areas of greatest weakness"
  TRUTH — "You grow most in your areas of greatest strength."
  
  
• RUBBISH — "Working as a team requires I lay aside my strength and do whatever it takes to help the team."
  TRUTH — "The best way to help the team is to volunteer your strength to the Team as a resource"
  
  This has radical implications for Ministry Review schemes, and for the way we take responsibility for our own development. It's important not to infantilise people, but to build people's sense of responsibility for their own growth. Emergencies apart, we need to play to our strengths, not centre our attention on remedial action.

I also got a new Pat Lencioni book with a kind of Joy at Work theme — a must read for plane trip home.