Jane is failing. Ever since the start of the new school year, her performance levels have fallen dramatically, her classes have become battlegrounds and her self-confidence is now at an all-time low.

Her fellow teachers know this is happening. But so far, not one of those colleagues has stepped in to help.

This is just one sign that the team dynamic is failing. Flick through any of the thousands of management books out there and you can read dense chapters offering advice on how to encourage teamwork and build healthy team/group dynamics so that, for example, not only do people like Jane get the help from leadership that they need, but also colleagues are able to spot an issue and are willing and able to lend support.

So what, as a school leader, do you need to know to ensure a positive team dynamic?

What do we mean when we talk about team/group dynamics?

Team dynamics are essentially the interactions between team members, according to Stephen Humphrey, professor of management in the department of management and organisation at Pennsylvania State University. “It is how we get along,” he says. “It is how we coordinate our actions. It is whether we have conflict. It is the social support we provide each other when our boss is being a jerk or the job is getting stressful.”

What are the signs of a bad team dynamic?

If you are keeping a close eye on your team, you should be able to spot signs of dysfunction relatively early.“Perhaps the members [of these teams] don’t get along, perhaps they can’t figure out how to coordinate, perhaps they get along so well that they forgot to get their work done - this is usually the team that celebrate every tiny victory by going to the pub,” explains Humphrey. “All of these situations are a breakdown in team dynamics.”

It could also be that the team has reverted to following the lead of “high-status” team members - for instance, someone who came from the “right” university or is the boss’ child - even if they’re not the most knowledgeable or capable. Or you might have two team members whose personality clash is poisoning the whole team, breaking down communication, preventing the whole team from communicating or trusting each other.

All this is usually not down to the people in that team being bad at their jobs.

“Nearly every story about a bad team isn’t that the team is formed of incompetent people - though that occasionally happens - but rather that the team dynamics break down,” says Humphrey.

In a business context, poor team dynamics quickly have monetary impact. Alex DiLeonardo, partner at management consultancy firm McKinsey and Company, explains how a global sales organisation found that the biggest predictor of new-hire revenue generation was getting the team dynamics right. “This accounted for almost 30 per cent in top-line growth,” he says.

DiLeonardo also highlights a multinational bank client, which found that the biggest predictors of employee turnover related to the team construct. “Getting this right accounted for a 50 per cent reduction in attrition,” he says.

In schools, the impact might be a dip in pupil performance or teacher performance, a competitive culture among the team, increasing workload for staff, teachers looking for jobs elsewhere, a contagion of bad feeling that spreads to other teams - basically, a lot of bad news for all involved.

So, how do you get team dynamics right?

Ultimately, as a leader, it is your job to prevent teams from getting into this state, and to solve the issues quickly if they do. Here’s what the research suggests you should be doing:

1. Get the hiring right

The hiring and management of teams clearly has a significant impact on “outcomes”, suggests DiLeonardo. “On hiring, we are finding that testing for culture and team fit are worthwhile practices during the recruiting and on-boarding process. One global technology player with which we partnered found that it was able to segment new-joiners into one of four cultural archetypes upon entering the organisation.”

Humphrey agrees. “Usually, teams are brought together based on who we have available, or purely based upon unique skill requirements. Yet we do not often consider how people are going to get along when putting teams together. Put the time in to consider [relationships], whether the team will have an emergent leader that dominates the interactions, and, if so, is he/she the right one to lead, and whether they have anyone with the capability to manage conflict that will invariably arise.”

2. Get the basics right

Humphrey says it is vitally important that teams actively participate in setting the ground rules for success: everyone should talk about what they want out of the team, what they expect others to do, what their own capabilities are and then put all of this into some form of agreed charter.

“Even simple versions of this help,” says Humphrey. “A recent study showed that having a surgical team spend 30 seconds before a surgery to introduce themselves and talk about process expectations resulted in fewer mistakes in surgery.”

If you are the one putting the team together, you should be part of this process and ensure that everyone’s voice is heard.

3. Regularly review the team dynamic

If you are in charge, you should be regularly checking in with the team via 121s and surveys, and analysing data and observations to ensure that the team is working effectively. In addition, the team should be reviewing their own dynamic regularly, discussing what is working and what is not.

“The US military has leaned heavily into this idea, where they try to extract reasons for success and failure from each team mission, so that the members can bring knowledge about the process to the next team they are in,” says Humphrey. “If teams fail because we don’t know how to operate successfully in them, spending some time talking about and reflecting on each success and failure is a winning strategy.”

4. Model what you want to see

Finally, imitation is one of the most powerful forms of learning, so if your leadership team get team dynamics right, those teams that work under them should, too. If the deputy heads are at war and an associate headteacher is dominating every discussion, don’t be surprised if the departments under their leadership start acting similarly.

Likewise, if no one in your leadership team helps a person in that team who is struggling, then it’s unlikely that when someone like Jane is struggling in the maths department, her colleagues will pick her up before the problem comes to the notice of those higher up the chain of command.

Simon Creasey is a freelance journalist

This article originally appeared in the 20 SEPTEMBER 2019 issue under the headline “How to create a winning team the dynamic way”