From cringe to connection: Strengthening staff bonds for student success
by Verity Howorth
Director of Training
The Reach Foundation
The area of school life that leaders most commonly ask us for support in at the moment is building strong, trusting relationships ‘with families’.
We are going to write at length about the amazing work our partners across the country are doing to this end.
However, the second most common question we get asked about is how to develop strong, trusting relationships ‘between staff’.
We are going to talk about that today.
In highly pressurised, time-poor environments, the glue holding the adults together can sometimes feel like it wears thin.
Despite the inward (or not so inward!) groan induced when asked to do some sort of cringe-worthy ice-breaker during a September INSET, there is a part of us that knows it is good for us… really.
This year, many of our ‘Cradle-to-Career Partners’ have bemoaned the time they lose to sorting out disputes between staff, and many of the aspiring headteachers we work with through our ‘100s programmes’ have asked for more input and stimulus on handling tricky HR scenarios.
But these are downstream issues, resulting from a lack of upstream planning for strong relationships between colleagues.
I should also state that many colleagues also regularly report fantastic relationships between staff. This proclamation also now triggers a modicum of curiosity (read: scepticism) for me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s wonderful if people go to work and feel warm and fuzzy about their colleagues and this is important in and of itself.
But good working relationships involve some challenge, healthy critique, and constructive conflict (according to lots of people, but especially Lencioni)—and they can and should be leveraged to move an organisation towards achieving its main goal.
Without having met you, I’d hazard a guess that, if you work with young people, the outcome you strive for is probably something along the lines of ‘all children enjoying a life of choice and opportunity (regardless of their starting point in life)’.
Sadly, as we both know, this is demonstrably not the case for all children currently—with the ever-present hum of the recruitment and retention crisis providing some gloomy mood music in the background. At The Reach Foundation, we believe that all school, trust and community leaders have a moral duty to examine every possible lever available to achieve the outcome we so desire.
One of those levers is optimising how the staff we already have in the building work together, ensuring they are willing and able to stay in their roles.
That’s why we should all be curious, rigorous and strategic about building strong relationships between staff. Luckily there is a lot of literature on organisational health, many of which I’m sure you will have perused. This from Johnson, Kraft and Papay (2012) is a familiar starting point for many:
“(W)e find that stronger principal leadership, relationships among colleagues, and positive school culture predict higher median student achievement growth among schools”
Sam Crome’s, The Power of Teams is also a wonderful resource in this regard. Released in 2023, Sam does a phenomenal job of pulling together research from a range of sectors and makes it relevant for those working in schools in the UK today. I love his framework for building successful teams here:
Building on this work, and based on our partnerships over the last three years, here are three types of practices that are definitely ‘common sense but are not always common practice’.
1️⃣ Articulating a ‘story of self’ as part of your public narrative
Let’s start with Marshall Ganz. A hero of the community organising world, campaigner for Obama, and senior lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School—this is a serious person with a big idea; a ‘public narrative’ is an exercise of leadership by motivating others to join you in action on behalf of a shared purpose.
Here’s a video from Ganz’s on a specific part of the exercise; developing your ‘story of self’.
“We all have deep richness within us… we want to be seen and we want to fully see the others with whom we work.”
If all staff members had the time to reflect on, articulate and share their own ‘public narrative’, we believe that many surface behaviours would make more sense, resulting in fewer conflicts and better collaboration towards the overarching goal.
School leaders have definitely got the memo about needing vision and values, and these tend to exist somewhere on the spectrum between ‘lived’ and ‘laminated’.
But when we ask about why the individuals—the people who make our schools what they are—get up and do this work each day, folks often find it cringe-worthy (there’s that word again, let’s come back to that) or just downright impossible to articulate their own ‘public narrative’.
This is not an X-Factor sob story, exploiting moments of real or embellished personal trauma for Machiavellian gain, nor is it over-sharing in a way that gets the DSL reaching for CPOMs. But it is working out which parts of yourself you want to share in your public role as a civic leader.
Why should children, families, colleagues and the wider community trust you if they don’t really understand why you care?
A public narrative is your story, told authentically and compellingly, appropriately tailored for the audience. Crafting this may feel counter-intuitive: how can it be authentic if I practise it? But Ganz is clear. Creating your public narrative
“Requires learning a process, not writing a script. It can be learned only by telling, listening, reflecting, and telling again—over, over and over.”
Not crafting it, or worse, not even considering it, means your very best resource remains untapped. ‘The medium is the message’, they say. If we’re not enjoying our own lives of choice and opportunity, exemplifying the very goal we’re funnelling children towards, then really, what’s the point?
2️⃣ Actually being radically candid (and not just reading the book)
Secondly, and this is a biggie, so we’ll really hone in on this one, is practising having ‘difficult conversations’.
Many school leaders have read Radical Candor, Dare to Lead and others. We know that if we’re feeling frustrated, insecure, angry or unhappy in any way, as a result of something a colleague has done or said, the very best thing we can do is to talk to the person who did the thing (tpwdtt) about it. Thanks to Kim Scott, we know that we need to care personally and challenge directly to achieve positive growth and change.
Excerpt from Kim Scott’s ‘Radical Candor’
But there is a knowing-doing gap here. This is not what happens routinely.
Who hasn’t been guilty of a hushed conversation in the staffroom with a trusted confidant about ‘tpwdtt’? Or gleefully indulged in a no-holds-barred rant to a partner at home, perhaps?
So a helpful practice is to normalise those conversations. At Reach Academy Feltham, we used the acronym ‘A quick WIN’ to help with this.
A = appropriate time
Asking “Is now a good time for a quick win?” signals to a colleague that you have some feedback for them but you’re not going to bombard them with it right before they head into double maths with year 8.
W = what happened (be specific)
“I noticed that you weren’t at your spot on break duty on time yesterday—was everything OK?”. Addresses the issue head-on while assuming the best in your colleague. This approach is less likely to raise hackles and result in a knee-jerk defensive response.
I = what was the (negative) impact of this behaviour?
Following the previous example, “This meant I had to stay outside and was late to my lesson”.
N = What needs to happen next time?
That is, if either of you happens to be in this situation again. “Please could you alert me or send someone in your place?” And remember… if you have the quick win, you’ve said your part, received your apology, the thing is done: make like Elsa, and let it go.
When Beck and Tilly launched this at Reach Academy Feltham, Ed was both surprised and impressed in equal measure with the ECT who asked him to tidy his coffee cups from her desk.
Another school we work with calls it ‘picking up your tab’. You wouldn’t wander over to a friend in a bar and tell them to go and pay for the drinks you ordered. Nor should grown adults be asking their line managers to sort out minor disagreements within teams.
Whatever you call it, make it a ‘thing’. Give it a name. A name that isn’t ‘difficult conversations’. Because they’re not difficult, they’re part of being a human. They’re developmental.
Plan a launch in September and implement it like you would anything else. Do some scenario practice. Make sure everyone knows you—as a leader, a person with status and power in the organisation—are expecting people to come and have quick wins with you ASAP.
Make light of how everyone has to have one by Friday.
And there’ll be a prize for the best one at October half term.
Praise the people who are having those conversations and narrate their success.
Then measure the impact of this: carefully track the time you’re spending on resolving staff disputes compared to last year. Check-in with a half-termly staff survey. Follow up with some 1:1s. Revisit during the January and June INSET days.
This may just prevent tiny irritations from becoming major resentments.
Another helpful phrase comes from Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead and ‘the story I’m telling myself is’.
When I first heard this, it was like a magic wand. It means you can take your (perhaps) irrational worries, insecurities, and frustrations and put them to tpwdtt in a way they can respond to.
‘The story I’m telling myself is that you’re really disappointed in this piece of work and therefore you regret ever hiring me in the first place’
‘The story I’m telling myself is that I didn’t get that promotion because you don’t see the work I put in behind the scenes.’
‘The story I’m telling myself is that you are assuming I will do the extra work during evenings and weekends, which I don’t have the appetite or capacity for.’
Again, this is not new information, but there is a knowing-doing gap in schools in this area.
Maybe the days are so frantic that it’s challenging to find the time in the moment, and then the moment has passed.
Perhaps there is a fear (justified or not) that if you are seen to be critical, you will get a reputation for being unkind.
It could be that you’re worried that tpwdtt could even go off sick because they feel harassed by you.
Whatever the reason—and please know that I am only saying this because I do care personally—the reason isn’t good enough to not hold each other to account if we’re not meeting the highest standards we set out for ourselves and for our work.
Which brings me to the final common practice that happens routinely in community organising, and which gets a (brilliant) chapter in Sam Crome’s aforementioned book.
3️⃣ Holding values-led debriefs
The idea of a debrief is to schedule a short amount of time (research says they’re 18 minutes on average) following a specific piece of work to have a reflective conversation that leads to learning for the team and its future endeavours.
Sam talks about how this needs to be both positive and purposeful; he recommends focusing on a process, not an outcome, such as following a recently implemented policy or curriculum change. I also posit that a debrief after an important event, like a parents’ evening, would be beneficial.
Sam draws on research from Tannenbaum and Cerasoli (2013) and others to show that this process can make teams more effective. I agree, and my final pitch here is that this practice could be a bit of a game-changer in strengthening relationships between staff, as well as giving further opportunities for the team to reorient themselves towards the mission and values of the organisation.
I promised to come back to our national aversion to cringe.
I’ve recently read ‘Fully Alive’ by fellow Relationship Collective member Elizabeth Oldfield. I love her line on this:
“I have to resist my own internal cringe, because cringe is a terrible indicator of what is actually important.”
No matter how ‘cringey’ or ‘fluffy’ we find it to actively work on staff relationships, we can’t ignore this highly effective lever in our quest to ensure all children get to live lives of choice and opportunity.
