Staff Relationships and Collaboration

Shared leadership and ownership practices cultivate trust-filled staff relationships and facilitate high-quality collaboration. Fostering a sense of trust and belonging among staff not only buffers occupational stress, but also promotes job satisfaction, well-being, and engagement in shared beliefs, mindsets and goals. When staff members feel connected, well and engaged, they experience a greater sense of shared efficacy and proactively seek each other out for support. Some traditional change leadership practices (e.g., high-stakes accountability measures, exclusionary decision-making processes, and top-down improvement initiatives) can threaten this sense of well-being in adults or devalue it, exacerbating challenges, amplifying inequities, and causing the change process to slow or halt as individuals retreat from the shared effort into more comfortable, familiar or individualistic patterns of thinking and action. Strong staff relationships and collaboration ensure individuals feel part of a larger network where they are working together to solve problems and overcome obstacles (e.g., by sharing resources, valuing diversity, equity and inclusion, seeking out ideas, resolving conflicts, keeping promises, prioritizing well-being, and appreciating one another).

Through their relationships and collaboration, staff develop collective expertise in whole-child development and work toward achieving comprehensive, holistic student outcomes together in ways that mirror the physically, emotionally and identity-safe environments they seek to create for students.