Tool: Establishing Team Roles

Instructions: Listed in the following template are five roles—(1) team leader, (2) challenger, (3) producer, (4) encourager, and (5) realist—that all collaborative teams need if they are going to be productive. Working together, record all members of your team who have the skills and dispositions to fill each role. That way, you can maximize your collaborative potential by ensuring that all members are doing work that matches both their personalities and their professional abilities. Remember that on small teams, some members may need to fill more than one role.

Name of Role

Team Leader Description of Role

• Organizes agendas for weekly meetings • Addresses conflict between team members • Leads consensus-building conversations • Keeps the team focused on yearly goals

Skills Necessary for Filling Role

Strong relationship builder Good sense of the overall direction of both the team and the school Willingness to listen to all perspectives Commitment to seeing everyone move forward together

Members Suited for Filling Role

Team Challenger

• Challenges the current practices of the learning team • Contributes to or leads brainstorming of new alternatives and approaches worth considering • Regularly asks, “What if we tried ?” when the team is working to generate new ideas Strong professional knowledge base and learning network to draw ideas from Good sense of the professional strengths and weaknesses of the learning team Ability to look at data summarizing the team’s current reality and offer logical suggestions for next steps

Team Producer

Team Encourager

Team Realist

• Takes notes during meetings • Develops a logical system for organizing the team’s shared documents

• Produces first drafts of shared documents for the team’s review • Finds ways to accurately communicate team decisions

• Provides words of encouragement and affirmation both during and beyond weekly meetings • Moves the team forward during moments of stagnation or apathy • Monitors the attitudes and workloads of individual members and provides support when necessary

• Evaluates team decisions against the current workload of the team • Questions team decisions that seem unrealistic or impossible to pull off • Gives voice to concerns that might otherwise go unspoken Skilled with all kinds of document creation: Google Docs, PowerPoints, PDFs, and so on Logical thinker with strong organizational skills Good at listening to and summarizing ideas generated in group conversations Able to participate in conversations and create content at the same time

Generally optimistic; skilled at finding things worth celebrating regardless of the circumstance Strong relationships with—and genuine concern for—all members of the team Willingness to always find time to lend a hand when others need help

Ability to understand the work capacity of the learning team Strong sense of all the different projects and initiatives that the team is currently tackling Ability to express skepticism, concern, and doubt in a professional way

Questions for Reflection

Are there any roles that your team will have no trouble filling? How will that help your team?

Are there any roles that will be difficult for your team to fill? How might that hurt your team?

Do you think that rotating team roles is important? Why or why not? How would rotating team roles help your team? How would rotating roles hurt your team?

Are there any roles that aren’t listed here that you think your team will need in order to be successful? What are they? Why are those roles important for your team?