Excellence in education leadership

Education Sector

Learn how the 6 Conditions framework is bringing energy, alignment, and leadership excellence to the work of new superintendents in public education.

6 Team Conditions worked with the Holdsworth Center to coach a dozen new superintendents in public education on how to build a great leadership team. With this knowledge, and bolstered by peer learning teams, these education leaders are aligning their teams to tackle barriers to student success and build ever more innovative and equitable schools.

The Holdsworth Center aspires to create a healthy ecosystem for students and teachers to thrive by developing extraordinary school leaders in public schools in Texas. Their flagship program brings the best of leadership development practice to individuals stepping into the superintendent role for the first time.

These new superintendents must forge effective executive teams from seasoned leaders that together can transform systems for student success. 6 Team Conditions partnered with the Holdsworth Center for their flagship program to bring the science and art of team leadership to these education leaders.

Teaching leaders to design great teams

Our approach started outside-in, asking leaders:  What do you aspire to achieve for the students in your district? How can a great team help you with that?  The first step in leading a great team is designing it well for the work it needs to do.  

We led in-person sessions to connect the work of a district leadership team to their aspirations for students, and conducted interactive lectures and live consultations to teach team design thinking in a practical way.  Our online slf-paced course supplemented these sessions and guided leaders through a high-quality design of their teams.

Peer and expert coaching in launching teams

Through guided dialogues with peers and team experts, we supported each leader to plan a relaunch of their executive teams at the start of the new school year, breathing life into their excellent team designs.  

New superintendents did not take this journey alone.  With our master practitioners’ support, these leaders tested their ideas and experimented with new approaches to leading their teams. We also helped them invent practices for their teams that focused on multiple desired outcomes at once: How can these teams serve students well and be supportive contexts for developing leadership capacity?   

Setting them up for long-term success

Halfway through the school year, each leader conducted a Team Diagnostic Survey(™) to measure the effectiveness of their teams and the quality of their design and implementation.  Coached by our master practitioners and their peers, they led conversations with their teams to assess how fit-for-purpose their design and work practices were for meeting the challenges of their school systems.  

With their teams, they identified points to celebrate about their mission-critical accomplishments and key priorities for team development.  Armed with data and a set of reliable practices for coaching, they continued their own development journey by building the self-coaching capacities of their teams.

Supporting superintendents, principals and students

6 Team Conditions focuses on a team’s performance for their stakeholders and building a team where leaders grow and learn. With this perspective built into their teams, leaders were able to shift siloed thinking and action to an aligned portfolio of interventions and policies to support school principals and their faculty to enhance student achievement.

Touching 1,100,000 student lives

Our leadership development programs, which offer the science of great teams with a blended learning approach, real-time coaching of groups of leaders, and informative, reliable assessments and team leadership practices answer that need in a scaleable way.  In two cohorts alone, we touch the school experiences of more than a million children and their families.