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June 27, 2024
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SUMMARY:
Reflecting on nine years leading the Schusterman Fellowship, Colleen Cruikshank, the Director of the leadership development program, offers four ways her team nurtured a workplace culture that kept team members engaged and fulfilled, encouraging them to grow alongside the leaders they supported.
For nine years, I’ve helped lead the Schusterman Fellowship, an 18-month leadership development program designed to support exceptional Jewish leaders in building and sustaining Jewish nonprofits and Israeli civil society. This month, the Fellowship program is coming to an end, and my team and I are feeling immensely grateful and proud of what we accomplished. Together, we engaged nearly 200 Jewish leaders from 12 countries and developed a unique curriculum and philosophy that we offered to the field of leadership development.
We also built and tended to our own team culture. Running the Fellowship put us in the unique position of “leading leaders,” and we felt a responsibility to join our Fellows in practicing the leadership competencies we were teaching. We didn’t always get it right, but working to embody the program’s philosophy helped us build a stronger team.
The Fellows noticed. Over the years, I heard repeatedly from Fellows how inspired they were by our team dynamic. They could feel the care and attention we gave to each other and to each of them, and it made their experience in the program and their own leadership better. This, above all compliments, moved me the most.
I’d like to claim our culture evolved organically, but the truth is we put deliberate effort into building a team dynamic that would sustain us and help us grow alongside our talented participants. And while I could list many practices that kept our team engaged and fulfilled in our work, it’s the following four that formed the core of our team’s culture.
Embrace everyone's contributions.
Amy Edmonson of the Harvard Business School found that the most effective teams are ones that feel safe to take risks, share new ideas, express their concerns and admit their mistakes.
This is the kind of culture I wanted for my team. So, together, we took steps to ensure everyone felt comfortable contributing their honest perspectives and creativity no matter their role.
For instance, we spoke during meetings in reverse order of seniority (an exercise initiated by Joe Goldberg, then a Program Assistant and now Chief of Staff to a U.S. congressman). We also abided by a “no fester” rule; if something one of us did or said wasn’t sitting well with another member of the team, they were encouraged to reach out to that teammate within 48 hours to share how they felt and work toward a resolution.
Rather than restrict ourselves to one-way feedback between a manager and their direct reports, we wanted to leave all lanes of feedback wide open as a way to build trust and hold each other accountable.
Indeed, many of the ideas for our team’s core democratic practices came from team members themselves. You will see me credit them for their work throughout this article both to celebrate their contributions and to remind us all that the sources of excellent ideas deserve to be named and honored. I encourage you to assess your team’s level of comfort voicing their thoughts and feedback and then work to surface and encourage new ideas. This takes time, but even small moments of genuine listening and curiosity from leaders will signal to employees that their contributions are valued, respected and expected.
Running the Fellowship put us in the unique position of “leading leaders,” and we felt a responsibility to join our Fellows in practicing the leadership competencies we were teaching.
Embrace shared values.
One of the best moves we made as a team was identifying a set of common values to guide our daily interactions and long-term goals.
We were lucky that we had a built-in resource perfect for this purpose, and chose to adopt the leadership competency model that we used in the Schusterman Fellowship program—a set of seven skills and traits—as our own roadmap for how to operate. Embracing “resiliency,” for example, gave us permission to step away from our desks for a fitness class or a coffee with a colleague and return with renewed energy.
Similarly, we applied our team values to our recruitment process for new Fellows. Anyu Silverman (formerly a Program Officer, now a Program Manager at the Anti-Defamation League) created a comprehensive recruitment guide that ensured our team could live up to the standards we set for ourselves during one of the most demanding, collaborative and high stakes aspects of our work.
Of course, not every team will have a shared set of values at the ready—but all teams can take the time to define what it means to be a good teammate. Try drawing from your organization’s mission or core beliefs to guide your daily interactions and see you through tricky moments. Invoke your chosen values regularly. Teach them to new teammates. And don’t be afraid to update your lexicon as your team and goals evolve.
Embrace clarity.
Even a small team can lose sight of each other’s efforts and workflows amid day-to-day demands. I gathered our team once-per-quarter to review who was doing what so we could all see the bigger picture. As a manager, this also allowed me to open conversations about which work felt interesting and which felt tedious, discuss possible stretch assignments and identify opportunities for collaboration. It also helped us to maintain clarity, which facilitated greater autonomy, efficiency and understanding across our team.
In between these quarterly meetings, we kept each other informed and accountable by using a shared project management system (introduced to our team by Logan Kramer, Program Associate). And each time we took on a new project or a new member joined our team, we created a DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributor, Informed) model to align on our workstreams.
However you choose to practice clarity with your team, I recommend establishing daily, weekly and quarterly rhythms so that everyone understands their responsibilities and has reliable opportunities to address roadblocks and surface new ideas.
Embrace joy.
Joy, playfulness and creativity are all parts of the human birthright and, frankly, they belong in any workplace that employs real, live human beings. As David Brooks recently observed, “We assume we are being judged on our competence, but mostly we are judged on our warmth. Ethical leaders communicate a joyfulness in what they do and attract followers in part by showing pleasure.”
It’s in this spirit that during a period of global uncertainty and full-time remote-work amid the COVID-19 pandemic, we closed all our Zoom gatherings with a dance party. The physical movement was a welcome reprieve from screen fatigue and helped us tap into a sense of joy when we needed it most. Creating moments of joy with my team wasn’t just about lightening the mood; it was vital for sustaining our work—and my leadership—during challenging circumstances.
Lead with joy by planning deliberate moments of fun and rest into your agendas. During your next conference or event, experiment with adding time in the schedule for coffee breaks that are long enough for real conversations (a practice that Roey Kruvi, Senior Program Officer, incorporated into our programs). Turn your next staff meeting into a storytelling event. Create an office birthday tradition. Find what suits your team and don’t be afraid to play.
Leaders today face no shortage of urgent and unprecedented challenges. Many teams understandably feel exhausted and stretched thin. Devoting extra hours and energy to planning how your team works together may feel like something that must wait. And yet, I promise you it’s worth it. The effort and attention we as leaders put into developing a strong team culture will come back to us tenfold. Not only is being part of a positive team dynamic a more enjoyable experience for employees, but it also propels them to produce better outcomes.
To invest in our team cultures is to invest in our missions. We saw it with our Fellows’ teams, and we saw it with ours. Looking back, I see that it is the energy we poured into figuring out how to be with each other that led to our greatest accomplishments.
I want to acknowledge how lucky I’ve been to be part of the Schusterman Fellowship team. It’s rare to be involved in such interesting and worthwhile work alongside such passionate and talented humans. I am forever grateful for the lessons I learned from everyone who contributed to the Fellowship program over the years.
Director, Schusterman Fellowship
