Week 2: Shared Leadership at CommonLit
During my second week at CommonLit, the curriculum team experienced a major setback when they got negative feedback from a school about a unit they had created. This feedback puts the team far behind and essentially requires them to start over, but in the face of this bad news, it became clear to me that the company boasts a model of shared leadership, and in hard times, this model of leadership allows for support and resilience.
Although we have a team leader, I have found that the team leader mostly serves as a point person who is in contact with the schools we work with or she may be the person to make final decisions if there’s something the team cannot agree about, which doesn’t happen often. Because she has been in contact with the school, she was the one to deliver the bad news and offer words of encouragement. After the initial news happened, she ceded the floor to allow for people to voice their grievances and frustrations. This time quickly turned into a productive meeting as people began to jump in with new ideas and clarifying questions so they could begin to look ahead and identify areas that could be changed in response to the feedback. By the end of the meeting, each person had decided on next steps they could take and small group meetings had been scheduled to discuss specific areas of improvement. Although the team leader may have been the facilitator of the meeting, it was clear that she did not just tell people what to do, but instead, everyone contributed new ideas and as a group, they decided how to proceed.
From this experience, I saw how strong the team is. It could have been easy to become discouraged and jaded about the whole process, but instead, they supported each other, let themselves complain for a little bit, and then immediately came up with an action plan. Shared leadership seems to be beneficial especially for a company that constantly seeks feedback. Having multiple perspectives approaching the problem allows for more efficiency and a greater likelihood that a satisfying solution can be reached. Each person has their role, but together everyone steps up when times get tough.
You’ve done a really nice job offering concrete examples from the site that illustrate shared leadership. This specificity will be useful to you when completing the academic assignments in the fall. It sounds like a really dynamic environment in which everyone is able to contribute; how lovely. You also addressed something I posed after reading your first reflection – whether there were times when decisions had to made more centrally. Thus far, it seems you have not experienced a time when the team could not reach a decision and so the leader had to step in and make a decision. But you may find, going forward, that there are instances when this happens. Given that you are providing free educational materials, which some might say schools and educators should just appreciate at face value, it is admirable that the organization takes feedback from schools/educators so seriously and works so diligently to address concerns raised, improve/enhance materials, etc.