rel="nofollow" href="http://www.thetogethergroup.com/">www.thetogethergroup.com. Here you will find diagnostics, discussion and thinking questions, and bulleted summaries to wrap up each section. Tuck a printed copy inside the cover of the book or keep a soft copy open on your desktop. If you complete the Reader Reflection as you review each chapter, I guarantee you will feel well equipped to tackle each aspect of Togetherness!
Accountability Partners
You could also read this book with a partner on your team, in your organization, or even in another organization. Select a chapter per week, share answers from the Reader Reflection, and examine the corresponding samples on my website. Working together, you can take the self-assessments and quizzes, share artifacts, and brainstorm roll-out processes with your teams. You might even send each other drafts of your tools.
Improve Team Performance
You could read this book as an entire team to see what concepts and rituals stick the most as a group. However, I do not recommend that you make portions of this book mandatory; that will quickly backfire on you in the form of quiet rebellion. In my experience, people get motivated to get it Together when they have a clear reason for digging in, such as increasing sustainability or better meeting their own goals.
Regardless of the approach you take to reading, I do recommend going into this book with some sort of clear plan of how you will digest, practice, and apply the tips and tools. Keep a list of ideas on a sticky note, a running document on your laptop, or in your Reader Reflection Guide. If you don't have a plan, you will walk away feeling overwhelmed – which is exactly what I don't want to happen!
Notes on Terminology and Methodology
Finally, a word about terminology: I could have easily titled this book The Together Manager or The Together Supervisor. I just like the word leader best. It feels more all-encompassing of all that we do and everything we try to accomplish. Throughout the book, however, I will use the terms interchangeably. There are lots of articles about the fair and valid differences among the different job titles, but I'm not here to debate them. I'm here to help you manage the time you have to support a cause you believe in. Call yourself what you want, because you are in charge.
Similarly, I know there are many names for support staff, but I'm going to use assistant and let you translate that to your own context. And instead of using the technical term direct reports, I'm most often going to say team members. Last, although some of you work for nonprofits, schools, charter school management companies, religious institutions, school districts, and more, I'm going to use the blanket term organization instead of company or district. This enables me to be as neutral as possible to meet your various needs. Everyone is working with a mission in mind.
In almost all cases, I'm using real people and real organizations who have agreed to open their calendars and habits to you. I'm sure there are many Together leaders and organizations not represented. I always love to gather new examples, so please do feel free to send them my way via my website. Not one of my featured people or organizations is perfect in every way. We all have areas to work on in our own Togetherness journeys. But every single person, team, and organization profiled here is putting forth a concerted effort to keeping Together to help meet professional and personal goals – whatever they may be.
Togetherness Is a Means to an End
In case you cannot already tell, I'm a huge fan of clear expectations, organizational routines, and planning for the unexpected. This is not a book about being organized just to have a clean desk. This book is to help you feel and be more successful driving toward your mission – and maybe, just maybe, having a life along the way! This book is focused on helping you think about your own time – and your people's time – as a manager. This book is about developing tools, habits, and systems to effectively and efficiently lead a team. This book is about creating plans for expected work so we can deal with the unanticipated stuff when it inevitably arises. This book is the nuts and bolts of effective time management in a leadership role at a mission-driven organization: how to weigh the urgent call that comes through against the need to revamp staff orientation, how to plan purposefully for a meeting, and then follow up. This book is not about color-coding, alphabetizing, or creating perfect paper files. In fact, there will be multiple times I encourage messiness and improvisation.
Togetherness matters more in mission-driven work – and no one has taught it – until now!
Togetherness Talks: Shawn Mangar
Name: Shawn Mangar
Title: Founding principal of Baychester Middle School (NYC Department of Education)
Why Togetherness matters: My workload is endless but my time isn't. Togetherness allows me to make the most of every minute.
Tell me about the mission and scope of your work. What are you most proud of?
My goal was to develop an organization that places the needs of students above all else while simultaneously providing staff with the best resources and opportunities to excel at one of the hardest jobs in the world. I'm proud of the fact that we've taken our student community service commitment from an ideal to a reality by ensuring every student has the opportunity to actively support the Bronx community with their advisory class each year.
At 10 am on any given workday, what might I find you doing?
A typical day involves reigniting the best friend status of two middle students, providing instructional feedback to teachers, and planning or leading teacher training.
What is your favorite Together Tool and why?
I'm a huge fan of the software program Flow. It allows me to focus on my priorities, break down larger projects into bite-sized pieces, and monitor the deliverables of our team.
Tell me how you start and end each day to remain Together.
I begin every morning with a ten-minute meeting with my secretary, Elsa. We preview the day and discuss any tasks that need to get done. I end each workday with a fifteen-minute meeting with my codirector, Liz. We support each other by staying focused on the big rocks and holding ourselves accountable to our To-Do Lists for the next day or week.
What is a challenge you still face with Togetherness?
I'm addicted to e-mail and ESPN.com. I'm working on allocating specific time frames each day for checking e-mail and focusing on one task at a time without self-interruptions.
How do you remain focused when the work is swirling around you?
I often take a five-minute break and go interact with our students at recess or gym. This instantly puts me in a better mood. Our students have the ability to motivate me without even knowing it. After time with them, l head back to my desk to write everything down and reprioritize as needed.
What happens when you get interrupted or ambushed?
In the moment, I tend to deal with the problem at hand. Afterwards, I like to take a step back and identify the organizational breakdown that led to the interruption and strategize about how I can prevent it from occurring in the future.
It's 10 am on a Saturday morning. What keeps you rejuvenated and renewed?
