CEO Notebook

For this issue of CEO Notebook, I’ve asked James Palmieri, Ed.D., NBOA’s executive vice president, to share some of his thoughts on strategies for team building, knowing that at this time of year, many of you may be planning activities and retreats with boards, the business office team or incoming staff and faculty.

One of my favorite parts of my job is leading NBOA’s staff development efforts throughout the year, with help from a volunteer committee of colleagues. This includes planning full staff engagements, which entail professional development beyond each staff member’s individual learning opportunities tailored more directly to their role, expertise and career interests. NBOA’s staff is distributed across 14 states from coast to coast, and we feel these investments are vital to our success in serving our membership and achieving our mission of developing, delivering and promoting best business practices to advance independent schools.

One of those activities, our annual July Staff Offsite program, kicks off our fiscal year in productive fashion. We recently returned from three impactful days together in Nashville, Tennessee, where our meetings were hosted at University School of Nashville (USN), an inclusive and diverse K-12 educational community with a beautiful and mission-aligned campus just steps from Vanderbilt University. Thank you to our hosts at USN, and in particular assistant head of school Quinton Walker, Ed.D., for his warm hospitality throughout the week.

The agenda allotted time to celebrate our successes from the prior year, discuss our strategic priorities for the year(s) ahead, and above all, enhance staff culture, organizational effectiveness, communication and teambuilding. Several staff-led sessions allowed us to reflect and refine how we conduct our work, individually and collectively, focusing on our strengths while also finding opportunities for improvement.

To reinforce and demonstrate the role of the NBOA Board of Directors in relation to staff work on behalf of the association, we were joined by newly-elected Board Chair-elect, Beth Pollard, chief financial officer at Ensworth School, conveniently nearby in Nashville. Pollard presented her take on “a day in the life of a business officer,” which has become an annual tradition at our staff offsite program, thanks to our committed board representatives who are always willing to join us. It’s a favorite session of the NBOA staff because of our continuous desire to learn about and serve you better.

Our second guest was Krystal Clark, owner of Equip to Thrive, which offers personal and professional development opportunities for “talented and imperfect” people, as she says. Clark has led leadership development programming at several NBOA events, including NBOA Leadership Academy, and has also led the NBOA staff through staff culture reflection and exploration. Last December we completed the CliftonStrengths assessment by Gallup to better understand our strengths and unlock our potential individually and when working alongside others. The assessment, now taken by all staff as part of their onboarding, identifies an individual’s top five signature themes among a possible 34. Fun fact: the odds that someone shares the same “top five” are 1 in 33 million.

Throughout the year ahead, with Clark’s help, the NBOA staff will work as a strengths-based team – “a group of imperfect but talented contributors who are valued for their strengths and who need one another to realize individual and team excellence.” Members of a strengths-based team are aware of each other's talent filters; understand how each person is inclined to think, act and feel; lead with positive intent and acknowledge that people need each other; acknowledge that differences are advantages, and that strengths are not labels. Striving together to be a strengths-based team will allow us to work more cohesively day-to-day.

Clark helped us put words to how members of truly cohesive teams behave, and what we are seeking — and even expecting — from each other. Cohesive team members:

• trust one another.
• engage in unfiltered conflict around ideas.
• commit to decisions and plans of action.
• hold one another accountable for delivering against those plans.
• focus on achieving collective results.

Our key question, the one the NBOA staff is addressing and iterating upon, may be helpful to you and your team, whether that’s the business office or other department, administrative leadership or board of trustees:

How will you bring your strengths, to continue building a cohesive team as you address and make progress towards success in identified high impact areas of workplace engagement?

We believe that doing so will allow us to become both the best version of ourselves individually and collectively – that is the magic we are pursuing.

Best wishes for a summer that includes not only productive team building and operations management, but also some well-deserved R&R!

—James Palmieri, Executive Vice President, NBOA