No matter how effective an individual leader you are, implementation can only work as a collaborative endeavour, where we engage people in the process. One way of engaging people in implementation is to create an implementation team. Evidence suggests that implementation teams can improve adoption, buy-in and sustainability.
The right team for the intervention
Schools have many existing structures and leadership teams. In some cases, these will be the right team for an implementation. However, there is a danger that these existing teams work at a strategic level, and do not always involve all relevant stakeholders. The teams exist slightly removed from the context of the intervention.
Higgins et all (2020), say that ‘Implementation teams differ from traditional senior leadership teams because, while in addition to potentially developing an organizational change strategy, their primary responsibility is to implement a change strategy.’
In many cases, we will need to create an implementation team that is right for the specific purpose. There are no ‘rules’ for this, but effective teams tend to have:
Intervention specific knowledge
Leaders who can make changes to systems and structures.
Representative voices from stakeholders
Early adopters or champions with experience of implementing in one context
Capacity, or the ability to direct capacity towards implementation
What they bring; not just what they will do
Implementation teams work well when they are made up of members from diverse roles. This allows for a greater understanding of various stakeholder groups and greater learning for the group as a whole.
We often talk about ‘buy-in’. Getting the right people on the implementation team means that anyone affected by the process, informs the process. As Phil Stock, Director of Greenshaw Research School, writes in this excellent blog: “This flags up the importance of a certain kind of engagement: one that is active, genuine and valued. This is not so much ‘buying-in’ as ‘being-in.’”
It isn’t just those who will be directly involved that can bring wisdom to the implementation team. Depending on the approach, we can involve students, parents, community leaders, those placed to offer an important perspective. For example, if a school was to implement a homework strategy, having input from parents would provide valuable insight.
The evidence isn’t conclusive about optimal team size, but teams need to be big enough to ensure the right vices are represented, while small enough to avoid inefficiency and cognitive overload.
The team for the future
When putting together an implementation, we can focus primarily on getting something off the ground, the explore, prepare and deliver stages. But what happens to the team at the sustain stage? It certainly needs to be considered as part of the implementation planning. If we leave it to chance, there will be staff turnover, and the team will either look quite different, or even disband.
Neither of these things are bad per se, because teams should evolve, but it should be conscious. If you have a leader of the group, consider succession. How can you capture the knowledge, discussions and decisions so far? Can another senior leader replace the senior leader representative on the team, or should the new leader come from within the group?
You should also review the purpose of the implementation team. When does it shift to a monitoring team? When does it become a de-implementation team? When does it return to the explore stage?
Higgins, Monica & Weiner, Jennie & Young, Lissa. (2012). Implementation teams: A new lever for organizational change. Journal of Organizational Behavior. 33. 10.1002/job.1773.
Moore, D et al(2024). Review of evidence on implementation in education
