Organizing partners for large-scale impact requires a thoughtful and strategic approach to ensure that there are diverse opportunities for engagement while ensuring a cross-functional Core Team is equipped to address complex challenges and drive meaningful transformation. As the scope of work expands, defining roles, responsibilities, and the level of involvement for partners is crucial for success.
Many institutions embrace a structure that involves both a Core Team and a combination of lower intensity opportunities—each playing distinct yet complementary roles.
Core Team
Function
The Core Team is the day-to-day team leaders responsible for coordinating and organizing improvement and innovation efforts across the institution. The Core Team often serves as the engine for change, leading the way, pulling others along, chugging through sometimes challenging terrain, keeping things on track, moving a diverse community of people in a common direction, and building the movement and momentum to arrive at the destination of wellbeing for all students. The Core Team directly engages in the intricate, nuts-and-bolts details of the improvement and innovation change work.
Key functions include:
- Administering the Wellbeing Improvement Survey for Higher Education Settings (WISHES) multiple times per year, analyzing the data, and using the data to inform system change efforts.
- Applying a systematic and holistic data collection process to build an understanding of the norms, processes, and structures that perpetuate suboptimal mental health and wellbeing for a subpopulation of students.
- Focusing collective improvement efforts and selecting a portfolio of priority improvement projects
- Catalyzing new changes and improvements across the institution
- Cultivating and deepening collaboration, co-design, co-production, and shared leadership across the institution and with students with lived experience
- Communicating progress, insights, and guidance
- Acting as a bridge between various leaders, groups, and champions across the institution
Composition
The Core Team is typically 4-8 members and can include both formal and informal leaders. At a minimum, we strongly recommend that each institution designate individuals for each of the following Core Team roles to support their journey of improvement and innovation in pursuit of wellbeing and mental health for all students, with a focus on a subpopulation of students experiencing disparities in wellbeing outcomes.
We strongly recommend: (1) representation from at least two different functional areas across the institution, such as student affairs, institutional research, academic affairs, faculty, student success, teaching and learning, and student health, and (2) that at least one department be something other than a health related unit (e.g., not medical, mental health/counseling, health promotion/wellness/wellbeing, AOD, campus recreation).
Key functions include:
You are encouraged to consider additional Core Team roles based on factors that are specific to your institution and work. However, all Core Team members should be able to contribute consistent effort to help advance the day-to-day work, including participating in regular Core Team meetings and Collaborative-wide community calls and activities.
Your Core Team (other than the Student Lead) is expected to participate in all Collaborative-wide calls and activities. We strongly encourage your Core Team to meet approximately weekly. You may modify your Core Team membership at any point.
Factors that Maximize the Impact of Core Teams
The Core Team is typically 4-8 members and can include both formal and informal leaders. At a minimum, we strongly recommend that each institution designate individuals for each of the following Core Team roles to support their journey of improvement and innovation in pursuit of wellbeing and mental health for all students, with a focus on a subpopulation of students experiencing disparities in wellbeing outcomes. Key functions include:
Embracing the analogy that “Institutionwide change is catalyzed by a core team—like bonfires are created from kindling.”
Establishing a small core team (four to eight people) is essential to support and catalyze systems changes across the institution. The role of kindling in sparking large, impressive bonfires is analogous to the function of small core teams in catalyzing broader partnership, activation, and systems change work across an institution.
Diversity of departments.
Core teams with people from at least two different departments are better able to move work forward than those with only health staff or staff from a single department. Experience shows that core teams with at least two different departments represented have demonstrated greater capacity to keep the work moving forward during challenging times and greater collective power to facilitate changemaking.
Characteristics of Core Team members
- Commitment to wellbeing and eliminating disparities, with passion and energy to motivate others;
- Interest in learning and applying skills for systems-based approaches;
- Collaborative in working across differences and organizing for collective results;
- Ability to be a visible and vocal champion for wellbeing.
- Creativity to think outside the box to craft forward-thinking, innovative strategies;
- Flexibility to work across departmental barriers and roles and to seize opportunities;
- Humility and curiosity to continually learn and engage in self-reflection;
- Relationships, internally and externally, that can be leveraged to expand engagement;
- Resilience to engage in deep, challenging, and long-term work.
Shared leadership.
Critical to teams’ effectiveness is a shift away from hierarchical leadership toward a model of shared leadership and a focus on what needs to happen collectively to improve wellbeing. Intentional effort is needed to help members view themselves as equal co-leaders working together toward the shared purpose of improving outcomes for specific groups of students. The person or group that is the initial convener must pay extra attention to power dynamics and create the space, opportunity, norms for agency, autonomy, and shared leadership.
Shifting from transactional to transformational collaborations.
Although core team members often have long-standing track records of collaborating with students and departments across their institutions, working to create shifts in how Core Teams identify, inspire, learn with, and move new partners to join in action are key parts of the transformational change to achieve better student wellbeing outcomes. Fundamental to achieving large-scale improvement is shifting from a reliance on positional power and transactional collaboration to movement-building and forging deep, integrative relationships that build agency, power, and investment in improvement and innovation at all institutional levels.
Suggestions for Initial Core Team Meetings
The work of improvement and innovation in pursuit of better student wellbeing involves leading together across all institutional levels. Careful attention to the process of collaboration and forging deep, integrative relationships that build agency, power, and investment in improvement and innovation is as important as the technical aspects of administering WISHES and analyzing the data. Whether you are a new team or a team with a track record of collaboration, we strongly encourage you to invest time to build or sustain the foundation toward transformational relationships and shared leadership within your team.
- Determine a schedule to meet as a team. We strongly recommend your team meet weekly starting as soon as possible.
- Explore questions such as:
- What motivates each member to be part of the Core Team and to contribute toward improving wellbeing?
- How can this work help each member in their day-to-day work?
- What strengths and assets does each member bring to the team and to the work of improving wellbeing?
- What values are important individually and as a collective?
- What does each team member know about measuring and improving wellbeing? What does each member not know? What are real questions or curiosities each team member has about measuring and improving wellbeing?
- What does each team member know about your population of focus? What does each member not know? What are real questions or curiosities each team member has about what it will take to improve wellbeing for your population of focus?
- Draft a purpose statement for your team: Why is pursuing wellbeing for all students important? Why did your institution select your population of focus? What is your team’s shared vision for change? What do you aim to achieve together? What core values and principles will guide your collective work?This statement can be short and drafty; do not spend time on wordsmithing. The goal is usefulness not perfection. Purpose statements can often be helpful when the work gets tough to remind your team why you came together AND to build partnership across your institution.