Build a Team
One of the most important elements of the planning stage in a short course is building a cohesive, efficient and enthusiastic team. This section is about recruiting your organising and coordinating team who will complete all aspects of planning a short course, from fundraising to participant selection and marketing to facilitator recruitment. The section Facilitator Recruitment is about just that, recruiting the facilitators and guests who will deliver your vision.
With this being said, there may be overlaps in the roles of organisers, coordinators and facilitators, before and during the short course. For example, facilitators and the curriculum coordinator may work closely to shape the schedule and sessions which will take place, so do bear this in mind and ensure that all important roles and responsibilities are covered by someone.
Building a Team
It is important that your organising and coordinating team is diverse and has a mix of people with knowledge and skills in the following areas:
Knowledge and/or experience of the UWC movement
Lived experience with the demographic your participants will be from
Experience of working under pressure and beyond normal working hours
Experience of guiding conversations and leading debriefs
Experience in well-being and safeguarding of young people
Communications, design and social media engagement skills
Team members do not have to be based in the same country or region, and they don't have to be based in the country which will host the short course (although it may be beneficial to have at least one team member based in the country or territory when it comes to logistics).
Roles and Responsibilities
Once you've gathered your team, you need to clearly divide roles and assign responsibilities. A good project team is one in which all team members understand their remits and are accountable for their specific areas or deliverables. You may want to create a responsibility assignment matrix, a RACIS chart to define who will be Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed and provide Support for any project task.
Previous short course organisers have reported additional, unnecessary pressure and responsibility on their shoulders because they did not delegate and assign responsibility to other team members effectively.
To help you assign roles, the following document lays out all of the roles and responsibilities which need to be covered in your core team. You may wish to split the following roles, combine them or duplicate them depending on your course.
Short Course team role descriptions.pdfCode of Conduct
Once you've built a core team, you can ask each team member to read, sign, return and adhere to a code of conduct. If you're doing this, it should be extended to facilitators once they are recruited, too. You may wish to use the one below, or you can create a code of conduct specific to your short course team, to cover policy aspects such as intellectual rights of programme content and activities.
Team Effectiveness
Becoming an effective, cohesive team is often a journey, and a non-linear one at that. To help you understand this process and pass through the "forming, storming and norming" stages effectively and quickly to the "performing" stage, a breakdown is provided here.
There has been much research conducted over the years showing that the least effective teams tend to be homogeneous groups, and likewise the most effective teams combine a diverse range of people with different skills and outlooks.
To form an effective team, the team members must know how they work in a team, what they can contribute, how they offer support to other people, and where the team may be lacking in skills. To help you determine this, you may wish to have all of your team members take the online questionnaires:
16 personalities test (also known as the Myers Briggs test - official definitions of each of the 16 personalities can be found here)
to understand whether they naturally have introvert or extrovert tendencies, are sensing or rely on intuition, think or feel more strongly, and judge or perceive the world.
Later on, in the planning stage, you will have to train all of your facilitators together which could also be viewed as building your wider team. More information on this can be found in the corresponding Train Facilitators section. For now, you should think about team building with your core team members in order to best 'perform'.
To do this you may hold an introductory video call (seeing a person can make a big difference when it comes to connections and building a strong team), have a face-to-face meeting or having regular team conference calls where you provide updates on your respective areas of organising and coordinating the course.
Developing Yourself as a Leader
As a short course organiser, you are not only a project manager as the layout of this resource platform suggests, you're also a leader. You are leading your team on the journey to delivering this short course and it's your vision which will get everyone there. To do this, you'll exhibit some of these leadership skills and may be lacking slightly in others: communication, motivation, delegating, positivity, trustworthiness, creativity, an ability to give and receive feedback, responsibility, commitment and flexibility.
It's important that you take some time to reflect on what type of leader you most naturally are. All leadership styles have their strengths and weaknesses - or opportunities to make the most of once you know what kind of leader you are.
To develop yourself as a leader, understand:
your preferred leadership style and less comfortable style
the preferences of your team members
your strengths, and improve your weaknesses
that navigating through leadership styles is ok
And try to:
lead with a style that fits you, the situation, and the group
recognise that not all personalities correspond with leadership styles
To find out and to discover how courageous leadership works both in theory and practice, you could get a copy of Brené Brown's Dare to Lead (2018) which is a heavily sited text used across the globe, in academia and industry alike.
There is a great lecture series on YouTube by David Dunaetz which goes over all leadership theories put forward in Northouse (2016).
We've come a long way from the 'Great Man' lens of looking at leaders, and now methods such as authentic leadership and servant leadership have really taken hold, especially in grass roots organisations. There are examples of modern ways of looking at leadership all throughout pop-culture, from Coach Carter to Michelle Obama.
Situational leadership is a great model to get to grips with and to use for adapting your leadership style to the needs of your different team mates.
You can see all of these models and more in this folder:
Hints and Tips
The following hints and tips apply to forming your core team, as this is the foundation of your course, but can apply at different stages of your short course journey too:
Create all documents in the language common to all organisers and facilitators, and make the content and format accessible to all team members so that they can understand the ideas behind the course very well, and thus contribute more effectively.
Communicate actively - just sending emails and letters is not enough. Call your team mates to follow up on emails, try to meet them and be open to fresh ideas that come up. This extends to all stakeholders who have an influence on your project, especially those representing local organisations.
Spread the word and let people know about the course. Some of your best contacts, who may form your core team, will likely result from early social media posts, and letters/emails to organisations, and friends of friends through word of mouth.
Be resourceful and try to use your networks to get the things you need. You might want to ask project partners to use their facilities, schools you have contacts to to borrow equipment, etc. Often it's not only cheaper, but also much easier than to go through commercial channels. Bare this in mind when recruiting your core team, as it's often not what you know but who you know, and in this case who forms your core team, which gets you by.
Trust your team members and your participants. Micromanaging the team, and setting strict rules for the participants is no fun, and quite counterproductive. You should have team members develop ground rules together as they start to work together, and gave specific team members full responsibility for sections of the programme. You should also bare this in mind when developing your curriculum and allocate time to creating a community agreement, ground rules, a code of conduct with your participant group early on in your short course.