Team

The person leading facilitates rather than evaluates. Ask questions, name what you observed, and hold back recommendations until after the group has done its own analysis.

• Response time. If the group chat expects a reply within a day, a reply within a day. Silence reads as absence.
• Commitments. If you say you will do a thing, it happens or you say early that it will not. Late is recoverable; silent is not.
• Disagreement. Raise it to the person, in the way the charter says, not around them.
• Showing up. Two meetings missed without a word is a signal to the officers whether you mean it as one or not.

A chapter that keeps these is one where you get a real task with a real deadline by your third meeting — because you have shown you will do it. That is the trade.

• Ask the question everyone is thinking. The first person to say ‘I don’t understand the plan’ makes it possible for the next four.
• Report your own mistake before it is found. Early and plainly. ‘I dropped this, here is where it stands.’
• When someone else does either of those, respond to the content and not to the courage. Treat it as normal, because it should be.

There is a seven-item scale, free and short. Officers run it in October and again in March and report the team average — never individual answers. If the number is low, the fix is in what the officers do, not in the members.

Every ‘ask’ line is a question about the person’s experience. Every ‘not’ line is an instruction to stop having it. That is the whole difference, and it is enough.

The last field of the charter is the exact wording one officer uses to raise a missed commitment with another. Agreed in advance, it is usable. Improvised in the moment, it is a conflict. See Hold a Peer Accountable.

The seven-item psychological safety scale goes out in October and March. The charter names who sends it and states that only the team average is reported.

• Task → structured debate. Put both positions on the board, give each side two minutes uninterrupted, vote or decide by the rule in the charter.
• Process → charter amendment. The conflict is a missing rule. Write the rule; the conflict usually dissolves.
• Relationship → a private conversation between the two people, or with the chair as a third. Not the group chat, not the meeting. Ever.

Most relationship complaints have a task or process complaint underneath. ‘She never listens’ is often ‘she made a decision the charter says we make together’. Find the underneath and treat that.

• Rung one makes the invisible decisions visible.
• Rung two catches the misunderstanding before it becomes a habit.
• Rung three is the hard one for the officer — the silence is the teaching.
• Rung four is the only rung that counts as delegation. The first three are training.

The old build carried a matrix that matched a leadership ‘style’ to a member’s readiness. That model is widely taught and has weak evidence for the prescribed matching. Retired. The four rungs are simpler, and they work.

Do not add advice unless asked. The three parts are the feedback; the next step is theirs to propose. If they ask, offer one thing, not five.

The same three parts deliver praise that is worth something. ‘At the health fair, you stayed with the grandmother who was frightened by her results, and she left with a plan. That is the whole reason we were there.’

For every stage, write the cost in time, money, social risk and what the member gives up to be there. Most chapters have never written that column. When they do, the fix is nearly always logistics, not messaging.

Onboarding is the second and third stage done deliberately. One named action per week — a greeting by name at meeting one; a real task by meeting three; a question about what they want from HOSA before week four, with a promise about how the answer will be used.

• Low direction → a goal-setting problem. Write the one sentence.
• Low structure → a roles-and-meetings problem. Charter and agenda.
• Low context → an advocacy problem. The Internal Advocacy Pack goes to an administrator.
• Low coaching → an advisor problem, or a state-staff one.
• Low ‘real team’ → the roster is the problem. Who is actually on this?

Forming, storming, norming, performing is universally taught and has never held up as a sequence teams pass through. Keep the four words as vocabulary if they help. Do not diagnose a chapter with them.

• Re-score the Five Conditions. Compare to September.
• Re-read the charter. Amend what has not held.
• Each officer writes a midpoint memo: what I said I would do, what has happened, what I am changing for the second half. One page.
• Re-derive the calendar from the second peak — the offsite Round Two dates and SLC.
• One decision the team has been avoiding, decided.

This is the defensible reason for a mid-year retreat. Not a reward, not a bonding exercise — the point in the year when the council is most able to change course.

Because it was agreed. The person raising it is doing what the team decided, not making a personal accusation. The person receiving it heard the words in September and signed them.

The charter also says what happens the second time. Usually: the task moves to someone else, stated in the meeting, without discussion. That is not punishment. It is what the team agreed.

• Which restraining force is easiest to reduce? Usually process friction — the form, the timing, the instructions.
• Which driving force is most worth strengthening? Usually visibility of early adopters.
• Do one of each. Not everything.

Run it before the January reset on the change the team most needs to make in the second half. Run it before any statewide initiative, as the first page of the launch plan.