Mindful Organizing: Six Teamwork Habits

Within a Mindful Organizing framework, teams plan forward, reflect back, test change, communicate clearly, appreciate their colleagues, and manage professionalism.

Resilience lives in context.

For children, resilience lives in the context of family and community. For child welfare professionals, resilience lives in the context of teams and agencies that adaptively and intentionally organize to prevent under-resourcing or overtaxing one another.

Mindful organizing refers to how teams behave,

particularly how they anticipate and respond to risks and unmet needs. These practices impact how we assess and team to support children and families during the course of child welfare involvement. Mindful organizing both builds and draws upon psychological safety.

Mindful organizing is built through a series of prosocial habits.

One way to build habits is to simply try out strategies in support of those habits. Over time, the strategies become hardwired and intuitive – in other words, a habit!

Key leaders can advance mindful organizing.

Directors, managers and supervisors are key leaders to advance mindful organizing. Habits can be hard to cultivate, and it can be easy to turn away from a new strategy just due to discomfort or it being outside the normal routine. Mindful organizing promotes shared accountability across a team and requires candid disclosures about intentions, concerns and needs. When the strategies are newly applied, they can feel hard at first. The encouragement, candor and consistency of supervisors are a key to success.