The Extension Nursery Landscape and Turf Team (ENLTT) is an example of a collegial, interdisciplinary team that works at Ohio State University Extension (OSUE). ENLTT was formed in response to severe budget cuts at The Ohio State University in the early 1990s.
In looking at what makes ENLTT work, our group has identified eight key characteristics of our team that have value in discussing teamwork in general.
Team history and a team’s defining moments are important in understanding team development. The ENLTT formed in 1992, during a period of budgetary challenge within the Ohio State University (OSU) College of Agriculture (now the College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences) and Ohio State University Extension (OSUE). For example, due to decreased statewide funding at that time, the number of faculty in the Department of Horticulture fell from 30 to 21. This included an early retirement by a key Extension Specialist in landscape horticulture. This resulted in the chairman of the department calling a meeting of industry clientele; field faculty in the Department of Extension; and research, teaching, and field faculty in horticulture and related departments to discuss how to address resource challenges.
During that meeting, several key statements were made. The first was that with the retirement of the landscape horticulture specialist, the “Extension landscape/nursery program was gone.” This statement hung in the room for several beats. It was not an unusual sentiment with regards to a key retirement, but it sounded so wrong — especially with industry clientele present.
We all looked around the room, and finally someone spoke up that this was not exactly true. After all, there were numerous Extension agents in the room who had horticulture as their specialty area. There were landscape horticulturists with teaching and research positions in the horticulture department; there were entomologists and plant pathologists and turfgrass agronomists from other departments in the room. In fact, a group of at least 20 people easily came to mind as part of an “Extension landscape/nursery program” at Ohio State University.
With that information in mind, someone spoke up and asked industry representatives if they would support a transformation of the program. Instead of 20 talented, competent people who loosely knew what each other was doing in the landscape horticulture program, what if we re-organized as a team of 20 talented, competent people who communicated well enough to additionally harness the genius of team? What if we seriously ran with the ideas of agent specialization and interdisciplinary cooperation? Brian Decker, then president of the Ohio Nurseryman’s Association, said that if we seriously developed such a team, “We would not be able to get to the bank fast enough to cash the check.”
Talk about defining moments! The rest is history.
From this hook, a team jelled over the next month, coming up with a clear proposal to the industry, asking for financial support for team-building — not simply for money to hire a new person or to provide a new service — but for new money to encourage development of the team. More on that later, but the important lesson is that our team did not arise from simply saying that teamwork is good or necessary, but from a history that includes several defining moments, including a budgetary challenge and a critical interchange with clientele.
There are two questions that inevitably occur when a person considers becoming a member of a team:
This relates to the zero-sum idea that team activities will simply replace activities that were previously done individually and that teams will simply make life even more busy, complicated, and stressful.
This means that a team must be able to define how the team will make each person’s job more fruitful and successful. A team must be able to show its members how “teamwork is its own reward.”
In our case, the Buckeye Yard and Garden Line (BYGL) is an example of how we buttressed the altruistic impulses toward teamwork with the energy of synergy that teamwork provides. BYGL (Chatfield, Boggs, and Shetlar, 1996) was started in 1993 as a weekly electronic newsletter for our team. Each week from April-October, team members from around the state meet by conference phone on Tuesday morning, discussing landscape and garden plant problems from their area.
A group of BYGL writers then convenes on the conference call to decide which items should be written up that week. Over the next two days, each writer completes his or her assigned items, and rotating BYGL senders and proofers construct, proof, and send out the overall BYGL in its fax, e-mail, and web versions (http://bygl.osu.edu/, enhanced by more than 59,000 fact sheet and 5,000 image links).
The finished BYGL is a timely, professional newsletter that comes out every week and is used by diverse sources, including other Extension offices in Ohio and elsewhere, green industry and other horticultural professionals, Master Gardener volunteers, consumers, and the media. It provides the wealth of the Ohio State University expertise emanating as an electronic newsletter from each OSU Extension office.
A quite important internal benefit of the BYGL is that contributors directly benefit from a weekly 90-minute interdisciplinary in-service, complete with clarifications, point-counterpointing (Boggs and Chatfield, 1995), and the educational benefit of translating the spoken word into written information — a highly important skill to be regularly honed by Extension professionals. It was once posed that we should try to imagine a world in which we are not truly sure of what we want to say until we have to write about it — and that this is precisely the world in which we live.
Evaluations for BYGL are strong. For example, in the 2004 BYGL Evaluation Survey, 67% of the respondents indicated that they had changed horticultural practices on the basis of BYGL, and 66% indicated that they had changed pesticide-use practices due to BYGL. Respondents, who represented less than 10% of actual readers because web-site users were not surveyed, indicated that BYGL had saved their company or increased net profits by more than $250,000 (Stone, et al., 2004). Buckeye Yard and Garden onLine averaged 5,156 hits for the first six months of 2000.
The bottom line for Extension educators is as follows: Each BYGL contributor puts in an average of perhaps four hours a week on the BYGL. What do they get back? The most timely, useful, and heralded newsletter any of us have ever developed, one that is available to a diverse clientele in every county. Plus we benefit from a weekly 90-minute interactive, interdisciplinary in-service each week during the growing season. What do we have to give up to spend time on team activities? BYGL benefits make the question moot.
We all know that money is only one type of resource, that teams fundamentally rise and fall on their human resources. We also all know how targeted money can sometimes drive a program in ways that interfere with a more open prioritization of activities. An example is certain grants in which dollars flow in attached only to one particular static project that will not allow for needed re-prioritization on the basis of changing circumstances.
With our team, we identified early on that we wanted to develop a new relationship with our industry partners (the Ohio Nursery and Landscape Association and others) that would commit us, together, more clearly to a yearly proposal and yearly funding and accountability. An early question that arose from these discussions was whether this was just a one-shot deal or whether we would continue to make proposals and seek this funding commitment if our budgetary crisis ended. We quickly focused on the proposal, the partnership, the commitment, and the idea of team-building by being very clear that this was not a short-term relationship we sought, but rather the beginning of a new way of doing business.
With that clear understanding early and with yearly proposals and accounting with our industry partners, we have been generously funded by the Ohio Nursery and Landscape Association with more than $350,000 over the past 12 years. What is this money for? It is essentially for team-building — to make our team better able to deliver information and programming to this important clientele group.
Some of the examples of our expenditures include:
Teams such as the ENLTT can help change a broader culture. This happened at the Ohio State University. By 1992 the concept of agent specialization had been put in place by Ohio State University Extension administration. Entrepreneurial team development helped give it form, and administrative support provided ongoing nurture. The process started with ENLTT and others, but OSU Extension now has more than 20 highly active and creative, diverse agricultural and environmental commodity and issue teams. All provide better collegial communication and cooperative planning that ultimately improves delivery of research-based programming and development of partnerships with clientele groups. Teams have also developed in Family and Consumer Sciences, Community Development, and 4-H Youth Development.
As noted in the OSU Extension team brochure:
“The development and formation of interdisciplinary commodity/issue teams is aimed at improving communication within our faculty and to better meet the needs of our commodity groups and industry clientele. These teams have focused on improved dissemination of new technology and the development of more comprehensive educational programs aimed at the commercial agriculture and horticulture industries and recreational/urban gardening. Teams are coordinated by county agents, district specialists, and associates represented across departments and colleges. Team directories are available upon request. (Ohio State University Extension, 1999).”
An acknowledgment of the cultural shift engendered by these teams was highlighted in 1996 with this statement by the national Cooperative States Research Extension and Education System (CSREES) reviewers of the horticulture and crop science department at Ohio State. To quote:
“Those Extension teams that the review team learned about were highly productive and able to respond rapidly to clientele. A review team member who recently reviewed Extension programs in several other North Central states observed that Ohio State University was the only one of these institutions where Extension personnel were moving boldly ahead with creative programs....There are some other departments and colleges in the country that have a strong relationship with their industry clients, but Ohio is near the top of the list.”
ENLTT benefitted from being the first commodity team in the Ohio State University network and from the positive energy that being present at the creation provides. Whether your team is the first of its kind or not, though, it is important to constantly nurture this type of creative energy. Some techniques we recommend to try to keep this energy fresh are presented here.
One of our team mottoes comes from William Shakespeare: “A lily that festers smells far worse than a weed.” We use this to jettison programs that do not work for the team.
We learned early on that certain programs become more vigorous from team cooperation (BYGL is an example), but that others flounder. One example was a Perennial Plants School that one team member had successfully developed for years. It was, in fact, growing in attendance and quality.
For one, brief, non-shining moment, it became a team activity, with shared responsibility and leadership by none. The energy was lost, the program suffered, and we quickly realized: this was not an example of the energy of synergy. It would decline as surely as a hosta planted in a hot, sunny site. This program was one that was best done by the person who had developed it, rather than doing it as a team activity.
We decided early on that membership in ENLTT was not guaranteed simply on the basis of job description or other presumptions of interest. We formed as a team partly to foster better communication with our clientele, and we were concerned that if any member of our team was not involved enough to know what the team was doing, we would all suffer. So we do expect some level of commitment to team activities. We do not automatically assume people are members of the team when hired, regardless of their position. We post a standing invitation on our team directory:
“Membership on the team is based on interest and commitment to the vision and mission of the team. Potential members are encouraged to participate in some of our activities to determine if they would like to become a part of our team. If you are interested in the work of the team, contact any of the team members.”
Our mission and vision statements, torturous as they are to thrash out, provide a good opportunity to think about what we are as a team. As we progress, we periodically revisit and rewrite these statements.
Are we just a commercial horticulture team, or do we also serve the consumer horticulture area? Should we include members from outside the university? How should we proceed to expand our funding base? These are important itches to constantly scratch.
Once a team is successful, it can be tempting to try to clone it, to look for a recipe. In a way, this article might seem like just such an attempt. Though we do believe there is value in looking at such stories of teams that have something going and continue to grow (Leholm, et al., 1999), without belaboring the point overmuch, it is not our intent to suggest that any team should look like ours. It is our opinion that cookie-cutter recipes for teams and teamwork, as tempting as they may be, are simply recipes for disaster. Teams work when members believe that teamwork is its own reward; energy cannot be mandated.
One of the crucial aspects of our team is its high degree of collegiality. It is non-hierarchical in nature, maximizing human resources. Leadership is shared, but often with discrete roles that can be identified for others. Examples include our CTO (Chief Travel Officer) and our Team Financial Czar (TFC). Agent/Educator specialization plays a big role here, with increasing professionalism and recognition region-wide, statewide, and nationally for many of the team members.
Several times at presentations at national Extension meetings, one of the authors was asked how many agents are on the team compared to the number of state specialists. The honest answer, though it could be easily determined, was a suddenly realized “I don’t know.” We do have a Team Coordinator for administrative contact purposes, and that person calls meetings, assembles meeting agenda items, organizes certain team contacts with clientele groups, and doubles, perhaps, as a CCO, Chief Communication Officer.
Another key human resource component of our team is the extent to which each team member is constantly challenged. This culture has been encouraged in a number of ways.
Point CounterPoint is a popular magazine column that two team members write for a statewide trade journal (Chatfield and Boggs, 1994 - Present). This idea of open, back-and-forth debate is encouraged in team meetings and in BYGL conference calls.
The edges of sensitive egos have worn off over time as people learn that different perspectives can be expressed without retribution, that ideas will not be used against the other person. The history of again and again coming into meetings with widely divergent, strongly held opinions only to emerge from the meeting with decisions reflecting the “genius of team” has built strong commitment to vigorous debate in the best tradition of academic and intellectual ferment. We encourage opening our minds to different ways of doing things and have annual team study tours outside Ohio in order to see how Extension works in other states and to see different approaches in the horticultural subject matter area.
Though we value brainstorming and the acceptance of vetting any and all ideas (“multihorticulturalism,” so to speak), we also have a team culture that adheres to the principles of reason. In the words of Carl Sagan (Shermer, 1997): “If you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish useful ideas from the worthless ones. If all ideas have equal validity then you are lost, because then it seems to me, no ideas have any validity at all.”
Above all — Cogita tute! Think for yourself!
The social commentator and jazz critic Stanley Crouch (Crouch, 1995) puts into broader perspective the implications of true teamwork, and fittingly sums up the ENLTT experience:
The high degree of individuality, together with the mutual respect and co-operation required in a jazz ensemble carry with them philosophical implications that are so exciting and far-reaching that one almost hesitates to contemplate them. It is as if jazz were saying to us that not only is far greater individuality possible to man than he has so far allowed himself, but that such individuality, far from being a threat to a cooperative social structure, can actually enhance society.
Boggs, J. F. and Chatfield, J. A. (1995). Point Counterpoint — A Method for Teaching Critical Thinking. Journal of Extension [On-line], 33(4). Available at: http://www.joe.org/joe/1995august/iw2.html
Chatfield, J. A. and Boggs, J. F. (1994-2004). Point CounterPoint monthly column. The Buckeye: The Official Publication of the Ohio Nursery and Landscape Association.
Chatfield, J. A., Boggs, J. F., and Shetlar, D. J. (1996). The Buckeye Yard and Garden Line. HortTechnology 6(3): 280-281.
Crouch, S. (1995). The All-American Skin Game. Pantheon Books. New York, New York.
Gao, G. Y., Bennett, P. J., Boggs, J. F., Chatfield, J. A., Dyke, D. E., Martin, J. C., Shetlar, D. J., Stone, A. K., and Draper, E. A. (2000). Ohio State University Buckeye Yard and Garden Line Evaluation Survey: 1999. Ornamental Plants: Annual Reports and Research Results, 1999. Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, Special Circular 173: 15-19.
Leholm, A., Hamm, L., Suvedi, M., Gray, I., and Pasfon, F. (1999). Area of Expertise Teams: The Michigan Approach to Applied Research and Extension. Journal of Extension [On-line], 37 (3). Available at: http://www.joe.org/joe/1999june/a3.html
Ohio State University Extension. 1999. Ohio State University Commodity and Issues Teams. Available from the Department of Extension, The Ohio State University, Agricultural Administration Building, 2120 Fyffe Road, Columbus, Ohio 43210.
Shermer, M. (1997). Why People Believe Weird Things. W. H. Freeman and Company. New York, New York.
James A. Chatfield, Ohio State University Extension Center at Wooster, Horticulture and Crop Science; Joseph F. Boggs, Ohio State University Extension, Hamilton County, OSU Extension Center at Piketon; Gary Y. Gao, Ohio State University Extension, Clermont County; Erik A. Draper, Ohio State University Extension, Geauga County; Keith L. Smith, Ohio State University Extension, Director; Barbara G. Ludwig, Ohio State University Extension, Associate Director; Stephen R. Baertsche, Ohio State University Extension, Assistant Director.Note: This article is modified from an article entitled Teams Change Everything in the international publication, Journal of Extension, April