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A Note From the Chief Justice

Teams in Action: Effective and Efficient Collaboration

Chief Justice Michael Heavican

Soon we will be approaching the one-year mark since the Nebraska Children's Summit in Grand Island in September 2009. The Children's Summit identified or addressed problems and provided suggestions as to how to address these ideas. These included facilitated conferences to speed progression on cases, identifying reasonable efforts to be provided at early stages in the cases, improving the use of parenting time to improve permanency and allowing children's voices to be better heard in court, among many others. You can watch videos from the sessions you missed. Also during the Summit, your team had the opportunity to meet and discuss what you had learned at the various breakout sessions and begin to talk about ways you can implement some of these ideas in your own court communities.

But talking is often much easier than doing. After returning home, your team may have struggled with effectively implementing your ideas into your own court practice. This could have happened for a variety of reasons, such as lack of a single vision, absence of a detailed Action Plan with designated leaders, the weight of everyday realities pushing out the “new way" of doing things, etc.

Implementation, however, is the most critical step for our Initiative. The success of the Through the Eyes of the Child Initiative relies on local teams improving court practices in their communities. If we do not see real progress in our cases and with the children we serve, our efforts are meaningless.

Therefore, I would like to offer you a few suggestions on developing and implementing best practices into your court system:

1. Hold structured team meetings with a set agenda. If your team meeting does not adequately address real issues happening in your abuse/neglect cases in a timely and efficient way, you will lose the interest of important stakeholders who decide that they have better things to do with their time. Set the agenda, stick to the agenda and make sure it's relevant and that its goals will work toward improving court practice.
2. Create a detailed Action Plan that includes:
• What your intended outcome is (e.g., holding Permanency Pre-Hearing Conferences to decrease the time to permanency)
• How you will get there (e.g., contact the local mediation center, approve a protocol, etc.)
• Who will be in charge of, and
• When this goal will be rolled out.
3. Use your team's data report distributed at the Children's Summit and available online to guide the development of your Action Plan. Consider what the data report may be saying about needs for improvement in your community.
4. Don't be afraid to copy the activities of other teams. There is no need to re-invent the wheel. If another local team has seen success with a particular practice, adapt it to your courts and implement it. And ask for assistance from that team's members or from Initiative staff.
5. Make sure you have the right people at the table. If a constant barrier to your issues is a party that has not attended your team meetings, ensure that they begin attending. If you need assistance with this, please ask Initiative staff.
6. Let the detailed work be done outside of the team meeting. Embrace the use of subcommittees. With the limited availability professionals have in the schedules, don't allow the general team meetings to be bogged down in details. Give that work to a select group of people who can then present a draft product to the team to address.

For your next team meeting, I encourage you to follow these six pieces of advice. Hopefully, you will begin to see improvements in the effectiveness of your meetings and in the output of your teams.

The Through the Eyes of the Child Initiative would not exist without you and the efforts you make with your team in your own community. I am truly grateful for the time you volunteer to ensure that we improve the ways we handle abuse/neglect cases in our courts. Thank you.