Build a Team

A successful short course starts with a strong, diverse, and well-organised team. This section helps you recruit the organisers and coordinators who will handle everything from fundraising and marketing to participant selection.

While roles often overlap—for example, your Curriculum Coordinator will work closely with facilitators—it is vital that every responsibility is clearly assigned so that no one person carries too much pressure.

How to select your team

To find the best fit for your course, we now use an Evidence-Based Selection Process. This helps remove bias and ensures we hire people based on their actual skills and "UWC spirit" rather than just a CV.

Standardised Scoring: Use the Written Application Rubric below to score candidates on safeguarding reflexes and pedagogical agility.
The "Power Balance" Interview: When interviewing, use a 2-on-1 panel (two interviewers, one candidate). This creates a comfortable space for the candidate to be authentic.
Human Connection: Look for "vulnerability" and the ability to learn from mistakes—these are the traits of a great UWC facilitator.

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

Based on the tested team framework used by UWC Spain, we have outlined four core roles below as a helpful example. You are free to adapt these roles, responsibilities, and compensation structures to suit your specific project needs and local context. Please note that you must ensure your team structure and contracts always abide by the legal employment standards and activity regulations of your specific region.

Logistics Coordinator: The "guardian" of operations. They manage the budget, catering, transport, and act as the lead for Safeguarding (DSL). They are the main contact for parents and UWC International.
Programme/Curriculum Coordinator: The "educational lead." They design the schedule, manage the daily workshops, and support the facilitators in delivering the UWC mission.
Facilitators (Senior & Junior): The "mentors." They work directly with participants, lead sessions, and ensure the students are safe, included, and engaged.
Support & Apprentices: Those learning the ropes who provide vital extra hands for daily tasks and student supervision.

Pro-Tip: Use a Responsibility Matrix (RACIS) to map out who is Responsible for a task and who needs to be Informed. This simple step prevents "unnecessary pressure" and ensures a smooth, happy team experience.

Role Descriptions_ UWC Spain Facilitation Team.pdf

Code 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.

Code of Conduct

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)
Belbin's nine team roles
Personality quiz
Colour code test

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.

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