Teamliness: Why a made-up word is critical for TJJD’s success 

By Shandra Carter —

The short answer is that it’s better than ‘Collective Efficacy’ — Teamliness rolls off the tongue in an easy to say and easy to understand way. Even without the definition, you can look at the word and just know it means to be a team player.  

For us, Teamliness means: Working together with trust, shared purpose, and selfless commitment to achieve our mission. 

In 2022, when I stepped into the executive director role, the agency was facing one of the most challenging times in its history. We were in the post-Covid staffing crisis and needed help. Lots of it, and quick.  

If you’ve been around for more than a few years, you experienced those challenges firsthand. If you haven’t, then I’m sure you’ve heard:  

• Staffing levels were so low we had to lock youth back to maintain safety 
• Morale was abysmal 
• Our JCOs ranked 36th nationally in starting salaries
• We were under Sunset Review, and the DOJ was investigating the agency  

We couldn’t afford to just wait around. My Deputy Director, Sean Grove, and I visited as many legislative offices as we could, to tell them about the dire situation we were in and how safety and basic care were being compromised. 

Fortunately, the legislature heard our concerns and made significant investments in staff salaries to help stabilize our workforce. They also invested over $200M in two new facilities – later adding another $104M to that critical investment. The Sunset Commission provided helpful recommendations, and Governor Abbott appointed new leadership to our board.  

With all these investments, there were no more excuses. We had to do the work. We had to regain public trust. We had to build a culture of excellence.  

To do that, we needed to enhance both staff and public safety, maintain appropriate correctional practices, provide rehabilitative and therapeutic services, and ensure appropriate reentry support. What immediately stood out was that this could not be achieved individually or in silos; it had to be done with teamwork. That is how we got to Teamliness. 

Teamliness grew out of my focus on staff surveys. Ever since I joined the agency as a Deputy, we have sent out meaningful and informative staff surveys and I’m proud to say that we have robust participation from employees across the agency. Though individual responses are confidential, I read every single comment. The feedback directly influences and informs our executive direction.  

This is where the concept of Teamliness came into being. Initially, we were using the term collective efficacy to describe what we were seeing across our agency, but it quickly became clear that the phrase did not fully capture the experience staff were describing. As we dug deeper into the qualitative data, we realized the scale we were using was actually measuring something much broader: teamwork, psychological safety, trust, connection, and mutual respect. Together, those elements represented a workplace dynamic that could not be adequately summed up by existing terminology. That realization led us to this new word, one that better reflected what we expected, observed, and ultimately what needed to be strengthened throughout TJJD.  

So, what did this do? Through staff surveys, we have seen that facilities with higher levels of Teamliness tend to perform better on staff survey measures related to leadership, perceived safety, burnout, and overall wellness. In 2026, when we specifically examined psychological safety, we found similar patterns. Ultimately, the message is this: stronger Teamliness is associated with better operations and a stronger sense of safety. It describes something both foundational to the human experience and uniquely important in environments like ours. It is a complex idea, but one that helps explain why healthy workplace relationships are so critical to success. 

In corrections, operations and treatment have historically struggled to function as a unified team. At best, they operate in parallel. At worst, the relationship becomes adversarial, territorial, and hostile, with each side protecting its own domain and blaming the other when things go wrong. TJJD was not immune to that default position, but we refused to stay there. Coming out of the post-Covid staffing struggles, we knew that we had to reestablish our mission, vision, and values and that Teamliness was going to be at the top of the list to help get us where we knew we needed to be. This isn’t just us talking the talk. Every leader on my team is expected to walk the walk. My expectations are crystal clear: we support one another, reinforce positive behavior, ensure fidelity to the Texas Model, and hold ourselves and each other accountable. There is no tolerance for disparaging colleagues, undermining other departments, or engaging in negative conversations that erode trust and team cohesion. We address concerns directly, professionally, and with the people who can actually help resolve them. 

After becoming Executive Director, I worked relentlessly to build a culture of teamliness across the agency. I held town halls at our facilities and Central Office to hear directly from staff and worked to strengthen relationships with juvenile probation department chiefs across the state. I introduced a milieu-based model designed to bring treatment and operations together as partners rather than separate functions. We solicited feedback through staff surveys, launched agency-wide calls for proposals, and encouraged employees at every level to bring forward ideas for improving how we work. I also established a staff wellness team and supported initiatives such as wellness rooms at our facilities, because we cannot expect people to build strong teams, support one another, and do this incredibly difficult work well when they are burned out.

With all these efforts, over time, we started to notice a shift. I like to say it’s like turning around a Disney cruise liner in the Panama Canal – not impossible, but definitely not easy and with very little room for error. Teamliness is more than just a standalone value of TJJD, in fact, it is the glue that binds every other value we live by; safety, accountability, excellence, growth, and transparency. 

Before Teamliness, we operated in silos, focused on our own areas rather than the needs of the broader team and viewed mistakes through the lens of individual departments rather than shared responsibility. Over time, Teamliness became part of our shared language and something our staff began practicing with pride. Are we perfect at it? Of course not. But our work around Teamliness is gaining national and international attention in the juvenile justice and corrections arenas for our efforts. Just this year I presented at the American Correctional Association (ACA), the Council of Juvenile Justice Administrators (CJJA), and the International Association of Forensic Mental Health (IAFMHS) – the topic? You guessed it: Teamliness.  

We are striving to become an agency that is unrecognizable from our challenging past and Teamliness is how we get there. With two new builds on the horizon, the 90th legislative session around the corner, and currently under a limited Sunset review, with our next full review in 2031, I want to look back and know that we did everything we could to achieve our mission, that our staff held each other’s safety and wellbeing as their top priority, and that we built an agency that looks nothing like what I inherited.  That is where we are going. 

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