Team dynamics can get awfully messy for one key reason – the people who make up the team. Whether virtual or collocated, most teams are usually comprised of peers. For the team to work they have to set aside their own issues and work through communication difficulties while remaining focused on completing their objective. Multi-professional teams add another layer of challenges to the problem such as their unique communication lingo and their positional status. Healthcare comes readily to mind as an industry that requires tight teamwork with many levels of important participants. What’s clear is that these multi-professional teams have some difficult challenges and such teams can’t be created with the simple belief that everyone will understand and respect the team dynamic.
An essay in the opinion section of the New York Times, from a hospital nurse, provides some great insight to the difficulties some teams can face and the resulting consequences poor teamwork can produce. When our lives, or the lives of our loved ones, are on the line there’s little doubt about the need for the investment in team training. Yet though this piece is about healthcare, it is just as relevant to those of us who must complete projects with a team of people in any industry, because it comes down to the dynamics of the people that comprise the team.
“Doctors and nurses are trained differently, and our sense of priorities can conflict. When that happens, the lack of an established, neutral way of resolving such clashes works to everyone’s detriment.
This isn’t about hurt feelings or bruised egos. Modern health care is complex, highly technical and dangerous, and the lack of flexible, dynamic protocols to facilitate communication along the medical hierarchy can be deadly. Indeed, preventable medical errors kill 100,000 patients a year, or a million people a decade, wrote Rosemary Gibson and Janardan Prasad Singh in their book ‘Wall of Silence.’”
Here’s the link: Healing the Hospital Hierarchy
