Teaching Teamwork Skills

By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN

Many health systems today are looking at redesigning care to a team-based model. When making this change, it is essential to think about the role of teamwork. Don’t assume that it is strong. Consider the story a nurse manager recently shared with me.

It feels like I am watching the musical West Side Story play out daily with my OR team. The musical explores forbidden love and the rivalry between the Jets and the Sharks, two teenage street gangs of different ethnic backgrounds. There is little that the gangs agree on, just like this manager’s team, who have very different ideas about team loyalty and team backup. His seasoned staff complains that new graduates are late in setting up rooms and rarely reach out to help others in the group. The younger staff complain that older staff are judgmental and have weak technological skills. In response, seasoned nurses complain about newer nurses who “treat the screen” and not the patient.

This leader is not alone. It is a story repeated by nurse leaders across the country. Recent Press Ganey data indicates that effective teamwork, essential to a safety culture, is a metric where health systems have seen the most marked drops in the last three years. Putting the staff together on a team does not always lead to effective teamwork. There are skills that staff need to be taught, especially today. The only way to develop community and cohesiveness among your teammates is to get them together professionally and personally.

I recommended to this leader that he start a conversation at a staff meeting by asking his team to talk about the most incredible team they had ever been on – and a follow-up question about what made the team great.  When I have done leadership development workshops, I usually get the following responses:

• We took time to learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
• Everyone played a role in the team’s success.
• We could have difficult conversations.
• We laughed about our different viewpoints.
• We got through rough times together.
• We communicated with each other.

Staff need to learn teamwork skills and great teammate moves to become a great team. To stop the “gang rivalries” discussed above, the OR team needs to learn more about each other. Ask each staff member to fill in the blank on these statements:

To bring out the best in me, the team should _________________________________________

Things that I don’t do well that the team should know include _____________________________

Something I can bring to the team to make us more effective is ____________________________

Learning each other’s strengths is essential to building an effective team.  Some generational conflicts may be inevitable, but we also know that the more we know each other personally, the stronger the likelihood that we will work effectively as a team.