Near the start of the COVID-19 pandemic last March, I found myself in a conversation with a friend. We shared our concerns about the days ahead, talking about how we were going to handle the kids learning from home, and discussing whether she was putting her family at risk by continuing to practice clinically. 

This is Part 5 of our blog series Building Effective Teams. Click here to check out parts 1-4.

COVID-19 has made a huge impact on daily life, both at home and at work. In the midst of a crisis like this, it’s more important than ever to work on building strong working relationships with your team. As we jump into discussing the last few elements of building an effective team, I want to tell a story about an emergency department nurse named Jen.

This is Part 4 of our blog series Building Effective Teams. You can find the first three parts here. 

“If you avoid conflict to keep the peace, you start a war inside yourself” - Cheryl Richardson

On to the second layer of building an effective team: Surfacing Conflict. I will admit that my opinion on conflict has changed over the years. As a young nurse I was afraid of it, worried how my colleagues would react. Would they get defensive or think I didn’t know anything? Fast forward ten years. Experience taught me to be comfortable with conflict as a necessary evil, but I was completely puzzled when my boss insisted that it was a positive thing. Finally, I realized that conflict, handled wisely, could create opportunities for a discussion that often propelled us to great results.

What changed for me? Knowing how to tell the difference between healthy conflict and conflict that is not handled well.

“Trust is a product of vulnerability that grows over time and requires work, attention, and full engagement.” - Brene Brown

In part 2 of my blog series about building effective teams, I revealed five main areas of focus to develop effective healthcare teams. The first of those was building trust. 

In Part One of my "Building Effective Teams" series, you were left to think about two questions:

• Who is your team?  
• What is their purpose? 

Thinking about these questions may have proven to be more difficult than expected. This is not surprising though, as it is common for clinicians to be part of different teams throughout a single workday. 

Think about a nurse in the emergency room: she may identify her team as the nurses, techs, and ER providers who work with her during her shift. However, when she gets alerted that a critical trauma patient is coming in, her team is expanded to include flight nurses, CT, and the trauma surgeon. This may not be the team she would identify with on a daily basis, but it is a team she is part of, and whose functions and unity during emergency events are critical.

Who is your team?  And why does it matter?

Ask a room full of clinicians and healthcare leaders who their team is, and you will get a variety of responses:

• Everybody who works for my ambulance company
• The nurses, techs, and docs that work my shift in the ER
• All the nurses on my unit
• The trauma physicians
• The cath team