Series: Let our Powers Combine! Post 2: All sunshine and roses? Not until you make it that way—Together!
High-functioning successful teams don’t just happen. Successful teamwork doesn’t come about by luck or chance. Successful teamwork isn't a happenstance or ‘unicorn’ experience. Team members make their teams successful through reflection, thoughtfulness, persistence—and work! To combine individual powers into collective competence that is productive and effective, it is imperative that we have team skills. In this post, the authors share how they developed into a cohesive successful high-functioning interprofessional team. (Estimated reading time: 5 minutes, 40 seconds)
By Getahun Lombamo, Sheryl Mills, and Amy Wiebe
Setting the Stage:
You might remember our team—and their ‘powers’—from Post 1 in this series. Amy Wiebe, from Pharmacy, brought a transferable idea suitable for interprofessional education to the USask Health Sciences IPE Team, Getahun Lombamo and Sheryl Mills. This initiative was also supported by the broader IPE Curriculum Committee (IPECC). Members of this committee recognized the importance of learners becoming familiar with harm reduction principles along with trauma-informed care.
It’s Day 1. Let’s meet! Let’s do this exciting thing together!
Amy came to the first meeting with expectations. She hoped for a guiding structure or template to follow. She didn’t really anticipate engagement or support from the IPE team. She wondered what the limits and boundaries were.
What did Amy need from Sheryl and Getahun? Limits and boundaries.
But “Surprise!”
Sheryl said, “You can do whatever you want! How can we help? Let’s explore together!” 😳
You see, Sheryl didn’t have ‘expectations’—but she did have goals. 😉 Getahun and Sheryl were working on expanding IPE opportunities and here was Amy, backed by the College of Pharmacy and Nutrition and IPECC, coming with a gem of an idea, a SMART idea! Our goals were mutually beneficial. Win, win, win, win, win!
But wait?!? Where is the structure?! How will we do this? How will this work? How do we do this new thing together?
We worked this out—together. We set up weekly hour-long meetings. And we turned up week after week. One series of meetings would end and we would check in, “Do we want to continue in this way?” “Yes!” we all said. During these meetings we discussed ideas, formats, approaches, resources, activities, and eventually the philosophies, assumptions and beliefs that were underpinning all of these. Amy would be frantically taking notes during these meetings. Between meetings, Amy worked on filling in the template we eventually had offered as a guide (but not before we did a good amount of exploring first!). And that is how SITE 2.3 was developed—and how we developed together as a team.
Did we agree on everything? Nope. But we talked about these things openly, learned more, remained curious and interested. We also made decisions collectively, had clear roles and responsibilities—and we had our shared SMART goals.
We have been so successful—and creative—in taking the approach we have, that we expanded our project beyond SITE 2.3 to include two Health Sciences Students’ Association (HSSA)-hosted seminars, a Patient and Family Narrative, and possibly an Escape Room! And a series of blog posts exploring this adventure!
So how did we get to sunshine and roses?
Good teams are made ‘good’ by their members. It takes effort and finessing within your team. It isn’t luck of the draw of who is on your team. There are no horseshoes, shamrocks, or shooting stars. A good team is not a unicorn or an urban legend. There are the elements, qualities, attributes, and characteristics which are developed within successful teams.
These are our guiding practices that we developed together—and believe contribute to our success:
Our shared mission was to make the experience as meaningful as possible for learners. We used these three salutogenic [1] domains in our decision-making:
1. Is this relevant and meaningful?
2. Is this manageable?
3. Is this understandable?
Our goals were all SMART (specific, manageable, achievable, realistic/relevant, time-bound and timely)—and shared!
We capitalized on the strengths that come through interdependence: We were respectful and appreciative. We valued what other ‘powers’ team members brought to the table. No one person could have built this on their own. And we knew that!
We all have a willingness to explore the viewpoints of others. We brought positivity and a genuine interest in new ideas—and no one was shut down for their perspectives. This allowed ideas to be shared, mature, develop, morph, and change as we went along. As mentioned earlier, we didn’t always agree! However, we could navigate these differences because we were curious and interested in seeing one another’s perspectives.
We were all flexible. We had the flexibility to approach the hurdles that we encountered together—in ways that worked for us.
The regularly scheduled meetings were always interesting and a bright spot in the day. We had fun! It wasn’t too formal (no pre-identified agenda), so it was the perfect environment for new idea generation. “What would we discover together today?!”
Our agreed-upon process was that we would come together to talk about ideas and then go back to do individual work, bring it back to the group to share, refine ideas, etc. A good rhythm. We had meetings that were productive, and we were all committed to our ‘homework’ between meetings.
Meeting logistics that worked for us were critical to our success. Meeting virtually was very helpful. We weren’t all physically located in the same city, yet we were clearly “present” during the meetings. We built a strong collaborative team through virtual interactions. However, the video conferencing component was key—we relied heavily on body language and eye contact. It was clear we were each fully engaged during the meetings (i.e. we weren’t checking our email at the same time or working on other projects simultaneously! 😉).
What have we learned so far...?
No one ‘power’ is better than another. Each power, when working together synergistically with others, is needed to accomplish the mission (save the planet! —if you remember our Captain Planet theme in Post 1 in this series. ‘Saving the planet’ in our case was to develop meaningful and relevant IPE experiences that were manageable and understandable related to harm reduction).
Are we ‘successful'?
We don’t know what the participant experience will be in SITE 2.3, but we DO know that we have accomplished our shared goals so far AND we have decided to do more work together—this post is an example!
This is what worked for us.
But how you go about working with your teams might be very different! We are not suggesting a system of working together but rather, pointing to the importance and value of enjoying working together.
You see more sunshine and roses when you go looking for them 🌞🌹
Reflect on your own successful team experiences. What qualities do you think contributed to the successfulness of your team?
If you would like to share one of your successful team experiences, please be in touch. There might be a gem of a blog post just waiting to be shared!