Teaming Book Summary

docx

School

University of Phoenix *

*We aren’t endorsed by this school

Course

Subject

Computer Science

Date

Jan 9, 2024

Type

docx

Pages

Uploaded by CorporalOstrichMaster323

Comp 3 - Reflection Reflection Abdul Sameer Shaik University Of Phoenix MHA: 542: Leading With Authenticity In The Health Sector 09/02/2021 Debi Williams

Reflection What have you learned so far about developing your own leadership purpose? The leadership purpose has been derived from the book ‘Teaming’ that talks about three different real-life situations to see how leaders assess uncertainty, mobilize people and meet their goals in each of those scenarios. The first case looks at a company that manufactures, sells and distributes mattresses to retailers across the United States. Unfortunately, company’s performance had been deteriorating for several years and a new CEO was brought in to reverse the trend. When Charlie Eitel arrived at Simmons Bedding company, he brought a simple vision to the employees. “I want us together to create the kind of company where all of us want to get up and come to work in the morning and the kind of company that others want to do business with”. When he arrived at the company teaming was virtually nonexistent. Not only were relations poor within the eighteen manufacturing plants, but between them it was even worse. Employees tended to view each other as competitors rather than collaborators. Workforce morale problem was an open invitation to make a difference. Eitel believed that his success depended on communicating a compelling direction to get people’s attention and, better yet, to inspire them to believe in themselves and in the firm. He was confident that the employees had what it took to do the work effectively and efficiently and he could see that they had not previously been supported in doing so. Eitel also believed in the power of soft skills approach to make it happen. He decided to engage front-line employees through out the company, site by site, in a program designed to build team skills and establish a culture of worker environment. Neither team building nor even a vastly improved culture will alone turn around a business. Focus on personal growth and culture change had to be combined with clearly specified goals and skills to channel employees’ new enthusiasm and teaming behaviors into performance results. In any turnaround there are numerous problems and opportunities for improvement but picking one reasonably clear target area to direct participants’ motivation into something measurable is very important. Eitel chose ‘zero waste’ as the goal to rally and focus the teaming energy for two reasons. Everyone can relate to the waste. No matter what department or the job, you can find opportunities to reduce waste. And dimensions of waste are relatively easy to measure, allowing

the demonstration of small wins and steady progress. Five stages of teaming that were outlined for production department were: Level 1: Employees could understand daily production goals, production zones and learn manufacturing concepts. Level 2: Teams could monitor their work in progress, meet existing goals, clear zones, and understand lean principles. Level 3: Teams could set, measure, post and report team production goals. Level 4: Teams could consistently meet goals and initiate production improvements. Level 5: Teams could reevaluate goals and continuously improve as well as coordinate production between teams and shifts. Similar five-level trajectories were outlined for Safety, Quality, Service and Cost. When a team’s members think they are ready to advance from one stage to the next, they made a formal presentation to the leadership team at the plant. This systematic approach tied the employees’ skills learning, personal growth, incentives, and results together in ways that were motivating and easy to understand. Leading Teaming in Complex Operations at Children’s Hospital This is case of a Chief Operating Officer at a Midwestern Children’s hospital who wanted to dramatically improve patient safety. Her challenge was to engage people in an organizational learning journey through which safer, better ways of operating could be discovered and implemented at the same time. Whether global supply chain or tertiary care hospital, a complex organization faces the possibility of failure around every corner. In that situation, teaming is a strategy for identifying vulnerabilities, brainstorming designs to prevent failures, and analyzing those failures. Children’s Hospital and Clinics in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is a major tertiary care hospital for children, with six facilities located throughout the Minneapolis St. Paul area. When Julie Morath took the job of chief operating officer at Children’s, she understood the complexity of patient care operations and clearly recognized the challenge ahead as one with neither a manual nor a successful predecessor to emulate. All complex organizations face unknowns (will the supply chain face disruptions? will the aircraft carrier successfully land its aircraft in a stormy sea?), but hospitals confront more than their fair share. The timing and type of patients who come through the door of the emergency room or show up in a hospital bed, and the

Your preview ends here

Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version

Access to all documents
Unlimited textbook solutions
24/7 expert homework help

services they will need, can be difficult to predict. Moreover, treatment protocols and medications are constantly changing because of advances in science, technology, and clinical research. Chronic diseases such as cystic fibrosis or advanced diabetes require ongoing customized care, and new diseases, such as the H1N1 virus, COVID-19 periodically show up, demanding intense discovery and problem solving. Problems small and catastrophic, unique, and recurring are the norm. The kind of teaming that is needed to find and solve problems involves keen observation from multiple perspectives, timely and open communication, and quick decision making. The stakes are high particularly in the ICU or an operating room. Errors can have dire consequences. To better understand the potential for safety failures, consider this episode in one young patient’s hospital stay. Nurse Ginny Swenson 5 wheeled ten-year-old Matthew from the intensive care unit to Children’s surgical floor, despite needing medications usually reserved for the ICU, because of capacity constraints. Swenson described Matthew’s condition to Patrick O’Reilly, a newly graduated nurse, and instructed him to program the electronic infusion pump for the morphine dosage prescribed by the physician. Matthew’s care was dependent, at the very least, on accurate communication between a physician and two nurses. O’Reilly, unfamiliar with that morphine pump, asked another nurse, Molly Chen, for help. Unfortunately, neither she nor any of the other nurses in the unit had much previous experience using pumps for continuous pain control. Chen, an experienced nurse, felt rushed. She was taking time from her many other duties to help O’Reilly. A conscientious, capable professional, she peered at the unfamiliar machine’s dials. To program the pump, one needed to enter both the morphine concentration and the appropriate rate of infusion. Neither Chen nor O’Reilly saw a concentration listed on the medication label (it turns out the label had been printed in a way that folded critical information inside the cassette where it could not be seen), but Chen used the information visible on the label to calculate and program the machine with what she believed was the correct concentration. She entered the rate of infusion as Swenson had instructed. Following hospital procedure, O’Reilly verified Chen’s calculations and settings. Then Chen left to care for other patients. Within minutes, Matthew’s face turned blue. He was having trouble breathing. O’Reilly sprang into action, turned off the infusion machine, called for the doctor, and began ventilating the child with a breathing bag. The doctor arrived within a very few minutes and confirmed O’Reilly’s suspicion that Matthew had

been given a morphine overdose several times more than was appropriate. The doctor administered a different drug to reverse the effect, and within seconds, Matthew’s breathing returned to normal. Morath had a single-minded goal to avoid harming hospitalized children. She aspired to achieve 100 percent patient safety at Children’s at a time when medication errors were rarely discussed among caregivers, let alone by senior management, and were widely considered inevitable by industry insiders. Thus, knowledge of how to improve safety dramatically was not only limited, but it was likely to differ in various parts of the organization based on the nature of the procedures. Counterbalancing this challenge of venturing into new territory, however, was the fact that this was indeed a goal that everyone could buy into. No one wants to harm a hospitalized child. When Morath interviewed for the COO job, she had twenty-five years’ experience in patient care administration and had previously been a registered nurse. With her calm demeanor and ready smile, she exuded an unflappable, can-do attitude that was both reassuring and inspiring. After joining Children’s, she continued her carefully constructed conversations around the topic of safety with people who would have to be on board with the initiative. In the beginning, this was not easy. As Morath noted, it was difficult to broach the topic of safety because most people get defensive. Talking about safety implies that we are doing things, wrong. For example, recall the teaming failure that led to Matthew’s overdose. Fortunately, an episode of successful teaming was quickly triggered, and Matthew made a full recovery. This is not the kind of story that makes newspaper headlines or even one that would have necessarily been reported a decade ago in a busy urban hospital. It was, however, clear to Morath that avoiding these kinds of failures was of the utmost importance for the goal of 100 percent patient safety. To prevent this kind of failure in the future, it was important to understand who or what was to blame. Looking at the string of events, this is not an easy question to answer. Did the problem lie with Chen, who programmed the machine? O’Reilly, who verified her settings? The administrator who placed the postsurgical patient in a unit where nurses were unfamiliar with using a pain pump? The pharmacist who delivered a morphine cassette with an ambiguous concentration. The computer programmer who made the medication labels too large to fit on the cassette, obscuring some text? Or perhaps Swensen, who left Matthew in the care of a novice

nurse? In a word, yes. All of them contributed to the failure. We cannot single out anyone as the culprit. The events succumb to a multicausal analysis, which ultimately points to a system breakdown. A novel situation combined with several small deviations from optimal practice to produce a potentially fatal failure. Unfortunately, because of the complexity of the activities and the idiosyncratic nature of individual patients’ situations, incidents like this happen repeatedly in hospitals around the world. The power of teaming in complex operations is the ability with the right leadership, interpersonal awareness, and discipline to anticipate, problem solve, diagnose, and reduce system risks, to avoid consequential failures. How do leaders create this kind of learning organization? The answer is not the same as what Eitel did to lead change at Simmons communicate a compelling goal, make it safe to team, and support teaming for improvement throughout the company but it’s not completely different, either. Leading in a complex operation starts with communicating a compelling goal to motivate people to act without easy answers. The need to tie that goal to a meaningful shared purpose that contributes to making a better world is far greater in complex operations than in routine operations. This is because people must cope with greater uncertainty. They must take greater interpersonal risks such as admitting mistakes and pointing out flawed systems to bosses and others. The opportunity to make a positive difference in the world supports and promotes the greater willingness to sacrifice that these interpersonal risks require. Tying the work, the organization does to the larger purpose of creating a better world is itself a reframing. Leaders in complex operations must pay even more attention to creating an environment of psychological safety , where people can tolerate the risks of learning, than in routine operations. The interpersonal risks in complex operations are that much greater. When leaders inspire and support teaming in this setting, they are seeking coinvestigators. People willing to work together to seek out, identify, and solve problems that have never been solved before. They are embarking on a journey, facing many unknowns. In contrast, at Simmons, the path forward had the comfort of a blueprint. Building a Teaming Infrastructure Soon after assuming her leadership role, Morath assembled a core team that she called the Patient Safety Steering Committee (PSSC). This was a select group of key influencers who would help design and launch the Patient Safety Initiative. To identify those with interest and

Your preview ends here

Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version

Access to all documents
Unlimited textbook solutions
24/7 expert homework help

passion, as well as to communicate widely with as many people in the hospital as possible, she delivered a series of formal presentations about medical errors, presenting the then still unfamiliar data that as many as 98,000 people in the United States were dying annually from medical errors higher than the number from car accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS. The PSSC was deliberately diverse with doctors and nurses, department heads and front-line staff, union members and executives. It was a group that understood and represented the organization well. Despite the pedigree of the PSSC and Morath’s compelling delivery, many pushed back against the idea of the initiative at first, reluctant to believe that errors were a problem at Children’s. They believed the national statistics, perhaps, but they did not believe that these data applied to Children’s. Tempting as it must have been to Morath to simply reiterate her message more forcefully, given that she understood that all hospitals, because of their operational complexity, were vulnerable to error she did not try to argue the point. Instead, she thoughtfully responded to the resistance with inquiry. Okay, this data may not be applicable here, she concurred. Then she asked, tell me, what was your own experience this week, in the units, with your patients? Was everything as safe as you would like it to have been? This simple inquiry seems to have transformed the dialogue, as the question is an invitation one that is genuine, curious, direct, and concrete. Each caregiver is invited to consider his or her own patients, his or her own experiences, in his or her own unit, in the prior few days. Moreover, the question is aspirational like ‘was everything as safe as you would like it to have been?’ but rather, ‘did you see things that were unsafe?’ It both respects others’ experience and invites aspiration. Too many would-be leaders forget about the power of inquiry, and instead rely on forceful advocacy to bring others along. As Morath showed, inquiry respects and invites. As people began to discuss incidents with her and with others that they had thought were unique or idiosyncratic, they realized that most of their colleagues had experienced similar events. As Morath put it, “I found that most people had been at the center of a health care situation where something did not go well. They were quick to recognize that the hospital could be doing better. She led as many as eighteen focus groups throughout the organization to allow people to air their concerns and ideas. To build the psychological safety needed for the inevitably difficult conversations about errors and failures, Morath frequently described her philosophy on patient safety to anyone who would listen.

Health care is a very complex system, and complex systems are, by their very nature, risk prone. The culture of health care must be one of everyone working together to understand safety, identify risks, and report them without fear of blame. We must look at ways to change the whole system when we manage to zero defects. By emphasizing the systemic nature of failures, she sought to help people move away from a tendency to find and blame individual culprits. Complex systems, as Morath recognized, also meant no easy path forward. She was passionate about her vision to direct the organization toward 100 percent patient safety but did not know how it would be accomplished. Admitting that she did not have all the answers, she enlisted everyone helping to work together to look at ways to change the system. Healthcare has had a long and painful history surrounding medical mistakes. Often called the ABC’s of Medicine - Accuse, Blame, Criticize the culture of medicine emphasized individual incompetence as a source of mishap, rather than careful analysis of where systems may have broken down. This mindset made blame, shame, and disciplinary action the logical approach to producing high-quality care. Unfortunately, however, this approach neither produced error-free care nor pointed the way to reducing medical errors, even during a period of heightened scrutiny. The ABC mindset is not conducive to honest, rigorous investigations into what causes the failures that occur, but rather seeks individuals to blame. Moreover, it does not consider the belief held by an increasing number of health care professionals that many medical errors can be traced to a fault in the system rather than to any one individual. In fact, what the ABC mindset did best, I would argue, was to silence reporting of errors. Most health care workers are rightfully protective of their reputations and jobs. Especially when an error resulted in patient harm, doctors and nurses involved in the patient’s care were frequently too afraid or too traumatized to discuss it. This left many dedicated and talented clinicians burdened with an internal sense of shame and nagging self-doubt about their value to the profession. Stimulating constructive dialogue required a fundamental shift on many fronts: organizational structure, processes, norms and values, and leadership styles. Psychological safety’s most important role in a health care setting is to allow increased accident reporting, a necessary first step if a hospital is to learn from its mistakes and improve over time. Health care also has a long, entrenched history of professional hierarchy. Those on lower echelons often do not feel psychologically safe enough to speak up to superiors with questions and suggestions. 11 Morath knew firsthand about the aftershock and emotional pain of medical accidents for health

care workers. She never forgot one she’d witnessed thirty years earlier, when she was a young nurse: a four-year-old patient died from an anesthesia error. What Morath remembered, even more than the devastation of the child’s death, was that “the nurse who felt responsible ‘went home that day and never returned,’ guiltily giving up the career she loved. Doctors and other nurses ‘just shut down’ and never talked to one another about what happened. The hospital’s attorneys swooped in to do damage control. ‘It just didn’t sit right and it plagued me,’” Third case is a renowned product design consultancy where leaders and project team members routinely experiment with both small and large changes. Unafraid to fail, they do fail. But they learn fast, try again and ultimately succeed in transforming parts of the operation to generate new lines of business while successfully providing innovative product designs. What elements from your chosen book and your own leadership purpose would you like to share with a colleague, fellow students, or a trusted health care professional? What resources (e.g., presentation, video, music) are useful in understanding leadership the way it is presented in the book you selected? Provide three takeaways for your colleagues or fellow students For each of your takeaways from your chosen book, how does each relate to development of your leadership purpose? What three elements of authentic leadership are presented in your chosen book? Provide a recommendation: Would you recommend this book? Why or why not? References Complexity leadership: Enabling people and organizations for adaptability https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0090261616301590 System Structure and Behavior Thinking in Systems— A Primer —Donella H. Meadows Systems and us: Feedback loops

Your preview ends here

Eager to read complete document? Join bartleby learn and gain access to the full version

Access to all documents
Unlimited textbook solutions
24/7 expert homework help

https://systemsandus.com/foundations/why-you-should-think-like-a-modeler/balancing loops

Teaming Book Summary

Related Documents