Development of the TeamThe team was developed to accommodate the needs of a growing organization. Basically we had two people, and then the team grew quickly to a staff of six, as the team became a much higher priority. This has proved to be incredibly valuable to the organization, and gave me an opportunity to basically build a team from scratch, and to create the culture of that team. One of the things that we realized early on as that we needed to structure the need in such a way that the team worked for each other, to help each other out. That way, we felt that we could cover many of the basic advantages of teamwork, such as increased efficiency, a high level of responsiveness to patient needs, and overall effectiveness as wait times were diminished (Ray, 2017).

For example, we were able to take on projects on a team basis, which is one of the main advantages of having a team. Any one individual can become overloaded with work temporarily, so having other people on the team able to step in and help has made the department much more effective, even with the extra workload. From a managerial perspective, this aspect of teamwork makes it easier to divide work evenly, and the entire team takes responsibility for the work, which means that they have to work together and lift each other up. There is even a social aspect to teamwork – people aren\'t so alienated in their work as when they are constantly working alone, and that matters for morale. Like when the workload is very high, before the team it was always stressful, but with a team together at least you were all in it together, and that helped with morale (Nair, 2016).

Barriers

Teamwork is not without its challenges. One of the interesting things is that even when you think you have a team of like-minded individuals who are committed...

One thing that was perhaps unexpected was just the way that different people learn things. As it turns out there are people who just process things differently, they learn differently, and so when you\'re trying to teach or instruct them, you have to understand the approaches that work best and then follow them. In our role in nursing, it\'s often a matter of people who learn by doing versus people who prefer to learn through verbal training and instruction (Loehr, 2014). One of the barriers you see, in addition to just having to teach people differently, is that when people learn differently, they sometimes have different perspectives of specific things. People who learn by doing are probably more content with failure, because that is a natural part of hands-on learning. This contrasts with people who cannot stand failure, and managers like myself who think that making mistakes on live patients is absolutely unacceptable – one must learn enough to succeed the first time when someone\'s health in on the line. So something that is as innate as how someone learns new skills can actually prove really challenging in the team environment when it buts up against people who cannot accept that style of learning.
This is in addition to other things, like cultural differences. There are some pretty distinctive differences sometimes between cultures, or even in the same culture between people with completely different backgrounds. One of the things you want your team to do is to be a cohesive unit working towards a common goal, but that is difficult when people have completely different worldviews, styles of working and that sort of thing. Diversity comes in a lot of different forms and can be…