Building a Cohesive Team * Incedo Group

Building a Cohesive Team

Success for any organization depends on teams working well together.

Every manager would love for this to simply happen organically.

Yet it takes a lot of work to get individuals with different skills levels, backgrounds and personalities to jell together and become a cohesive team.

When you factor in team members working remotely, whether in different states, countries or working from home, it complicates everything, and building a cohesive team is more challenging.

In many cases effective teamwork can help improve the organization’s productivity, efficiency and effectiveness, and maybe even revenues.

What’s interesting to me though is how much attention and time is spent on getting teams to work together better, and yet if we look at surgical teams, they already do that…naturally.

Surgical Teams versus Business Teams

Teams are teams right? By that I mean aren’t all teams the same? They are made up of a bunch of team members who each have a specific role and responsibility to the team.

So what difference does it make if it’s a sports team, business team, surgical team or any other kind of team? What makes a surgical team different? What do they know or do that we can apply to other team situations?

I admit that the life and death component can’t be overlooked. And there are a number of other factors that come into play with surgical teams I think are worth considering.

Fully focused: They aren’t reading emails, texting or thinking about their next meeting. The patient in front of them has their full attention, as do the other members of the team.

Mutual Support: The doctor performing the surgery needs the support of the nurses and anesthesiologist and everyone else in the room. And each of these people needs the support of the others to perform their job well.

Data Driven Decision Making: They come to the surgery with high-quality information and aren’t ‘guessing’.

Interest of the Patient is Above Own Interests: Sure there are egos in that room but at the end of the day the patient’s interests are paramount and the interests of the others in the room are secondary.

Ability to Make Decisions: They don’t have the luxury of hemming and hawing and considering every possibility and how to make everyone happy, they have to make a decision in the moment, and they do.

I could list other factors but I’m sure you get the point.

The question is what can we learn from surgical teams we can apply to the business world to make our teams work better together?

Applying Lessons from Surgical Teams to Business Teams

Clearly there are natural differences between business and medicine we can’t ignore. But the lessons have applications in the business world if we are open to considering the possibilities. Let’s take a look and see what can be applied to your teams.

Interest of Enterprise above Individuals: The enterprise is the team or the organization (just like the patient is to the surgical team).

Each person comes with their own skills and knowledge that are meant to collectively contribute to the success of the team.

One’s own personal needs and interests have to take a back seat.

Clear Leader: Someone has to make a decision during surgery when there are decisions to make. The doctor performing the surgery assumes and accepts that responsibility.

They make the decision with input from others and recognize the decision is the best one they can make at that moment.

In business while it’s important to gain consensus, at the end of the day someone has to be willing to accept responsibility for making a decision.

Clearly Defined Roles: You may have multiple doctors in the operating room and multiple nurses but each has a specific role.

Someone may be there to ‘assist’. Others are there to observe. Someone else may be working in tangent with the other doctor because they bring a different specialty into the OR.

Each has their own role that is clearly defined so they bring their own area of expertise to the team and are respected for that expertise and the role they play.

Success is Defined Collectively Not Individually: I know the surgeon may get most of the kudos outside the operating room (and maybe inside as well) and each person knows, including the surgeon, they couldn’t have had success without the collective ‘we’.

This is the epitome of good teamwork.

What I want you to recognize is that one of the ways you can get your teams to work better together is to look at the lessons from medicine, the surgical teams, and what makes them successful.

Applying these same concepts to your teams will have members looking at each other differently, responding to each other differently and the net result will be a huge win for the individuals, the team and your organization.

There is no perfect team, in an operating room or anywhere else.

People are people and egos their own needs and beliefs will get in the way at times.

However, there are characteristics that all extraordinary teams have. And when teams are performing poorly, if you look you can see common threads in these teams.