#teameffectiveness

Joan Deal, DNP, MBA, ACC | Executive Coach & Organizational Consultant, SixSEED Partners 

Background

 Dr. Deal was invited to work with a team of nurse managers at a large rural academic health system in the Mid-Atlantic region who wanted to strengthen their ability to work together as a high-performing team. The group had recently experienced the “storming” phase of team development. While each manager was highly skilled and dedicated, they tended to stay within their own silos rather than collaborating as one cohesive unit. 

Recent role redesigns and staff changes had disrupted team trust and communication. Members hesitated to share openly or engage in constructive conflict, which made it hard to align on priorities or solve problems together. A new Nursing Director, in her first six months with the organization, recognized these challenges and partnered with the Chief Nursing Officer (CNO) to help the team rebuild connection and effectiveness. 

Client Results

The Strategy:

 After consultation with the CNO and Nursing Director, Dr, Deal designed a one-day retreat focused on improving trust, communication, and teamwork. The goal was to help the group understand their current dynamics, appreciate individual communication styles, and develop shared commitments for how they would work together moving forward. 

To guide this process, the team completed The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team assessment – a tool that evaluates how teams build trust, manage conflict, commit to decisions, hold one another accountable, and achieve results. Leaders also agreed to create a “Team Covenant,” a code of shared behaviors describing how they wanted to show up and collaborate as colleagues. 

The Solution: 

 Before the retreat, each nurse leader participated in a one-hour conversation with Dr. Deal to share their perspective on the team’s current state and challenges. Across the interviews, several common themes emerged: the need for greater trust, clearer roles, improved communication, and stronger follow-through on commitments. These insights were summarized and shared with the team at the start of the retreat. 

During the session, the group reviewed their Five Behaviors results and explored how their individual DiSC communication styles affected their comfort with conflict and collaboration. Through guided discussion and coaching, the team identified specific actions to strengthen relationships and created a shared “Team Covenant” outlining the behaviors they would practice to maintain a healthy, effective culture. 

The Impact:

 By the end of the retreat, the team had: 

• Identified strengths and key challenges. 
• Developed clear operational priorities for the coming year. 
• Established a shared set of agreements for teamwork and communication. 
• Made personal commitments to practice new, more collaborative behaviors. 

In post-workshop feedback, participants shared their appreciation for the opportunity to connect and learn more about one another. The team left with renewed trust, greater awareness of one another’s strengths, and a stronger foundation for collaboration and communication. 

As one manager reflected, “The best part of the day was learning more about my colleagues and their leadership styles.” 

To learn more about doing this kind of work to support and elevate your team to the next level, contact SixSEED Partners today.

Petra Platzer, PhD NBC-HWC, PCC: CEO SixSEED Partners

Background

SixSEED Partners (SSP) was invited to co-lead an AI Innovation Session at a national CEO Healthcare Roundtable, where executives explored how to turn AI from a concept into action. Building on earlier sessions that introduced AI fundamentals, this session aimed to help leaders identify practical next steps for integrating AI into their organizations. 

Client Results

The Strategy:

In partnership with Amol Joshi, PhD, MBA, an academic leader in AI device innovation and research, SSP co-designed and facilitated an experiential session focused on Human-Centered AI. As Ben Schneiderman defines this in his book, “human-centered AI focuses on amplifying, augmenting, and enhancing human performance in ways that make systems reliable, safe, and trustworthy.” 

In design and delivery, we focused on integrating and modeling a “Both/And” approach for participants to directly experience the power of polarity thinking and mapping. The strategy included two presenters – one coming from the technology perspective and the other from the people perspective. It included highlighting disruptive innovation from the past (Flight) with the disruptive innovation of the present/future (AI). It also included thinking about the hopes and fears of Artificial Intelligence, juxtaposed with the hopes and fears of Human Intelligence (HI), which when leveraged together can produce the greater result of Human-Centered AI, with the potential of healing the currently broken healthcare system – for patients and the workforce, alike. 

The Solution: 

Together, Drs. Platzer and Joshi co-facilitated a 2.5hour session with CEOs and healthcare executives to “Chart their AI Flight Path using Systemic Thinking and Experimentation”. Using the lessons of the Wright Brothers, and lesser named Wright sister, the executives defined their hope and fears for AI within healthcare. Fears named could quickly be identified as ‘solved’ by human intelligence, whereas the potential benefits of AI were quickly seen as ‘solutions’ to the limitations currently present in the healthcare system, such as burnout from data overload and slower decision-making, difficulty scaling services and access issues, etc. 

After seeing the larger polarity map of Human AND Artificial Intelligence – to achieve Human-Centered AI – participants next vetted a specific AI tool on a “test flight” in their organization. Guided by a 5-step flight plan, they explored how they would realistically bring this AI tool into their organization today – with it’s current AI vision, infrastructure, and culture of readiness. 

The Impact:

Through this dynamically facilitated session, leaders left with a shared realization: “we need to have our own bike shop”. Like the Wright Brothers, they saw that innovation requires an environment for safe and coordinated experimentation. Their key takeaway – the time is NOW to develop a streamlined governance and process for their organizations to explore AI driven technologies. They recognized began to reframe their thinking about AI, shifting from AI as a tool to AI as a strategic that can drive success towards their goals for the quadruple aim – and beyond. How to do this begins with this shift in thinking – and the communication approach – to include both artificial and human intelligence with strategic clarity. 

One executive shared, “the fact that you made such a boring topic so engaging and real was wonderful”. 

Another said, “that was really amazing. If you had just come in and said ‘you all need to build a bike shop’, it wouldn’t have worked the same!” 

To learn more about doing this kind of work to support and elevate your team to the next level, contact SixSEED Partners today.

Petra Platzer, PhD NBC-HWC, PCC: CEO SixSEED Partners

Background

A clinical division within a community-based hospital was experiencing a decrease in morale and team cohesion, which was starting to affect patient care. In seeing this negative trajectory for the health of their workforce and their quality patient care, the Director of Advanced Practice Practitioners (APPs) and Division Chair showed effective leadership by seeking support. Through the referral of a trusted colleague, this executive sponsor dyad contacted SixSEED Partners to help heal their team.

 
In the Discovery phase, the leadership team transparently shared that, while the clinicians and APPs respected each other as people, the communication flows were breaking down and less collaborative. They were hearing from multiple team members about a lack of trust and decreased psychological safety. One source of tension was the different working styles of the clinicians, such as high drama or micromanaging behaviors. Over time, this left the APPs with varied levels of role clarity, feeling deflated, and unable to fully practice to the scope of their license.

The leadership team felt stuck. The division was short-staffed and covering 24/7 patient care. While it seemed like there was no “extra” time for anything, the leadership also knew that not addressing this team culture issue now would lead to even worse problems later: a disengaged workforce, employee turnover and lower quality care. 

Client Results

The Strategy:

Shifting from the traditional “fix the problem people” approach, our strategy was to build a sustainable culture of trust. We designed a blended approach to support learning and growth at the individual, team and leadership levels. To be effective, we ensured this approach would fit into the team’s busy schedule, foster connection, and provide tools they could apply immediately in their day-to-day work. 

The Solution: 

Dr. Platzer and Ms. Hompe designed and facilitated a five session, nine-month experiential learning series that led the team through an “internal Operating System” upgrade. The group moved step by step through scaffolded learning to:

• Build Self-Awareness using strengths-based assessments
• Shift from Drama to Empowerment mindsets and behaviors
• Move from Assumptions to Shared Commitments

With this foundational work, the team applied their new interaction behaviors to optimizing their team communications in patient rounds and defining their Team Norms for team effectiveness. Clinicians also selected mini-coaching engagements to support further individual development.

The Impact:

Through this work, the team blended and became more effective by building trust, improving collaboration, and communicating more openly. Team members demonstrated safety to engage in discussion, rather than passively agreeing. Patient care also improved. As one example, the team was able to respectfully and supportively raise concerns about one provider’s clinical practices, resulting in improved accountability and better quality care. 

Three months after the final session, we checked in with the Leadership Team. They confirmed the team was still using their new skills and ways of operating – even while under more external pressures and volumes than previously. 

As the Division Chair reflected: “It’s one thing to practice these skills during the sessions, but it’s another to see people still using them together when things are even tougher. This engagement was so worth it!”

To learn more about doing this kind of work to support and elevate your team to the next level, contact SixSEED Partners today.

Petra Platzer, PhD NBC-HWC, PCC: CEO SixSEED Partners

Background

SixSEED Partners concluded a year-long Team Development Series with a team of neonatal physicians and advanced practice providers at a community-based hospital outside of a major urban city. The vision of the executive sponsors was to strengthen team bonds and increase the team’s effectiveness for patient care delivery and for their own well-being. Throughout this series, we helped the team increase their self- and team-awareness around their ways of thinking by providing evidence-based tools and frameworks to use in their day-to-day work and team interactions. The team’s medical director and advanced practice providers lead continued threading the tools and framework into the team’s daily work and interactions. They also provided real-time feedback for the team into the session design process to achieve the overall engagement results. In the latest session, the team successfully worked together to “optimize team communications for effective patient care rounds”.

Client Results

The Strategy:

Building on the progress from the last session, the team leaders asked SSP for help on codifying what the team had skillfully demonstrated in the last session – new ways of discussing, listening and coming to decisions on topics that had different opinions. With the series concluding, it was also crucial to their success to define ways for actively sustaining the progress everyone had made, as well as how to intentionally bring new team members into this way of working together. 

The Solution: 

SSP’s Petra Platzer and Lisa Hompe designed a highly interactive and experiential session for the team to craft their Team Norms within their new Team Operating Manual. In this 2 hour in-person session, sixteen physicians and advanced practice practitioners “experienced” a Team Work Cycle by physically walking through it together and noticing their own energies and preferences in the phases. After learning about this cycle and their own natural tendencies, the team then moved through the work cycle process to make simple rules of behaviors as their working agreements for how they are most effective together – and consequently, their patients. 

The Impact:

Through this facilitated, experiential design, the neonatal division created five team norms which all members actively built together and voted on for consensus. Through everyone’s efforts in this series, the team’s improved psychological safety and alignment on their shared purpose helped them in focusing on voicing their individual needs and the needs of the team, as well as in their decision-making process for the final sets of behaviors they are now empowered to uphold and support each other on.

One participant shared she started the session in a low energy state after a challenging day in the NICU. She was pleasantly surprised that her energy was much improved through feeling the energy of the team and the satisfaction from everyone doing this work together – for themselves. Another shared she had never had such a productive outcome from everyone’s participation in this big a group, and in such a short time. The team leaders shared their pleasure in seeing the team really own the process and felt their shared investment in upholding these norms going forward together. 

To learn more about doing this kind of work to support and elevate your team to the next level, contact SixSEED Partners today.