Spotlight

"Team Catalyst": The Faculty Coaches of the AAMC TeamWorks! Program

By Jennifer Leadley, jleadley@aamc.org

	The faculty and staff of Team Catalyst: Omar Khan, Kevin Grigsby, Yvette Pigeon, Deborah Davis, Diane Magrane, Valerie Williams, Clyde Evans, Linda Roth, Jennifer Leadley, Marilyn Raymond

In August 2007, eight faculty leaders gathered in a room at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges) to develop the lessons of a professional development program on teams. Highly committed to a collective learning program that would immerse both participants and faculty in team-oriented activities, the faculty purposefully designed the program so that teams permeated nearly every aspect of the program. Participants would practice skills of peer consultation, collective analysis, and team communication in peer consultation teams and faculty would practice these same skills within the realm of their own team.

This Spotlight on the program faculty team is a story how eight diverse educators collaboratively developed and taught the lessons on teamwork. Their experiences are described from interviews, team meeting records, and observations of the author.

Are "We" a Team?

The TeamWorks! program recognizes that team members enter the work of teams as diverse individuals and must LEARN to work together as mutually accountable teams. Supported by well-established concepts of adult learning, effective team behaviors, and professional leadership development, the program presents a six-month course of study and practice of the work of enhancing team effectiveness. Participants learn about team behaviors, task management, and interpersonal dynamics while working in peer consultation teams within the program.

The eight educational leaders chosen to teach and coach the lessons of the program were as diverse in their experiences as they were in their contributions in working with teams. The team of faculty met the Katzenbach and Smith ("The Wisdom of Teams," 1993) definition of a team: "a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, a set of performance goals and approach for which they hold themselves accountable." Faculty members' diverse backgrounds of race, ethnicity, gender, education and skills were complementary. With a shared passion for teamwork, all members were committed to working together as a team to produce a collective product—an effective learning program.

Faculty member Omar Khan commented: "We were a team from the start. We had complementary skills, a common purpose of teaching/training health care teams, and we held each other accountable."

Team Catalyst: Teaching and Coaching Assignments

Faculty represented diverse organizations and professions. They worked in partners to teach workshops and coach teams of participants, called consultation teams. As one of the first activities in their development, consultation teams gave themselves a team name, as depicted in the chart.

What Are "We" Here For?

	Team Catalyst Ground Rules: Be fully present Share responsibilities and hold each other accountable for products and effective process Communicate effectively using active listening, holding back on interruptions, and building upon each other's ideas Maintain confidentiality Start and stop on time Demonstrate trust and mutual respect Embrace conflict Make decisions by consensus Have fun!
	TeamWorks! participants learn about team behaviors, task management, and interpersonal dynamics while working in teams. The expected results are enhanced team productivity and an impact of organizational improvement and personal leadership development.

Faculty first came together for a meeting called "A Taste of Our Own Medicine." It was held six weeks prior to the program start so that faculty members could: (1) become acquainted with one another, (2) come together as a team to fully understand the lessons of the program, (3) agree on what they wanted to accomplish as a team, and (4) present their lessons to other team members for critical review, feedback, and interweaving of ideas. This was the beginning of their development as a team.

In working in teams, a common misconception is that all team members share the same perspectives on the specific tasks, goals, and outcomes of the program. Aware of this challenge, Diane Magrane, the Program Director, led the team in a discussion to clarify roles, responsibilities, and expectations of faculty in carrying out the work of the program. The discussion contributed to their naming—"Team Catalyst"—a name that reflects the team's dedication and commitment to transforming the work of health professions teams. Their purpose speaks to team members' shared values and goals: to be an authentic team that leverages the abilities of each member to benefit TeamWorks! participants and ultimately improve the work of academic medicine.

In "The Discipline of Teams" (1993), Katzenbach and Smith propose that "all effective teams develop rules of conduct at the outset to help them achieve their purpose and performance goals." The ground rules drafted by Team Catalyst expressed norms, shared values, and desired behaviors, and set forth the standards of conduct. Ground rules reminded members to respect other's ideas and opinions, show mutual respect, embrace conflict, hold each other accountable, and share responsibilities.

Effective team meetings are fundamental to productive work and achievement of goals and therefore it was important for the team to develop guidelines on how to function in meetings. They agreed to adopt practices that included: a logically ordered agenda; distribution of a meeting notice with purpose, place and time; rotating roles of timekeeper, facilitator, and recorder to facilitate meeting process; and use of a meeting record to make action items and decisions explicit. The recorder would be responsible for documentation of minutes in the meeting record template (PDF, 1 page). The facilitator whould be responsible for following the agenda to keep the meeting on track and to ensure ample time for check-in and closure.

The bulk of the meeting involved the presentation of lessons to the rest of the group for feedback on lesson content and performance. Experiencing the lessons before they were taught to participants not only improved the lessons with feedback but also gave faculty a head start in their own team development as faculty coaches. It also gave them insight into the knowledge, skills and practices of the select principles of teamwork that would be taught in the program.

Changes in Team Composition Affect Team Dynamics

The change in team membership from the inaugural program resulted in the development of a new team with different (and distinct) communication patterns and behaviors. The four returning faculty members and the four new faculty members acknowledged their need to learn to work together as a new team to design the program. Returning team member Valerie Williams noted, "The change in team composition provided new perspectives to improving program outcomes. As a returning coach, I was delighted to hear more ideas and new ideas about how to make the experience valuable to the participants."

With the new team dynamic, members were eager to exchange ideas, views and contributions. Returning members enthusiastically welcomed new members and this nurtured a warm atmosphere where individual and group values could thrive. As members described their best team moments from the previous year, individual contributions increased and future conversations became easier and more efficient. Returning member Yvette Pigeon reflected, "Our challenge was to welcome new members and to initiate a collaborative dialogue to define who we were as a team, what we valued, goals, ground rules, share past lessons, and to honor the questions, knowledge, and skill sets new members brought to the team."

I Know What I Bring to the Team...But What Do We Bring to the Team?

Six weeks later, the program opened with twenty participants in Irvington, Va. This was a five-day period of intensive learning and instruction. In addition to teaching participant workshops and coaching participant consultation teams, Team Catalyst members met daily to debrief, adapt to feedback, and provide peer consultation on the challenges they were encountering in coaching the participant teams.

Team Catalyst members actively integrated program principles into their lessons, coaching methods, and most importantly—their own team interactions. Team Catalyst found success in the "Learning in Teams" model, which was taught to participants on day two of the seminar. Deliberate reflection on the conceptual model caused team members to consider the expectations and needs of group members, and how these behaviors are modified by the work of the task, group collaboration, and the end product.

Team Catalyst Embraces Conflict

	"Faculty coaches were challenged with having to seek the best balance of successfully teaching their lessons, providing guidance to their consultation team, and then coming back to support each other in coaching these diverse consultation teams with yet unknown challenges." —Valerie Williams
	Faculty established ground rules, team purpose, and shared the upcoming lessons in their first experience as a team in "A Taste of Our Own Medicine," at the AAMC in Washington, D.C., Aug. 6-8, 2007

When Team Catalyst was asked to adopt a new internet-based tool to support the curriculum, some members greeted it with skepticism. The Blackboard™ course management system was used by faculty (and participants) to enhance communication as virtual teams between September and February sessions and to coordinate lessons and group work products. The hurdles to adoption of the Blackboard™ collaboration tools (e.g., weblogs, discussion boards, group spaces) produced what Amason refers to as "cognitive conflict," or conflict which is "task-oriented and focused on judgmental differences about how best to achieve common objectives." (1996)

Faculty coach Kevin Grisby immediately recognized this conflict and led the team to "embrace" the tension that was present. (Recall that this was one of the team's ground rules.) Members addressed their frustrations, most of which were a result of generational differences in ease of technology application. As a result of grappling with the technology issues, a solution emerged. The team agreed to set aside time for the more experienced team members to assist the newer team members with course navigation techniques.

Team member Valerie Williams described: "I think the team conflict that brought us together was how to settle our issues on the role of Blackboard™ course management system. There were potentially good things about using it as a tool and there were not-so-good things about it. We all had to laugh about some of the issues that arose because ultimately we had to deal with problems that could not have been anticipated and come up with ways to work around them so that the participants could do their work together."

Lesson Transfer

When Team Catalyst members made the commitment to become a high performing team of coaches that would apply the lessons of effective teams to their own team, they underestimated the challenges and time needed to simultaneously design a course, teach in the course, coach participant teams, learn new technologies for team communication, and advance their own learning about teams as they guided participants through the process of team development.

Mutual respect and honesty, combined with shared accountability and commitment to team goals ultimately led the team to establish an effective support system for those who wrestled roles as consultation team coach, teacher, and team member. "It was definitely an odd experience to be simultaneously engaging in the dual role of team member and coach," remarked Omar Khan, "but it became more natural and less contrived to be Team Catalyst as time wore on. This was powerfully illustrated by the team meetings we had during the 'Team Dynamics Seminar'—Team Catalyst was a place to process, to think, to talk out loud about the work of coaching and teaching."

Team Catalyst demonstrated a keen self-awareness of what each individual brought to the team and to a philosophy of teamwork. Together, the team leveraged individual talents and experiences to produce a successful program where participants could explore the concepts and practical applications of team development. Team Catalyst faculty contributed to the important institutional work of eleven research teams, five clinical improvement teams, and four educational teams from nine different medical schools and teaching hospitals. The team of faculty clearly achieved their purpose to "improve the work of academic medicine." The closing session of the program in which participants reported on the outcomes and impacts of their home institutional teams revealed both personal growth and professional leadership development.

The author would like to acknowledge the contributions of: R. Kevin Grigsby, D.S.W, Valerie Williams, Ph.D., Yvette Pigeon, Ed.D., Clyde Evans, Ph.D., and Omar Khan, M.D.

References

1. Katzenbach, J. & Smith, D. (1999). The wisdom of teams: Creating the high-performance organization. New York, HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

2. Katzenbach, J. & Smith, D. (1993). The Discipline of teams. (Best of Harvard Business Review)

3. Amason, A.C. (1996) Distinguishing the Effects of Functional and Dysfunctional Conflict on Strategic Decision Making: Resolving a Paradox for Top Management Teams. The Academy of Management Journal, 39(1): 123-148.

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