Nurses shouldn’t be expected to build resilience on their own, says Dr. Pamela Power, DNP, MSN, BSN, ACNS-BC, associate chief nursing officer (ACNO) at Tipton Health.
Instead, nurse leaders need to consider team resilience and organizational resilience in addition to individual resilience. Team resilience deals with a team’s capacity to withstand and overcome stressors in a manner that allows it to sustain performance.
Resilient nurse teams share common traits, Power says.
- They share and understand a common purpose. All team members understand the team’s goals, purpose, and role.
- They have a shared consciousness, an accurate understanding of their environment, and access to the information they need.
- Team members trust one another, and they feel psychologically safe. There’s a real sense of having one another’s back. It’s foundational.
- They believe that they can effectively complete tasks together. They’ve done it before, they’ve been through difficult situations before, and they have a collective understanding that they can do it again.
- They share a mental model of themselves as a team. There’s an implicit understanding of team norms and rules of engagement. Nobody gets thrown under the bus. They have this shared understanding of how they interact with one another and how they work as a team.
- They can improvise. Resilient teams are nimble, pivoting, and weaving. When something unexpected occurs, they rise to the occasion.
- Resilient teams are cohesive and committed to navigating conflict. No member of the team chooses to leave.
Dr. Power discussed team resiliency during a recent Tipton Health Nursing Leadership Webinar. You can watch a webinar recording here to learn more about resilience and how nurse leaders can build resilience among nurses, teams, and their organizations.