Teamwork required

Teamwork requires a shift from working exclusively to achieve personal goals to working to achieve shared team goals. This requires belief in the power of teamwork, commitment toward the team s mission, and trust that every team member will do his or her part to meet team objectives. 

We come into this world dependent on others to take care of us. As children we depended on our family for all of our basic life needs. As adolescents, however, we looked for opportunities to be on our own. It seems, in fact, a primary mission of most teenagers is to resist dependency and assert independence. This reliance on self rather than others is promoted and reinforced throughout our culture, from high-school and college classrooms to the corporate boardroom. High-performance teamwork requires a dependency perspective, however. 

The benefits of implementing these teamwork strategies will not be immediate. The "sell" for teamwork is analogous to the "sell" for safety. Safety leaders are well aware of the need to perform certain inconvenient, inefficient, and even xmcomfortable safety-related behaviors in order to reap the potential long-term benefits of injury prevention. Likewise, the rewards of teamwork require substantial up-front investment in resources, time, and collective effort. 

Figure 17,16 High-performance teamwork requires these paradigm shifts.

Many jurisdictions, but not all, require that you live nearby or in the jurisdiction. Some fire departments give preference to otherwise qualified veterans over civilians. This may take the form of a policy, sometimes called a Veteran s Preference policy, whereby points are automatically added to the written exam. Is this unfair No. Fire companies are a lot like military units. They follow a strict chain of command, and firefighters on the line work as a team, knowing that their lives are in each other s hands. Military personnel have learned the discipline and teamwork that are vital to firefighting and emergency services, making them very well qualified. 

The model for an analysis and reporting strategy presented emphasizes the importance of a structured plan of work in combination with team s commitment, in the attempt to complete participation in the OPCW proficiency-testing scheme successfully. However, teamwork among laboratory staff may not be enough successful participation requires full support from management too. After all, management must understand that participation requires full devotion from the laboratory other tasks preferably have to wait for a later point in time. 

Because the framework of every clinical research study relies on a number of interdependent disciplines, the development of a clinical study protocol is ideally a multidisciplinary task. Teamwork, coordinated by one experienced person in clinical research with good knowledge of the regulatory requirements for new drug development, is essential. The protocol design team should also include input, recommendations, and review by the following ... 

Define the opportunity To arrive at the level of control exhibited in Figure 17.3 requires fundamental questioning of the entire system, including, but not limited to, each raw material component and process step needed to make a final product. This process takes teamwork. The team is generally comprised of a group of experts who understand the process, the intermediate components that make up the finished product, and the testing, and often missed the customer s expectation s for quality, product market share, and profit contribution and margins. 

Teamwork is central to all international disaster relief efforts. To provide focus for accountability it is necessary to be clear about what nurses need to know in order to function and be effective in disaster relief teams. Frequently disaster situations will require nurses to expand their practice parameters beyond what they had traditionally considered nursing practice. Certain situations demand additional responsibilities so that the nurse becomes the doctor, the engineer, or the nutrition expert by proxy. There are many health care situations where nurses do a little piece of everyone else s work in order to ensure completeness and continuity of care. The same applies in the disaster situation. 

Perhaps one the fastest-growing applications of teamwork has been in the field of ergonomics. The use of teams to evaluate, design, and implement jobs and workstations is relatively recent but has met widespread acceptance. A clear indication of this trend is the growing number of submissions on the topic in most national and international eigonomics conferences and the inclusion of employee participation as one of the basic requirements in the proposed OSHA Eigonomics Standard (OSHA 1999). 

The implementation of teamwork demands organizational resources, not only in financial terms, but also in time and organizational effort required for platrrring, training, meetings, and other activities. Therefore, resources must be allocated, and contrary to what some believe, effective teamwork is not free, and spontaneity is not the only driving force behind it. 

A maintenance storeroom strategic master plan is a prerequisite for success. There is efficiency in order. We must know what is to be done and what is the proper order to do it. It all starts with a plan, and successful planning requires teamwork. 

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