Leadership: A Workshop for Developing Excellence in Leading Healthcare Initiatives, Change, and Interprofessional Teams

One reason often sited for the state of healthcare in the United States is the inability of healthcare professionals to work well with each other. Individual health professionals generally learn in disciplinary silos limiting interprofessional collaboration and competencies. Even programs that have been recently developed to improve interprofessional collaboration tend to place various disciplines in the same setting where they actually work in silos beside each other rather than as collaborators. The participants often lack the skills required to overcome barriers to “Communication” and “Teamwork” that can result in conflict. This presentation will describe an interprofessional leadership workshop, funded through a HRSA grant, that was developed and implemented to address barriers to interprofessional collaboration.  During the workshop, students are introduced to Emotional Intelligence, the most significant predictor of outstanding leaders. The Johari’s Window is then used to assist students understand the importance of “transparency” and the detriment of “blind spots”. Students complete the DiSC® profile, a tool that assesses their individual behavioral styles. Students develop an understanding of the importance of considering not just their professional roles, but also their work style in order to form effective teams. Students are then divided into groups consisting of DNP/NP, DNP/Nurse Executive, Physical Therapy, and Clinical Counseling students.  The groups are mixed so that at least one member of the team is from each of the four DiSC® behavioral profiles.  The students then view vignettes from the movie, “Escape the Fire”, a documentary on the healthcare system, and work as teams to develop a program that utilizes the expertise of all of the professions on the team in order to address one of the issues portrayed.  Unknown to the team, an instigator is placed on each team to derail the process by over emphasizing some of the disruptive tendencies inherent in the instigator’s own behavioral profile. Students are then introduced to the Awareness Wheel, an exercise for addressing conflict in a win-win manner. Data will be presented on the impact of the workshop and how students have used the content to advance teams in health care.