Team Leadership and Partnering in Nursing and Health Care by Cynthia Armstrong Persily, PhD, RN, FAAN. Persily, CA; 2013, Springer Publishing Company.
This book grew out of the work accomplished at the West Virginia Nursing Leadership Institute over the course of several years. The Institute was designed to provide nurses with the skills and knowledge they would need to transform their "home teams" and to mentor others in acquisition of these same skills. Throughout the book, the author underscores the essential nature of teamwork to assure positive, high-quality health outcomes.
The book is divided into 4 sections: Team Models and Skills, Teams in Action, Team Issues and Challenges, and Leveraging Team Results. Section I (Team Models and Skills) provides the reader with the fundamental concepts and building blocks needed to build teams; these include tools to identify personality preferences, team management profiles, and institutional team climate. The author also provides a method for analyzing the 4 domains of leadership strength present in effective teams as well as data collection and gap analysis strategies.
Section II (Teams in Action) tackles broader concerns related to organizational culture, structure, politics, and leadership. Project planning and change management by teams is outlined in detail, and a variety of tools and frameworks for accomplishing the work of teams are included for the reader to consider. The evaluation of team success is given short shrift although several survey tools are touched on briefly.
Sections III and IV (Team Issues and Challenges and Leveraging Team Results) address the need to sustain gains made by health care teams, to provide ways for ongoing team growth and development, and to devise the means to continue funding teamwork. The book's final chapter examines the links between teams and partnerships and identifies ways to create partnerships from team successes.
In general, this book is a fairly exhaustive review of a great many concepts associated with teams and team building and includes a lengthy list of tools available to use in teams' work. For a novice leader or administrator, this overview offers a jumping off point to help begin thinking about teams and their work. However, no section provides sufficient detail for that leader to actually feel prepared and comfortable doing so. Because the scope of the book is so broad, its actual day-to-day utility might be limited. The author does provide the reader with a wealth of Web-based resources and an extensive reference list.
-V. Susan Carroll, MS, RN-BC
Clinical Nurse Educator
Neurosciences
Rush University Medical Center
Chicago, Illinois
[email protected]