RBWH Executive team recently attended a high performing teams workshop.

On Wednesday 12 July, the RBWH Executive Leadership team attended an offsite workshop focused on professional development and fostering high performance.

The workshop encouraged the Executive team to reflect on their teamwork as a group and their roles in coaching and leading their own teams in an environment of time pressure, limited resources, changing policy priorities and dynamic team membership.

The primary focus of the workshop was on developing cooperation, psychological safety and performance, as well as coaching and leading skills.

An interactive game called ‘Don’t let the bomb go off’ (pictured) saw team members working together to diffuse a simulated bomb, highlighting how time restraints can limit the ability of previously high-performing teams to make rational decisions.

There were a number of important takeaways from the workshop, however, creating psychologically safe teams stood out as a key focus. In this context, psychological safety is when all team members feel safe to speak up about their ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes without fear of being punished or humiliated for doing so. The team reflected on how hierarchy can impact effective team cooperation and the impact of poor psychological safety on performance.

It was revealed that building psychological safety is harder than we think, but has a bigger impact on performance than we realise. The notion of developing good psychological safety can be applied to all teams throughout RBWH, along with coaching and learning techniques.

The RBWH Executive team looks forward to implementing the skills learnt in the workshop to their Executive Leadership meetings, and working with teams throughout the hospital to create more psychologically safe environments.