Although coaches often talk about the importance of building a championship team, very few studies have addressed the mindset and psychosocial dynamics of teams winning multiple championships in a ...row. The purpose of this reflective report is to explore from a psychology of coaching perspective, factors perceived to be most paramount in building and sustaining a repeatable championship team culture over time. During the 2007-2010 seasons, a Division One NCAA university volleyball team won four successive national championships in a row. The lead author interviewed the head coach to ascertain his thoughts and reflections on foundational beliefs and coaching philosophy, program development and team norms, group dynamics and synergistic team functioning, and factors that influence the sustainability of excellence from year to year. Results from the structured interview were very enlightening, revealing insights into the importance of recruiting athletes that are the right fit, having a game plan to develop continuity and consistency from year to year, coaching for accountability and self-responsibility, reflections on true leadership and the essence of selfless service, mental skills training and the psychology of coaching, and getting athletes to buy into the program and perform with pride, collective confidence, and resiliency under pressure.
This article explores the hypothesis that a telemedicine intensive care unit (Tele-ICU) platform is uniquely suited to facilitate quality performance improvement (PI). This article addresses some ...substantial hurdles to overcome that may limit the effectiveness of a Tele-ICU platform to achieve PI objectives. Lastly, this article describes the author's experience with a PI project to improve ventilator management conducted via a Tele-ICU hub interacting with 11 geographically dispersed ICUs. Using this example to illustrate the concepts, the author hopes to shed some light on the successes and lessons learned so as to generate best-practice guidelines for Tele-ICU-directed PI initiatives.
Strategic planning is a process often left to senior hospital leadership, with limited input from unit-level, bedside patient care providers. This frequent approach to strategic planning misses the ...opportunity to engage a wide range of employees, build a shared sense of commitment, produce a collaborative team environment, and to generate greater acceptance of the plan. The Patient Care Services division at the University of Chicago Medicine used a strategic planning process that incorporated 360-degree input from both within the Patient Care Services division and outside of the division. The result is a strategic vision and plan that, shaped by broad-based input from both internal and external constituencies, is strengthened by the team that emerged from the process. Through the process of identifying a common understanding of the group's future direction, a shared purpose was created that transcended traditional professional boundaries and shaped a cohesive team focused on effective and efficient patient care. Now, with a focused strategic plan and a team centered on a shared purpose, the team is beginning to effectively deliver on the plan.
This study is a qualitative examination of the experiences and impact of participating in an outdoor-based and adventure education-based orientation as an alternative to traditional forms of sport ...team initiation. Traditional forms of initiation for the participants in this study had included hazing ceremonies, whereby new team members were forced to engage in degrading, humiliating and abusive activities to secure their place on a team. Following an experiential weekend orientation that incorporated cooperative, team-building and adventure-based challenges, interviews were conducted with male and female varsity athletes from collegiate hockey, volleyball, badminton and basketball teams in Canada. The participants observed how the cooperative, outdoor team activities contributed to an egalitarian, inclusive climate, which promoted team cohesion, communication and support among veteran and rookie athletes. Tackling team challenges that required support and cooperation for success facilitated the restructuring of pre-established hierarchical relationships, which led to changes in the ways athletes perceived and subsequently treated each other throughout the orientation and into their season. This study highlights some of the promising possibilities for creating new welcoming traditions for collegiate athletic teams that draw from experiential outdoor education and adventure-based models.
Data analysis to create deep understanding and insights holds vast potential for innovation, but there is a severe shortage of data scientists. How then can a company create the competencies needed ...to obtain a competitive edge in the era of data-driven business? This article describes "Data Driven Business", a program developed to coach company teams in Finland in the use of an innovation platform combining data analysis and service design using real-life case projects. The results suggest that this approach is an efficient way to build data-analysis competencies in a company: after taking the 14-week coaching course, 58% of the participating companies had launched a new product or service in the market within six months from the end of the course. After the program, a network called DOBit was established to share experiences among the members and to leverage data analysis and service thinking in society. This article describes the development and implementation of the course, its results and outcomes, and the keys for success and seeds for failure when attempting to build competencies for a data-driven business.
In creating a proper learning environment, teachers have to consider a wide range of factors and variables. Some of these are the diverse physical locations, classroom management, the personality of ...the students, cultural contexts, proficiency levels, assessment and curriculum constraints, students’ attitude towards learning, etc. Thus, the teacher faces the challenge of creating a matrix. The paper will show that you do not have to be a juggler to create a positive classroom climate that caters for children of all abilities.
This paper proposes a new model for team building, which enables teachers to build coherent teams rapidly and fairly for the term projects of software engineering courses. Moreover, the model can ...also be used to build teams for any type of project, if the team member candidates are students, or if they are inexperienced on a certain subject. The proposed model takes students’ preferences and the teacher’s considerations into account when a team building process is required for any type of course. In addition, this paper investigates how team building models (RandomM: teams are built with randomly selected students; TeacherM: teacher selects the members for each team; StudentsM: students build their own teams and the proposed model) affect team performance and how gender differences affect project activities and team performance. A three-year (five semesters) teaching experiment was performed with the participation of 248 male and 79 female university students and a total of 67 software project teams. Two different One-way ANOVA tests were applied on the experimental data, and the results indicated that the proposed model was better than RandomM, TeacherM and StudentsM models in terms of project grades, and the effect of gender differences on the teams’ performance and project activities was negligible.
Social behaviors are an integral part of team building. In this context, we propose a novel classification model that chooses an optimal classifier from the pool of classifiers for predicting the ...overall performance (OP). Secondly, the chosen classifier is used to investigate the impact of trust and personality on OP. To achieve these goals a pilot study with real time data from 442 respondents are collected from cross functional teams (CFTs) in India using an E-Questionnaire system. The results indicate that the adaptive neuro fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) method is an optimal classifier (A = 89.14%) with respect to other classifiers. We also infer that the predictors, trust and personality are most suitable for predicting OP with a direct relationship to OP and play an indispensable role; as a catalyst; for boosting OP.
PDF
