The other Phil Jackson observation from the article that impressed me was the notion that he used nonauthoritarian methods to empower his players and these methods came directly from a spiritual direction that allowed him to be true to himself. He talked about knowing that "things of a higher calling could unite groups of men."
"I've learned that the most effective way to forge a winning team is to call on the players need to connect with something larger than themselves...... It requires the individuals involved to surrender their self interest for the greater good so that the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts." - Phil Jackson in Sacred Hoops (p. 5)
Contrast that with typical managed care or business strategies that leave the people out of the equation. The best way to look at that contrast is by looking at some team situations I have been in the past. I wrote about my Renal Medicine team in the past. It was my last rotation in medical school and I walked off that service at about 8 PM on the last day before graduation. The whole raison d'etre of that team was the two goals of excellent medical care and education. The approach to both goals was intensive. Even as a medical student, I felt like a critical part of the team. My job was to go out into the large medical complex on the grounds of the Milwaukee County Medical Center and do consults. On the last day, the two residents I was working with approached me and said: "Look George, we know this is your big day but we are getting killed. Can you do these consults?" Of course I did. The only meaning that my action had at the time was the I was a part of this team and I wanted to share the workload. After we completed rounds that night at about 9 PM, those same residents joked about how I was a super medical student and some of the jokes were quite funny. But that rotation (with a few others) was one of the most meaningful educational experiences of my life. To this day, I miss working with that team. It was a spiritual experience!
Teams on inpatient psychiatric units can be a different story in part because they are influenced by the typical silo style management of big hospitals. The managers are ego rather than team driven. There are separate nursing and physician structures. Some of the team members may be in separate unions. There are multiple disciplines that can be split be numerous administrative hierarchies. It is always easy for administrators to try to play one discipline against the next. Institutional attitudes can affect psychiatric teams at multiple levels. At various times I have been in teams where one or more members were being influenced by administrators to the detriment of the team. That almost always translates to suboptimal patient care. The administrative message to teams can be fairly extreme. At one point I can recall being told that we were no longer doing team meetings. Productivity measured as individual physician-patient contacts was more important. At that time we had already been told that our documentation was supposed to include a blurb about observations made in the team meeting or it would not "meet criteria" for the correct billing code. At other times we were plagued by observers - bureaucrats, consultants, or business types who clearly did not know anything about the work or at least the work we were doing. Many were hired guns brought in by our own administration as the "next big idea" or an attempt to manipulate the team in some way. In the most extreme situation, a representative of the administration was sitting in team meetings and telling us what to do. I say extreme because the administrator had never assessed any of the patients and did not know them. They also did not have the expertise to make a diagnosis or treatment plan. All of their decisions were strictly financial. They needed us to carry them out to provide the legitimacy of having licensed professionals names in the charts, especially on the discharge orders.
All of those last scenarios are at the extreme other end of the spectrum from Phil Jackson's approach. My guess is that Phil Jackson would not have been able to keep Kobe Bryant in LA when he wanted to be traded with just financial incentives and a business approach. It took a spiritual one. He had to feel like he was part of a larger process. That is the spiritual atmosphere that needs to be created on treatment teams. You won't get to that by expecting physicians or nurses or social workers or occupational therapists to be mini-administrators focused on "cost effectiveness". In fact, it is exactly the wrong approach.
The correct spiritual ground for a team is unity, appropriate concern for other team members, common goals and positive affect associated with being on that team. Team members need to to have a uniform neutral and spiritual approach to the people they are trying to help. One of John MacDougall's suggested approach to improve spirituality is: "try treating every human being that you meet as if he or she were a beloved child of a Higher Power." It has nothing to do with being a bean counter and in fact if the bean counters can't support the development and maintenance of teams - it is time for everybody to walk away and start over.
Phil Jackson's elaboration of a non-authoritarian spiritual approach to managing people on teams is just another important way that the government and the managed care world miss the boat and end up providing the worst possible management of health care workers, especially mental health care workers. Micromanagement and a general cluelessness about managing knowledge workers is another. We don't have a shortage of worker productivity or a shortage of workers - we have grossly mismanaged workers and some of the worst managers in the world.
George Dawson, MD, DFAPA
John A. MacDougall. Being Sober and Becoming Happy. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013. p. 40.
Phil Jackson and Hugh Delehanty. Sacred Hoops. Spiritual Lessons of a Hardwood Warrior. Hyperion, New York, 1995.
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