When safety and health are not at stake, tolerance for error comes with a little wiggle-room. Learning from mistakes is the fuel for invention and growth. More and more, however, businesses are forced to treat team effectiveness as a requirement. The fat has been trimmed from most organizations. Employees who have survived workforce reductions are carrying the loads of those who have left. Mistakes are more costly than ever before. While the survival of a human may not be at stake, the future of an organization may be teetering.
In the health care industry where medical error costs families nearly 100,000 lives each year, patient safety specialists have begun to look at the data. Why does one surgeon’s team commit more errors than another when the procedures, tools and space are identical? Why does a PM shift experience a different error rate than a day shift? Might the difference lie in something as simple as communication, collaboration, and teamwork? Leading institutions are now mapping their patient safety data to team effectiveness metrics. Common sense gets validated.
You don’t have to be in the business of taking care of people to approach risk reduction with such urgency. Any organization can measure their team effectiveness and map it to their performance. You just have to be willing to live with the answers that arise from the question.
Does your business still have room for error in today’s economy?
