Building Your Dream Team, Part 1

One of my favorite current books is Fred Lee’s “If Disney Ran Your Hospital:9 ½ things you would do differently.”

I heard Lee speak at a conference a couple of years ago, and was completely sold. If we could capture the team – the energy – the enthusiasm of Disney in our building, people would not only want to live there, people would want to work there, too – in droves. What a nice mental picture that makes!

In the conclusion of the book, Lee poses this question:

“Have you ever worked very hard along side other people and absolutely loved every minute of it, even though you were physically exhausted at the end of the day? Is so, what made it so enjoyable?”

Lee goes on to answer the question for himself, sharing a story of backbreaking work side by side with family members, repairing his mother-in-laws house. Using precious vacation time to do it, too. And loving every minute of the work.

At the end of the story, Lee remarks,

“…I would describe the perfect work environment as finding an unsurpassed level of joy in hard work with good friends, doing something important for someone else who cannot do it for themselves. What comes closer to this picture than being a caregiver in a hospital [or senior care community]? The question is, how does one create such a team, and maintain such a spirit?”

Lee goes on to share some of the ways he believes this can happen.

One of the lessons we can learn from Disney in building the dream team of caregiving staff is simply this: Have a dream.

When either candidate for President today articulates a dream for this country people flock to listen. Whether you are a supporter of that candidate or not, it’s hard not to feel the passion of the dream. One example of this is the Youtube video that Obama supporters created - whether you're a supporter or not, you can feel the passion.

In days past, Martin Luther King shared his “I have a Dream” speech – a speech that lifted our national discussion about race and relationships to an entirely new level.

Goals, objectives and mission statements don’t really motivate people to stretch outside their usual behaviors. Dreams do.

Some days, your dreams may simply include having every shift filled and never having to pull a night shift yourself again.

But to truly motivate your own team to work at their highest level, share the dreams you had when you first began in this field. Did you dream of creating a caring environment that felt like a home? A team that loved every single person in your care? A place where people came together to accomplish more than they could do on their own – and had fun, laughed and hugged freely?

In our office, we’ve written the dream on the wall – literally. Through an inexpensive website we ordered vinyl lettering and carefully applied our dream (borrowing from the words of John Quincy Adams) on the wall: “If your words inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.”

It is our dream to become leaders by inspiring others to do all of those things.

What are your dreams? How do you share them with your team?