Develop and serve cross-border customers with a team to achieve twice the result with half the effort
Case 10-1
How to make the team learn quickly
In the past year, “uncertainty” has been a common challenge faced by many industries. Many industries and companies have temporarily adjusted their work plans, which requires employees to adapt quickly, such as adapting to new remote work modes or quickly developing new products. For managers, how can they make their entire team keep up with the pace? This is a period that particularly tests the team’s learning and adaptability. Let’s look at an interesting case: how the cardiac surgery team quickly adapts to a new surgical plan.
Cardiac surgery, professionally known as “open-chest extracorporeal circulation surgery”, refers to the need for surgeons to repair and replace the patient’s damaged arteries and valves. In this process, the patient’s heart needs to stop beating and the lungs need to stop breathing, and a machine is used to temporarily replace the heart and lung functions to complete the operation.
As you can imagine, this type of surgery is particularly risky, so it requires a high level of professionalism and cooperation from the team. Generally speaking, the surgical team consists of five people, including the surgeon, the surgeon’s assistant, the surgical assistant nurse, the cardiac anesthesiologist, and an extracorporeal circulation specialist – whose main responsibility is to control the machine that takes over the heart and lung functions. If the operation is to be successful, these five people need to have a clear division of labor and cooperate with each other’s work seamlessly. Not to mention making mistakes, even slow reactions or unclear communication during the process may have serious consequences.
Therefore, there has always been a saying in the medical community that open-chest extracorporeal circulation surgery is one of the miracles of modern medicine. However, this miracle also has a flaw, that is, it is highly traumatic. Because the doctor has to open the chest for the patient and cut the sternum, the patient’s later recovery process is long and painful.
But in the late 1990s, a new surgical method emerged. Instead of opening the chest, only a small incision was made between the ribs, and the operation was performed through the incision. Obviously, this method causes much less trauma to the patient and has a better prognosis. As soon as this new technology came out, many hospitals wanted to apply it quickly. There is fierce competition among private hospitals abroad. Whoever has more advanced medical methods will be ahead of their competitors. Currently, 16 hospitals have applied this new technology.
Interestingly, the researchers found that there was a significant speed difference in how quickly teams in different hospitals could master this new technology. For example, when this new technology was first introduced, the average operation time in the 16 hospitals was about 6 hours! – This time is 2 to 3 times that of open-chest surgery in the past.
As the number of operations increased, the teams became more and more skilled, and the operation time generally decreased. In general, by the time these hospitals had performed 20 operations, the average operation time had dropped to 4.5 hours. But you will find that some hospitals’ operation times are significantly lower than the average. For example, a community hospital called Alpine Medical Center only needs 3.5 hours to complete a surgery – obviously, they are more familiar with the process and operate more smoothly.
So why did these teams adapt so quickly? The researchers found that what really made the difference in the results was not the resources or capabilities, but how the entire team defined the nature of the challenge of “learning new technology”, in other words, what framework you put this task in. Some teams define learning new technology as mastering a new skill, which only requires ability or process training. Such teams often do not progress smoothly. For example, in a hospital called Chelsea Medical Center, in order to adopt new technology, the top management specially poached a surgeon who had used this technology many times from other hospitals. This doctor thought that this technology was not difficult and that it only required training for employees. But after arriving at Chelsea Medical Center, the surgeon performed 50 operations and still felt that the overall process was not smooth, and he did not know where the problem was.
Let’s look at those teams that learn quickly. Their definition of this task is this: This is not a simple personal skill learning, but a new challenge for the entire organization. This means that not only individuals have to learn skills, but also the entire team’s cooperation model, communication methods, and relationships between team members must change.
Why?
There is a link in the operation where medical technicians use a machine to temporarily replace the heart and lung functions. In traditional open-chest surgery, the operation of this link is very direct, just connect the tube directly to the heart. But in the new surgical process, the patient’s chest is not open for you to see directly. The wound is a very small opening, so the technician needs to insert the tube from the artery and vein in the groin like threading a needle. This process requires a small balloon to be placed in the aorta and inflated to prop up the aorta. The professional term is “balloon”. This operation is very complicated. For example, the anesthesiologist and surgeon need to work together to closely monitor the path of the balloon into the aorta through ultrasound; then, the nurse and technician need to work together to ensure that the position of the balloon is fixed and the pressure of the balloon is monitored, which cannot be too large or too small.
These processes are very different from traditional surgeries in the past, and naturally require more communication and closer cooperation between team members. This is a process of team members running in together, rather than simply everyone learning their own new skills. So, if you want the team to learn quickly, the first step is to make everyone realize that this is a new challenge that no one has encountered before, and overcoming it requires everyone to explore and work together.
The researchers found that some teams adapt quickly because they try new methods with an “experimental” mentality when using new technologies, and many attempts are “bottom-up”. For example, during an operation, an assistant nurse proposed to use a very old dilator to solve a surgical problem encountered on site. This dilator has actually been eliminated in surgery for a long time, but the team decided to give it a try and found that it worked very well. Since then, this old dilator has become a must-have tool for every operation. In this process, there is no saying who teaches whom or who is the authority. From surgeons to assistant nurses, everyone can propose new methods. This thing is simple to say, but it is not easy to actually do it.
A team leader can create a “psychological safety” for team members, so that they feel that they can put forward opinions at any time. For example, this study found that in teams that learn quickly, some surgeons will repeatedly emphasize to team members, “I need you to say what you think, because I may overlook a lot of things.” Some surgeons will take the initiative to play the role of “model of making mistakes” and admit their misjudgment in front of team members. These words and behaviors send a signal to subordinates, that is, each of us is in the process of learning, and no one knows everything. This will encourage subordinates to speak out their opinions more boldly. Another important finding of this study is that the characteristics and abilities of each member are also crucial to the learning progress of the entire team.
When applying new technologies, some hospitals do so by asking whoever has time to sign up to learn, and whoever is scheduled to perform the operation will do so. But those hospitals that adapt quickly do not do so. In those successful cases, surgeons often have specific standards for what kind of team members they want from the beginning, including how well this person cooperates with others, how high their tolerance for uncertainty is, and whether this person dares to give suggestions to leaders with higher status than themselves. Only when these conditions are met, coupled with excellent professional ability, will they be selected to learn new technologies. Moreover, once the team is formed, members will not be easily replaced. The reason is simple: when a new person comes in, the communication and cooperation model that the entire team has worked out will have to be restarted.
In summary, there are three main points in the experience of how the cardiac surgery doctor team can learn quickly.
1. Choose people with learning and adaptability to form a team.
2. Define the challenge in front of you as a collective and organizational challenge, and mobilize everyone to explore solutions together.
3. Managers can create a “psychological sense of safety” for team members by repeatedly seeking feedback and actively showing weakness.
[Case Analysis]
If you want your team to quickly learn a new skill, you first need to build it into a “learning team”. Nowadays, professional needs in all walks of life are constantly changing, which requires people to have good learning abilities. Industry-leading companies such as Google and Bridgewater Fund have already regarded learning as an indispensable part of the talent management system. A survey shows that in the long run, companies that can effectively cultivate employees’ desire to learn are 30% more likely to become industry leaders than other companies. How can you cultivate the learning motivation of team members? An article on the “Harvard Business Review” website introduces three methods.
First, reward continuous learning. An effective incentive system is the first step for employees to make changes. However, although many managers recognize the importance of learning, they are still more concerned about short-term performance. The article says that if employees are always focused on how to improve performance in the short term, it is difficult to have time to learn. A study of more than 700 companies showed that employees in these companies only have 24 minutes of learning time per week. In addition, rewarding knowledge is not just about commending those who work hard to learn. It is also important to create an atmosphere that cultivates critical thinking. If you want your team to be innovative, companies must encourage challenging authority and speaking out.
Second, give meaningful and constructive feedback. Many companies value positive feedback when managing, which makes people feel good, but it is also easy for people to ignore the value of negative feedback. When people ignore their limitations, it is difficult to make progress. One of the best ways to improve employee performance is to tell employees directly where they are wrong. The same is true for learning. If you want to stimulate people’s curiosity, the best way is to highlight knowledge gaps. In other words, make people aware of what they don’t know, especially when those gaps make them feel uncomfortable.
Third, lead by example. The behavior of leaders will have an impact on the team. Therefore, the words and deeds of leaders are another driving force for employee learning. If you want to cultivate the team’s curiosity and enthusiasm for learning, you should lead by example. If you want your employees to accept new and challenging tasks, you have to start doing these things first. For example, learn a new skill, volunteer for work that has nothing to do with you, or jump out of your comfort zone and do some projects that you are not good at. If you can do better through some learning and training, you can use this to inspire others.