Building a relationship-based team culture

FigureNURSE LEADERS FACE MANY challenges in building team culture, essential for patient care excellence and a positive workforce experience. It wouldn't be surprising if you're seeing incivility, ineffective communication patterns, avoidance of conflict management, and a lack of shared expectations for teamwork. As a passionate believer in relational leadership (RL), it seems natural to build team culture using RL principles, and along with that comes effectively managing conflict. Conflict isn't a dirty word, and it shouldn't get in the way of a healthy team. So how can you use RL to build team culture? Believe it or not, the RL model was first developed more than 25 years ago for college students studying leadership.1 To this day, its principles matter for nurse leaders and include being purposeful, inclusive, ethical, empowering, and process oriented. You've probably modeled, and even admired, what I call “spokes” of the RL hub—transformational, authentic, servant, and human-centered leaders—all having the common thread of RL principles. Let's intentionally use those 5 core principles for team building. A shared purpose, clearly communicated and applied daily, gives meaning to the work. I've been proud to work with patient care units that developed their own mission statements as a team, posted them proudly, referred to them as their “why,” and celebrated work that supported their shared purpose. Second, inclusivity means active listening, getting to know each person individually, valuing diversity of thought, and fostering a spirit of collaboration. These inclusive practices can and should be an expectation of all team members as part of the job—helping, recognizing, and talking to each other isn't optional behavior. What about the other 3 RL principles? Ethical leadership with authenticity, moral courage, advocacy, and integrity builds trust, which signals and role models the same for your team. When it comes to empowerment, we don't seem to get enough based on the literature and feedback from our practice environments. Structural empowerment and shared decision-making are core tenets of ANCC's Magnet® and Pathway to Excellence® models, and they're needed to create a culture of giving voice, enabling professionals to govern their practice, mentoring, and supporting growth; it's much more than having councils. Lastly, being process-minded involves a commitment to truly understanding the work and facilitating teamwork and collaboration for improvements, the opposite of being top-down. Healthy team relationships nurtured by these RL principles should make communication and conflict management easier. Acceptable behavior should be clearly defined, and we know nurse leaders must address incivility and disrespectful behavior straightaway as silence is approval. Yet conflict is normal, expected, and unavoidable, and can be managed productively to improve communication, team relationships, creativity, and problem-solving. With interpersonal conflict, we often find ourselves acting as a mediator and coach to bring the parties together, helping staff navigate conflict. Give your team members space to come to you. You might start with having each person explain the issue from the other's point of view, hopefully without triangulation, which alone can lead to resolution. An RL focus—digging deep into purpose, inclusivity, and empowerment—provides a pathway for addressing conflict and arguably preventing it in the first place. There's joy in cultivating both team and individuals. Your relational work can lead to outcomes beyond what you imagined. Embracing RL can be a proactive measure to decrease unproductive conflict. Build your team relationally and the benefits will come.Figure