Health Services Dealt a Winning Hand:

The Royal Flush

On December 4, 2002, the Health Services high performance work group – the Royal Flush – hosted their open house. This event celebrated the culmination of this team’s development into a self-directed work group.

History
The team, as formed in August 2000, consisted of four members; Deborah Van Horn, O’Sun Lewis, Clora Bailey and Monica Harris. Dr. Apollos Bulo, as trainer, began teaching the concepts, practices and processes of team behavior. Coaches Frank Gallup and Bob Mann worked with the team from its inception to September 2001. In October 2001, Kim Harless became the coach of the Royal Flush, bringing with her a great amount of experience and resources. The team membership stabilized in June 2002 and now consists of Deborah Van Horn, O’Sun Lewis, Tim Phillips, Arkadi Babayan and Jennifer Miller.

High Performance Team Training
To become a high performance team, the group underwent a vigorous team training program that included intensive leadership-focused training based on Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. This program develops individual qualities of integrity, trust, innovation, motivation and empowerment. As the team members worked together, they developed a high degree of trust and confidence with each other. High performance teams, when fully trained, have gone through three levels of development – dependence, or “forming and storming”; independence, or “norming and performing”; and interdependence, or “transforming”. The Royal Flush, having gone through the first two stages of development, is considered to operate at the independent level. With further training and development, the team will continue to grow to the level of inter-dependence and then be a fully mature entity.

Star Point Team Structure
Quality high performance teams function in a rotation system, where every member holds an administrative position for an agreed upon period of time. The purpose is for each member to gain experience with specific roles and accompanying responsibilities. At the end of the assigned time, members rotate positions and continue their learning processes with new responsibility areas.

During the Royal Flush’s evolution, they received lots of support from the more mature teams in Building Services such as the Crazy Eights and the Dirty Dozen. Linda Sen, Building Services Area Manager, described the Royal Flush as a multi-cultural team who works well together. They share Korean and Russian culture among themselves and their building clients. According to their trainer, Apollos Bulo, the Royal Flush is a fine example of team evolution and diversity blending together for high job performance. The Royal Flush Team is a winner – hands down – according to the team’s customers, the staff of the Health Services Buildings.

~ Valerie Amo
Plant Operations