In the last quarter of 1980, I was working at an apartment
building called Center Park in south Seattle. Center Park was
the first building of its kind built specifically to accommodate
the needs of people in wheelchairs who could live independently
with some assistance. I and a lady named Virginia were working
there as Personal Care Attendants. We worked very closely with
two disabled men, John Tyler and Ron Schwarz, both now deceased.
I consider us to have been a loosely knit team of all four
individuals. However, we did not perform the tasks that a good
team should have done to accomplish our goal of best possible
care of our clients. This is what I think we should have done to
improve our performance:
Set more goals, as outlined in “The Importance of Goals to the
Success of Work Teams” by Greg Hendrix. We simply played it
day-by-day when it came to taking care of our clients. We did
take trips to Hawaii, San Francisco and Canada which were well
planned and executed, but when it came to personal care we just
took care of things as they came along. This may have shortened
the lives of our clients in the long run. John Tyler was
seriously overweight, and we never clearly set a goal of having
him lose weight, such as write up a plan or get together as a
team to discuss his needs. Ron Schwarz was taking far too many
medications for his health, and one in particular seemed to be
destroying his central nervous system. Virginia and I should
have met with his doctors to discuss this problem and worked out
a way to lower his amount of medications taken. We should have
set goals for the betterment of his long-term overall health.
“The goal of the group creates a vision that focuses their
efforts.”—Hendrix. The four of us never had a clear vision of
what our general purposes were.
Motivated our team, as outlined in “Team Motivation” by Peter
Grazier. Virginia and I had no sense of growth or motivation in
our jobs, except for the general rewards of caring for the sick
and challenged. We held stagnant, dead-end jobs with very little
chance for relief even on the weekends. I remember going to a
talk by a Canadian lady who had gotten her aides together as a
team and rotated them on a schedule, which gave them time off
and a chance to go to school and better themselves. Job
satisfaction was improved, and the lady was not overly dependant
on any one aide. Not so with our “team.” Ron was highly
dependant on my services. My sole motivation was Ron’s care and
to work alone with Ron so much taxed me greatly. Virginia had
similar problems with John, even though we traded off sometimes
and covered for each other. We lacked “a clear purpose, focus or
mission”—Grazier—which should have been at the top of our list
of how to handle our jobs. We should have discussed burn-out
issues with John and Ron, and laid out a plan for hiring more
attendants on a revolving schedule so Virginia and I would have
had time to go to school and better ourselves.
In summary, there were a lot of things the four of us could have
done to improve our working situations, but the two most
important ones were to set healthy, realistic goals, and to
clearly motivate our paired and interactive teams.
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