Your team is comprised of the people you work with every day.

In nursing, we have more than 125 unit-, clinic-, and department-level teams called Team Councils that are led by Team Chairs—individuals who facilitate local shared governance work. It’s up to you (and the team members in your area) to decide on an optimal team size. If your group is smaller and you are having trouble finding staff with the interest and/or ability to serve as a chairperson (facilitator), you can consider combining teams within your areas.

A white-board or poster paper will do the trick.

This can be a white-board or other shared visible space for posting shared governance updates and conducting huddles.

You will need one individual to guide the group.

Each of our Team Councils nominate and elect a Team Council Chair—you may follow any nomination and election process that works best for your team. Your team may elect a co-chair to ensure representation for night and weekend teams, or diverse disciplines within your team. Team Chairs should not be team members in formal leadership roles.

The Team Council Chair will work with the team to build a Team Board (Kanban or idea board), where team members post problems, ideas, needs, and suggestions (PINS) on sticky notes, and meet weekly to huddle and discuss PINS as a team. Team Chairs manage and advance team-identified PINS and act as an overall shared governance resource. In the Department of Nursing, Team Chairs have up to 8 hours per month off-unit time to conduct work associated with Nursing Shared Governance.

Here are some forms we created to support our teams (feel free to adapt):

• Why Become a Team Chair?
• Team Council Chair SG Implementation Checklist
• Team Council Chairperson Commitment Form

A Team Board is a visual management tool sometimes called a Kanban or idea board that is intended to support local team participation in shared governance. Team Boards can be physical boards in a designated shared governance space within your area, or a virtual board using tools like MS Whiteboard or LucidSpark. Teams will use physical or virtual sticky notes to post PINS on the board at any given time.

Here are some resources we created to support our teams (feel free to adapt):

• Team Board Basics
• Team Activity: Build a Team Board
• MS Whiteboard Basics

Huddles are team meetings conducted at least weekly at the Team Board. They are intentionally brief to accommodate busy teams (10-15 minutes at most). During this time, teams will review and rank submitted PINS.

Here are some resources we created to support our teams (feel free to adapt):

• Team Huddle Process
• Team Activity: Team Huddle
• Leading People: Creating and Maintaining a Safe Space