Developing Team Grit

Abstract

Team grit, a combination of passion and perseverance, can predict success or failure in healthcare. That’s because the best patient care requires gritty teams that keep going in the face of challenges and never stop striving for improvement. This article defines workplace grit and briefly summarizes the history of grit as a topic of scholarly inquiry. It provides readers with eight practical strategies they can use to identify grit in prospective employees and describes work environments that best create and foster team grit. This article then argues that healthcare teams may be naturally grittier than teams in other organizations and how leaders can lean into that grit inclination. It suggests nine ways that team grit can be fostered at the organizational level, for example, by engaging employees in appreciate inquiry programs and establishing new norms. This article then explores how leaders can teach grit to their teams and includes a useful GRIT teaching acronym and specific training topics. It warns readers that grit taken to extreme can backfire and suggests what they can do to keep their teams from slipping into the dark side of grit. Finally, this article places team grit within the larger context of the healthcare organization of the future and provides a 20-question grit test to administer to healthcare teams to assess their grit baseline and identify areas for improvement.