Professional skills. Part 4: helping staff to be positive

One of the most destructive forces to teamwork and team morale are people within the team who are negative. Now everyone has days when they feel a bit ‘down’ and most people enjoy a bit of a coffee time moan, but a few people seem to dedicate their lives to moaning and take this to an extreme, becoming a destructive negative element when working in a team.

I was asked to do some one-to-one supervision with Joan, who despite having been qualified as a nurse for four years, was not really performing like an experienced nurse. Other staff did not like working with her. She demonstrated no initiative or drive and her practice manager said that all she ever seems to do was moan. I arranged to meet with Joan for one hour once a month for six months. On our first meeting I asked Joan to tell me about her role and out came a huge list of negative views and opinions, ranging from the politics of the NHS, the team she was in, other nurses in the practice, the amount of patients and so on.