Building an effective and high performance team can be a difficult thing to achieve. It also requires the cooperation of everyone from the team to reach its potential. I learned through my own experiences as a lifeguard at a local quarry. During my first two summers working there our staff was having difficulties learning and maintaining our guarding skills. This was a direct result of not having effective team dynamics. We had three head guards who were responsible for training the new guards. One head guard was away training with the army reserve. Another head guard seemed to only be there to socialize and talk to the girls. And the last head guard had just transferred to this beach from a smaller beach and had to learn how this beach ran just like the new guards. The beach I worked at was pretty big and gets really busy especially on hot days. We had a large staff of lifeguards, and during my first year many of these guards were having a hard time learning our rescue skills, including me. We all had tests we had to pass early in the year to ensure we knew how to respond in an emergency or when a swimmer needs to be rescued. Our staff received some of the lowest combined marks on our tests. I think the reason why this was directly related to our leaders and the inability to use training time efficiently.
Another problem with our team was that many of our members lacked commitment and dedication to their jobs. Many of the guards including myself needed to recognize that in order for us to operate as an effective team we all needed to make our job our number one priority. Most of the staff are students in college who return home during the summer and need a place to work. Some students bring their party mentality to the job and treat it like an extension of college. As a team we liked to have fun at work and away from work, doing things like going to Summerfest together and having parties. I think that’s where some problems originated because some people were struggling to make it to work. Working 40 hours a week seemed to get in the way of the party lifestyle that many of the lifeguards carried. Showing up for work hung over was a normal thing for some of the staff over 21 and this kind of thing was becoming a problem. The same people who were doing this we're showing up late and calling in sick. As a coworker to people who do this, it can be frustrating at times because of how unreliable some of the staff was. And it seemed I was the first person on the list to get called in if they were short staffed due to a no show.
After two summers I got promoted to head guard along with two other guards who started the same year I did. We worked great together, we helped hire new guards that we thought would bring the most value to our staff. We talked about the failures of our first summers lifeguarding and made a goal to lead a more responsible staff to be better prepared and more dedicated to the job they did. We spent extra time working together to make sure we were on the same page and that we all shared a common goal of making an effective lifeguard team.
One thing we did to help out staff learn all emergency procedures was we wrote out all of the Emergency Action Plans and made copies for every lifeguard to take home. This is something that we realized would have helped us learn the material we needed to know when we started working. When we took our skills tests our beach did much better and it was a big turnaround from the previous years.
One thing we didn’t want to do was make the job a place of all work and no play. We made sure to have fun in a variety of ways like going to movies together, staying after work to play volleyball and grilling out after work once a month. All in all the summer turned out to be a success for my first year as head guard. We established boundaries for which types of behaviors are acceptable and we all benefited from it.
Another problem with our team was that many of our members lacked commitment and dedication to their jobs. Many of the guards including myself needed to recognize that in order for us to operate as an effective team we all needed to make our job our number one priority. Most of the staff are students in college who return home during the summer and need a place to work. Some students bring their party mentality to the job and treat it like an extension of college. As a team we liked to have fun at work and away from work, doing things like going to Summerfest together and having parties. I think that’s where some problems originated because some people were struggling to make it to work. Working 40 hours a week seemed to get in the way of the party lifestyle that many of the lifeguards carried. Showing up for work hung over was a normal thing for some of the staff over 21 and this kind of thing was becoming a problem. The same people who were doing this we're showing up late and calling in sick. As a coworker to people who do this, it can be frustrating at times because of how unreliable some of the staff was. And it seemed I was the first person on the list to get called in if they were short staffed due to a no show.
After two summers I got promoted to head guard along with two other guards who started the same year I did. We worked great together, we helped hire new guards that we thought would bring the most value to our staff. We talked about the failures of our first summers lifeguarding and made a goal to lead a more responsible staff to be better prepared and more dedicated to the job they did. We spent extra time working together to make sure we were on the same page and that we all shared a common goal of making an effective lifeguard team.
One thing we did to help out staff learn all emergency procedures was we wrote out all of the Emergency Action Plans and made copies for every lifeguard to take home. This is something that we realized would have helped us learn the material we needed to know when we started working. When we took our skills tests our beach did much better and it was a big turnaround from the previous years.
One thing we didn’t want to do was make the job a place of all work and no play. We made sure to have fun in a variety of ways like going to movies together, staying after work to play volleyball and grilling out after work once a month. All in all the summer turned out to be a success for my first year as head guard. We established boundaries for which types of behaviors are acceptable and we all benefited from it.