Healthcare Administration Leadership & Management Journal
The Ten Characteristics of Excellent Healthcare Teams
This article explores team excellence in healthcare, highlighting characteristics like trust, communication, emotional intelligence, and offering a strengths audit and quiz.
May/June 2026 Vol. 4, No. 3 pp. 95–101 DOI: 10.55834/halmj.3073418326
Abstract
Healthcare administrators, leaders, and managers want to have excellent teams. But what does team excellence look like, specifically? This article describes the characteristics of an excellent team. It focuses on team balance and suggests that readers conduct a team strengths audit to identify deficiencies and weaknesses in their teams. This article then explores 10 characteristics that are shared by excellent teams. These are effective communication, trust, emotional intelligence, individual strengths, interdependence, ownership, continuous growth, group decision making (including a three-step approach to fostering better team decision making), conflict resolution, and dynamic teaming. Finally, this article describes behavioral, performance, and emotional indicators of excellence in teams and provides readers with a 20-question quiz to help them assess their current team’s level of excellence.
