The regional director of social workers at an agency I worked for once asked for a volunteer to write up a powerpoint presentation on the social worker’s participation in the IDG. I volunteered.
Before I got started, I wanted to clarify what she was looking for. IDG stands for interdisciplinary group, but the abbreviation is commonly used to refer to the interdisciplinary team meeting in which the group gets together every other week to discuss patient care. I asked quite explicitly:
“Do you want me to outline how to interact with the interdisciplinary team in general, or just during the IDG meeting?”
“Shut up and stop overthinking”
Her inexplicable response: “The IDG.”
Her response was bizarre. I was asking her what she meant by IDG. Her response was that she meant the IDG.
In her world, from her perspective, I was overthinking, and she was right. I had surmised she most likely meant the meeting versus the actual group, but I wanted to seek clarification.
Her response was invalidating and indicated a lack of leadership skills, but was also ironically appropriate. And ironically, she was telling me what I needed to hear.
The IDG, whether it’s referring to the group or the meeting of the group, tends not to be welcoming of the full range of critical thinking that MSWs have to offer. Why would they? They are controlled by a majority of individuals who spent usually two years in a trade school, before having to jump in and learn what they could by trial and error. Social workers spent hours in school deep in thought about ethical issues and these thoughts were expressed and validated through class discussions, presentations and hundreds of pages of theoretical writing. We were encouraged to deepen our critical thinking. Nurses on average receive less encouragement to spend so much time and energy on what excites us.
Know your audience
This may be the first point to recognize for interacting well in the IDG. It is important to recognize our audience. We might not necessarily do well in the group by speaking in the language we think in.
Instead, we do well in the group by learning how the group expects us to interact with them, and accommodate those expectations.