SixSEED Partners

Archives for September 2018

Case Study: Increasing Leadership Capacity—Disrupting Traditional Succession Planning in a Community-Based Healthcare System

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I.        Situation—Compelling Case

The Board, in collaboration with senior leadership at this Community-Based, Regional Health System invited partnership with Wiederhold & Associates to design a multi-year succession planning process for seven high potential leaders who were considered possible successors to the CEO, COO and Sr. Vice President of their regional medical group. This request was motivated by anticipated retirements over the next few years of several of their senior leaders.  Anticipating the destabilization this may cause the system, and wanting to preserve and build upon their strong culture, the system was committed to internal promotion opportunities, while also keeping options open for external candidates.

II.        Design

The health system Chief Human Resources Officer, along with the CEO, COO and Sr, VP for the medical group served as sponsors for this four-year engagement with Wiederhold & Associates Leadership Development Team. Joy Goldman RN, MS, PCC and Dr. Larry McEvoy MD served as co-leads for a coaching and organizational development team that comprised of six executive coaches, mentors and consultants. The diversity of the team included coaches and consultants who have held the following roles:

Healthcare CEO role; Nurse Executive roles; Healthcare Advisory Board Consultant; Organizational Development Leader for Large Academic Medical Center; Polarity Thinking Leaders and Faculty in Academic Leadership and Organizational Development Programs. All executive coaches were credentialed by the International Coaching Federation at the Associate or Professional Certified Coach level.

This four-year engagement incorporated the following key elements we considered critical to our success:

  • Individual, team and systemic transformation
  • The development of high potential individuals poised for increasingly more senior roles
  • Use of validated, evidence-based assessment tools to provide pre- and post-comparison
  • Integrated framework where consultants combined their expertise with the system leaders’ culture, action learning and strategic wisdom
  • Identification and leveraging of polarities within the client system and within the consultant team
  • Regular, monthly sponsor updates and touch-points to allow for ongoing evaluation and course correction as needed
  • Yearly review of success and co-creation of the next year design and outcome focus
  • Board exposure

III.        Strategic Interventions

The following theoretical frameworks served as the foundation for our design and strategy:

  • Systems theory and network science
  • Neuroscience
  • Stage development theory and complexity theory
  • Polarity thinking
  • Behavioral change principles
  • Executive coaching
  • Simulations

Our goal, recognizing the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) environment was to increase each leader’s ability to better manage complexity, so that we multiply the capacity of the system to better manage, adapt and thrive in today’s healthcare world, and prepare them for more senior roles.

IV.        Outcomes

By the start of year three, the following successes were identified by the client leaders, sponsors and consulting team:

  • Growth in scope and title changes for several of the client leaders
  • Successful transition from individual leaders to leaders of integrated and high performing teams
  • Broader strategic contribution with six out of the seven leaders asked to lead or participate in the system’s 2025 strategic planning committee
  • Increased innovation and disruptive strategic thinking by leaders demonstrated in a broadening strategic impact simulation providing accurate forecasts for system future direction in organizational structure and operations
  • Generative energy amongst the leaders as compared with subjective experiences of fatigue prior to the engagement
  • Greater system loyalty amongst the seven client leaders and the retention of higher departure-risk leaders
  • According to system CEO, there exists a greater strategic dialogue between executive sponsors and client leaders, where prior discussions were more transactional and current discussions were more focused on strategic results and mentoring opportunities
  • Integration of polarity thinking across teams and the system. Polarities leveraged included: mission and margin; continuity and transformation; tactical and strategic; centralized and decentralized.
  • Third year utilized seven client leaders as vehicles for systemic spread for effective leadership capacity and team development. The leaders have self-organized as a leadership group where there is greater strategic partnering and use of each other’s complementary strengths to achieve strategic results
  • The organization has reached “strategic arbitrage”—both able to tap its incumbent leadership more deeply and widely and the capacity to attract and support higher level talent. Further, the candidates express confidence in handling not just intended scenarios but anticipated unintended ones. As one sponsor remarked, “I realize when I pay more attention to my thinking, I can help the organization think better, and the results will come, whatever the circumstances.”
  • The leaders have demonstrated greater emotional intelligence and levels of self -awareness where each leader is better able to lead from an “eco”-system vs. “ego”-system foundation.

 

 

SixSeed Partners offers a suite of inter-collaborative, interdependent and custom-designed services to increase leader and system-level capacitation within the healthcare industry. Email us at info@sixseedpartners.com to learn how we can help you drive sustainable, transformational change within leaders, teams and entire organizations.

Rethinking Succession Planning for Incumbent Leaders

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While succession planning traditionally has a focus on increasing the capacity of emerging leaders, there are often overlooked, but very personal and fulfilling benefits for the incumbent leaders.

Legacy can be overrated.

Some look at succession planning for incumbent leaders as a time to create a legacy. This can be an opportunity to leave a mark on an organization that survives far past their years of employment. However, the term legacy has different connotations for different leaders.

Thinking that legacy is a far-reaching goal for a fast-changing healthcare environment, legacy today can be seen as difficult and a rarely experienced event. A concrete legacy example is buildings named for past leaders, yet whose actual contributions are much harder to remember, making this kind of legacy an allusive concept. If memories of actual contributions and influence on the system are more easy to forget, what is the incumbent leaders’ best result from their succession planning?

The ultimate benefit: self-strategy

Shifting mindsets from legacy to self-strategy as an outcome for succession building can be the ultimate gift for incumbent leaders. This self-strategy will give an incumbent clarity about what they truly care about and what they want to spend their remaining time working on.  It is a transformation from what they want to do, to who they want to be.

When leaders start to formulate what they want to be in their next chapters, they can start to focus how and what they spend their valuable resource of time on. With a clarity of what they are passionate about and who they want to become, incumbent leaders can be more selective on what projects to choose and what to distribute to others. They can focus on truly enjoying their work with activities that bring personal engagement. Perhaps most importantly, the time during succession planning can give incumbents choices they may not have allowed themselves in previous times.

Self-strategy and organization strategy

When incumbent leaders start to make shifts in their mindsets, the benefits of these shifts extend to the emerging leader and to the organization at large. People will start to witness what happens when leaders are at their best. When people witnesses incumbent leaders who are passionate about ideas or projects, they also see incumbent leaders at the pinnacle of their careers. That is not only inspiring, but outcome generating as well.

How to create this shift

Incumbent leaders, those who are planning for retirement or promotion, have the unique opportunity to create a self-strategy for self-transformation: one that is filled with the potential of the greatest engagement period of their professional lives, while increasing the capacity of the next tier of leadership.

In order for this transformation to take place, a skilled leadership coach can help shift succession planning to a polarity approach that is strategic for both the incumbent and emerging leaders. Skilled executive coaches are needed for this kind of multi-pronged approach of individual and team coaching that helps leaders visualize the next chapters for themselves, their teams and the organizations.  While incumbents may be able to get there on their own in time, partnering to create an optimal self-strategy in the most effective and efficient ways is highly recommended.

SixSeed Partners offers a suite of inter-collaborative, interdependent and custom-designed services to increase leader and system-level capacitation within the healthcare industry. Email us at info@sixseedpartners.com to learn how we can help you drive sustainable, transformational change within leaders, teams and entire organizations.

Want to Transform? Get the Top 5 Tips to Prepare You to Transform Your Organization

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The term “transformation” is used to describe the paradigm shifts that organizations and individuals need to do in order to meet the desired goals for a more preferred future. Transformation can be allusive, but obtainable, with optimal mindset shifts needed for success.

In order to prepare the mindset shifts needed for transformation, here are five valuable tips to best prepare for optimal transformation for individuals, teams and organizations.

  1. Transformation is multi-layered and integrated across multiple levels of leadership, sponsors and strategic partners.

Although mission, vision and strategy are often directed by the top levels of leadership, transformational culture involves a multi-layered and integrated approach. From the top-level leaders to strategic teams, changing mindsets to a transformational culture is a team sport.

  1. Supplementing “either/or” unilateral thinking with “both/and” polarity thinking.

In many cases, thinking in polarities and using a polarity approach to certain challenges can provide leverage and sustainable results that “either/or” thinking alone can provide to address complexity, culture, change and conflict. Like yin and yang, polarities are interdependent tensions “margin AND mission” (an “AND” not an “OR). Organizations need to have optimal focus on reaching the epitome of BOTH, not choosing between both or merely “balancing” the poles.

  1. Transformation requires vertical development of leaders.

Think of horizontal development of leaders as skill acquisition. This can help increase a leader’s situational effectiveness, but is less likely to result in the capacity to think more systemically and effectively handle ambiguity or increasing complexity. Developing those capacities, which lead to sustainable transformation, requires vertical development. Consider a physician that treats a single disease, as compared with population health. Disease management requires horizontal learning. Long-term wellness requires thinking about patients in a more complex and system-oriented manner and being aware of patient population health management that may transform a community.

  1. Human resources is a necessary thinking partner.

All too often, HR is included after visions are planned, strategy is set and decisions are made. Transformation and delivery of results happens through the people in the system. Shifting the mindset of human resources as merely executing the decisions to being a trusted advisor upstream in thinking through the strategy and decisions is vital for true transformation.

  1. Outside assistance is necessary so choose wisely.

Outside consultancies and strategic partnerships are necessary for optimal transformation and perspective, and not all are created equal. Choose wisely and engage partners with a depth and breadth of healthcare leadership experience that have been certified in the ability to transform teams and, who themselves, are proficient in systems and complexity thinking.

Agility is necessary for an outside consultancy to tailor to an organization’s unique needs. They need to contain credible experts in the fields of individual, team and organizational development and transformation.

Most importantly, you need to have a relationship with the people that you will be working with, and not just the face of the organization that sells the service. Outside assistance is necessary, so choose wisely for the most effective results.

SixSeed Partners offers a suite of inter-collaborative, interdependent and custom-designed services to increase leader and system-level capacitation within the healthcare industry. Email us at info@sixseedpartners.com to learn how we can help you drive sustainable, transformational change within leaders, teams and entire organizations.

Physicians as Systemic Change Leaders: Six Applications of Polarity Thinking in Support of Physician Leadership Development

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(Published in collaboration with Margaret Cary, MD, MBA, MPH, PCC)

In the March 2018 issue of The Future of Coaching, Margaret introduced the idea of using Polarity Thinking and Polarity Maps to help physicians shift from an Either/Or, problem-oriented viewpoint to an approach that includes a Both/And perspective to leverage personal and professional lives. We (Joy and Margaret) each use polarity maps with our coaching clients, who appreciate creating their own solutions in graphic form. We let clients drive the process as we facilitate their moving into a Both/And frame of mind.

Read the article as published at the Library of Professional Coaching