• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
SixSEED Partners

SixSEED Partners

  • Our Services
  • Our Team
  • Our Results
  • Our Resources
  • Contact

Case Study: WellSpan Health

December 14, 2021 by Joy Goldman Leave a Comment

Joy W. Goldman RN, MS, PCC:  CEO and Founding Partner, SixSEED Partners

Background

WellSpan Health is an eight hospital, 1500 provider integrated system based in York, PA. In 2016 they invited Wiederhold & Associates to design and implement a multi-year succession planning process for seven high potential leaders: four physicians and three non-physicians. Joy Goldman, executive director of coaching services, assembled a coaching and consulting team of experts on horizontal and vertical leadership development strategies, including executive coaching, polarity thinking, creating thinking environments, and strategic simulations. WellSpan’s commitment to internal development and awareness of anticipated turnover and retirements in their senior leadership resulted in this opportunity: to increase the capacity of their high potential leaders to manage complexity. In affiliation with Wiederhold & Associates, SixSEED Partners commenced this work between 2016 and 2020.

The Strategy:

To elevate the thinking competency of the seven Wellspan (WSPH) leaders, individual coaching goals gradually shifted from preparing for a specific role to preparing each leader to better manage a VUCA (volatile, unpredictable, complex, and ambiguous) world. Additional cohort-based work was needed to integrate individual learnings and provide strategic simulation case studies cross-functionally.

The Solution: 

Joy Goldman, SixSEED Partners (SSP) CEO, recruited and led a team of two SSP co-founders and three additional executive coaches and consultants, to design coordinate and integrate individual, team, and systemic interventions. These included polarity mapping as development plans and a polarity assessment for more than 130 of their senior leaders and direct reports that measured four polarities WSPH identified as key to their success:

Centralization AND Decentralization
Continuity AND Transformation
Mission AND Margin
Tactical AND Strategic

In order to scale leadership capacity further into the system, polarity thinking was cascaded to all of the high potential leaders’ direct reports. As a result of this work, WSPH asked us to also present a half- day session on polarity thinking to WSPH’s Nursing and Physician Leadership Academies. Executive and team coaching, Leadership Circle Profile 360’s, and strategic simulations were also components of this multi- faceted engagement.

The Impact:

Through delivering polarity thinking to over 100 nursing and physician leaders and over 130 additional staff, WSPH leadership shared this thinking competency was instrumental in supporting the systems’ response to COVID-19.

The polarity framework was also integral to a strategic simulation wherein the high potential leaders assessed actual strategic challenges for WSPH and presented their solutions to a mock board of WSPH’s C-Suite.

Under a new CEO, polarity assessments are being used to measure effectiveness within regionalization efforts in the system. Four of the seven leaders have been promoted to Senior Vice President roles.

Filed Under: Case Study

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

Recent Posts

  • Building Team Norms to Sustain Team Effectiveness
  • Scaling Leadership
  • What Makes Us Different?
  • Loyalty AND Autonomy
  • Dr. Stephen Karpman’s the Dreaded Drama Triangle and the Empowerment Dynamic by David Emerald Womeldorff

Archives

  • April 2025
  • December 2024
  • August 2024
  • July 2024
  • June 2024
  • May 2024
  • April 2024
  • March 2024
  • February 2024
  • January 2024
  • November 2023
  • October 2023
  • August 2023
  • July 2023
  • June 2023
  • May 2023
  • April 2023
  • March 2023
  • February 2023
  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • June 2019
  • April 2019
  • September 2018
  • August 2018

Categories

  • Case Study
  • Coaching
  • Culture
  • Diversity and Inclusion
  • Epidemic Leadership
  • Leadership Development
  • Leadership Ecosystem
  • Polarity Thinking
  • Six Seeds
  • Succession Planning
  • System Integration
  • Team Development
  • Transformational Leadership
  • Uncategorized
  • Well-being

DRIVING TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE IN HEALTHCARE

Offering a suite of inter-collaborative, interdependent and custom-designed services to increase leader and system-level capacitation within the healthcare industry, SixSEED Partners drives sustainable, transformational change within leaders, teams and entire organizations.

“Life does not accommodate you; it shatters you. Every seed destroys its container, or else there would be no fruition.”  —Florida Scott-Maxwell

[icon name=icon_phone] 443-379-4569
[icon name=icon_mail] info@sixseedpartners.com

[icon name=social_linkedin_square] Join our LinkedIn network.
[icon name=icon_clipboard] Get Insights on our Resources page.

© 2019 SixSEED Partners. All rights reserved.

  • 10431 Patterson Ave | Henrico, VA 23238
  • 443-379-4569
  • info@sixseedpartners.com
  • 2020 SixSEED Partners. All Rights Reserved

Footer

10431 Patterson Ave | Henrico, VA 23238

  804-220-1919

info@sixseedpartners.com

2025 SixSEED Partners. All Rights Reserved

HTML tutorial