SixSEED Partners

Joy Goldman

Extending Compassion for Recovering Fixers: Yes, AND….

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By Joy W. Goldman Advisor and Founding Partner

Background:

Quite often, we at SixSEED Partners find this theme arising with our clients:  “how do I stop seeing everything as a problem to fix?” Occasionally, we’ve thought of developing a 12-step program for recovering fixers: perhaps you’d like to be notified if we ever decide to go live? So what’s the “problem” with perpetual problem solvers?  In a complex, rapidly changing world, we need additional thinking tools and different perspectives. Feeling like we are the only ones who can satisfactorily fix problems can be exhausting!

The Challenge:

Simply stated, when every challenge we encounter at work is seen as a problem to fix, we end up in a cycle that drains energy and doesn’t actually eliminate the problem.  You can read our colleague David Emerald’s book: 3 Vital Questions to find out more!  You’ve heard of the myth of Sisyphus who was doomed to be pushing a boulder to the top of a cliff only to have it roll back down and him having to start all over again?  Exactly!

The Strategy:

First, embrace your strength and capacity to problem solve.  It’s a great gift and most likely contributed to your advancing in your field.  Bravo!

Second:  Seek out different perspectives, particularly those that are less visible to you.  Especially when you are absolutely certain that you have the one right answer, approach someone with whom you might often disagree and ask them: “What am I missing here?”  

Third:  Read up on “both/and” thinking:  Polarity Thinking.  This is a powerful thinking tool that allows you to see and map more complex systems where two seeming opposite tensions interact and the sustainable solution lies in leveraging each tension well and noticing early warning signs when your actions neglect the opposite pole.  As an example, for those of you who work for hospital systems that have many distributed hospitals, a common tension is centralizing for efficiency and decentralizing to meet local population needs.

The Outcome:

When you can follow the three steps above, you conserve energy, get results that last, and strengthen the leadership capacity of the entire system.  Want to know more?  You can reach out to us here:  https://sixseedpartners.com/contact/

Improving Leadership Well-Being in an Academic Medical Center

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Application of polarity thinking and Accountability Structures to Improve well-being & culture change.

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

Background

In our work with Patient Care and Nursing Senior Leaders at an academic medical center, we have been focusing on two key tensions: care- for- self and care -for -others; and integration for two hospitals and with patient throughput strategic partners. Our design for facilitation has mirrored this interdependency: we have focused for this past year on both well-being and integration, setting the vision that team-member well-being and quality excellence can co-exist.

The Strategy

Over the past year, we have blended in-person and virtual team facilitation for thirty nursing and patient care leaders. We have grounded our work with three powerful and complementary frameworks: Polarity Thinking; The Leadership Circle Profile’s Collective Leadership Assessment and Above and Below the Line from the Conscious Leadership Group. 

The Solution

Applying a blended, action-learning framework and a coaching lens to our work with thirty Vice-Presidents and Directors of Nursing and Patient-Care services, we used time-tested frameworks to support a high reliability culture and decrease blame.  We invited the leaders to suggest real-time work applications so that the learning was in the context of their existing priorities and did not add any undue burden on these already exhausted leaders.  Our emphasis throughout this past year and the past two years has been integrating a focus on well-being in the context of creating sustainable excellence.

The Impact

After nine months of blended facilitation and interim “field work,” we heard the following results in the leaders’ change of thinking, emotions, behaviors, and results: “I’ve reduced my heart rate by six beats/ minute.”  “I’ve been modeling setting boundaries around my time at work and giving myself permission to take the weekend “off” from emails and work and I’ve noticed that my team members are doing the same- what I model they seem to follow.”  “I’ve become more present to who is in front of me and I’m listening more.  Before I would be more concerned about getting somewhere on time and now I realize that the person in front of me is more important.  This sense of presence has also impacted my home life and I am more present there.”

Would you like to hear more about how you can develop your leaders, improve well-being and culture, while you do essential work and not separate from your work? We’d love to hear from you! Please contact us here: https://sixseedpartners.com/contact/

Supporting Clinical Peer Leaders

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A Case for Courage and Compassion In Action

Joy W. Goldman RN, MS PCC:  Advisor: SixSEED Partners

Our commitment

At SixSEED Partners, our mission is providing integrated solutions to heal healthcare.  In order to do this in a way that stewards the dwindling resources of money, energy and time, and provides sustainable results with minimal wear and tear, we must challenge existing systems and structures that work in opposition to these principles.  This blog focuses on the need to support a vulnerable population:  physicians, advanced practice clinical leaders, and nurses who are promoted into supervisory and leadership roles where they oversee the performance of colleagues who have been, and may still be, their peers.

The Problem:

In healthcare, we have observed the long -cherished practice of taking high achieving and driven clinicians and placing them in supervisory and leadership roles without preparing them for these roles.  Quite often, these positions require the practitioner to supervise and manage individuals with whom they still must work to care for patients.  As anyone who has been in this role will tell you, this is no easy task.  In one instance, they are working alongside their peers to complete a case and, in another, they are informing their peer when they have to work and when the peer’s requests for schedule changes or other privileges are denied.  Knowing how to both support and challenge one’s direct reports mystifies the most seasoned of leaders!

Our Actions:

As we focus on excellence AND well-being, we work with our clients to apply proven frameworks like The Conscious Leadership Group’s “Above and Below the Line,” and David Emerald’s The Empowerment Dynamic to increase self-awareness and learn how to better compassionately acknowledge the inner persecutor/judger while courageously asserting boundaries and actions that are in service to clinicians and patients alike.

The Impact:

Through our work, the clients are able to navigate these complex dynamics or, in some instances, they decide they might prefer staying in their practitioner role without the added demands of supervising their peers.  For informed organizations, they acknowledge the shift in mindsets and behaviors required for these roles and start preparing these ambitious leaders prior to the actual need.  In this way, the leader is set up for success and the organization, leader, team members, and patients thrive.

Want to learn more?  Contact us at: https://sixseedpartners.com/contact/

SixSEED Partners Message for Valentine’s Day

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Adopt One Action that Demonstrates Loving Yourself

“If you take good care of yourself, you are better able to be of service to others.”

“Sustainable self-care is an inside-out process. It is formed with a clear belief and intention to support and love yourself through the choices you make.”

The above quotes are from a recent Center for the Empowerment Dynamic blog from our colleagues David Emerald and Donna Zajonc. In our work to help organizations and leaders create healthy cultures, we partnered with Clinical and Nursing executives and middle managers to help them better manage the interdependent tension (polarity) of “Care for Self,” and “Care for Others.” In prior case studies, we’ve discussed the collective habitual response of perceiving “care for self” similar to a foreign body entering the system. All energy in the system went to expel that practice from the system, labeling it, as the article describes, as being “selfish.”

In prior work with physician and nursing leaders in a different system, when we asked the leaders to stand in the quadrant where they felt most aligned of care for self and care for others, the few who found themselves in “care for self” noticed feelings of shame as they stood in prioritizing their own health and well-being. They wanted to run from the quadrant into care for others or overdone care for others.

For this Valentine’s Day, we invite you to read this article and adopt one action that demonstrates loving yourself. It might be saying no and setting boundaries; it might be allowing yourself time to rest; it might be soothing your inner critic that has you constantly coming up short and saying: “I am good enough.”

Why not respond to this message and tell us how you choose to love yourself? And if you’d like a partner to support shifting your culture to one of well-being AND excellence, contact us! https://sixseedpartners.com/contact/

Psychological Safety

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

Continuing our theme of psychological safety, this article by McKinsey & Company: “Psychological Safety and the Critical Role of Leadership Development” describes research linking leadership development to high psychological safety cultures: “Investing in and scaling up leadership-development programs can equip leaders to embody these behaviors and consequently cultivate psychological safety across the organization.”

This article eludes to what we at SixSEED Partners train our clients in which is using both/and thinking to address complex challenges. If we are to sustainably create cultures of psychological safety, we must have leaders who can leverage challenging teams and supporting teams; practice advocacy (telling) and inquiry (asking questions, getting curious); flexing their style to leverage candor and diplomacy; and most importantly, when delegating, giving freedom and holding accountable.

Would you like to develop your leaders to be able to lead their teams toward creating psychologically safe environments? We’d love to hear from you! https://sixseedpartners.com/contact/

Read article here: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/psychological-safety-and-the-critical-role-of-leadership-development

David’s Ulrich’s Leadership Pipeline

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

With gratitude to Nicki Roth for posting this updated graphic of David Ulrich‘s Leadership Pipeline. As SixSEED Partners work with our clients, we invite them to re-think succession planning to a shift from preparing a few for select positions, to developing the capacity to think and better lead in complexity. In the graph posted by The Talent Guru, you will notice an evolution from task oriented and defined capacities to more of leading and growing others to create a culture of well-being and excellence. How are you intentionally developing your leaders so that their thinking expands before they are promoted into more complex roles? We’d welcome chatting with you about proven methods that respect your team’s and the organization’s most pressing needs.

Read post here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/nicki-roth-0b6a86_1-min-summary-of-the-evolution-of-leadership-activity-7086660758188486656-EBKR?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop