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.

Strengthening clinical and operational leadership and partnerships in an academic Medical center

Joy W. Goldman RN, MS, PCC: CEO
Cliff Kayser, MS, PCC: CSO

Background

SixSEED Partners (SSP)  was invited to work with a 789-bed, academic medical center located in a major metropolitan area.  We were asked to design a program that would improve the partnering between operational leaders: the Security Department and a clinical department:  Shock Trauma leaders, in service to improving staff and patient care when dealing with high profile trauma patients.  These patients posed challenges to these departments due to the crowd control often necessary with police gunshot victims and the support of political leaders.  

The Strategy:

After interviewing both department Senior Vice-Presidents and hearing their shared vision, SSP proposed a six-month engagement where we would combine expanding thinking capacity to better lead through complex and volatile situations with action learning and forced pairing to strengthen trust through mutual accountability. We wanted to be able to measure impact on a qualitative and quantitative basis and we wanted to strengthen the system so that each leader was doing work at the level that matched their position in the organization. Applying our Leadership Ecosystem Capacitation (LEC) model, we wanted to impact individual, team and system-level change to ensure sustainable impact. Complicating this work was the fact that all of our work would be done within the context of the Covid-19 global pandemic; mass vaccination campaigns; and the nation’s crisis of systemic racism.

The Solution: 

Over the six-month period, we offered a combination of in-person and virtual sessions where we introduced polarity thinking and the SMALL process: seeing, mapping, assessing, learning and leveraging. The eight leaders were engaged in identifying their own pain points which were mapped to represent their reality. The two tensions measured were:

• Continuity & Transformation (what’s working now and what would we like to see differently in our partnership)
• Autonomous Outcomes & Integrated Outcomes: how well do we leverage the expertise of each department while integrating and combining our complementary strengths in service to the patient and our respective teams

In addition, we met with the Senior Vice Presidents on an every -other- week basis to provide support for them as they coached their leaders in doing this work. We wanted to help them identify their own tensions of Holding Responsible & Giving Freedom. As strong problem solvers, we wanted them to notice any tendency to want to rescue or persecute and help so they could best leverage this interdependent tension. We brought in to our work internal hospital resources like process improvement talent so they could map out a desired procedure (Standard Operating Procedure) for managing high profile patients which could then be codified and shared so the results were less dependent on certain staff and could be standardized across both operational and clinical areas.

The Impact:

Not previously mentioned but of significance for our work was the fact that the Security Department consisted of all Black leaders and the Shock Trauma leaders were all Caucasian. We found this important given the larger context of protests and beliefs around systemic racism. We acknowledged a theme of “being heard” and elevating voice within operations since clinical areas often received the spotlight as direct patient care providers.
Markers of success included:

• Seamless and coordinated management of a high -profile patient two months post the conclusion of our work
• One of the Security-Shock Trauma Leader dyads presented their work at the Leadership Forum for the flagship hospital and Mid-Town Campus with many accolades
• The Senior Vice-Presidents were able to offer numerous examples of mid-level director empowerment, including the presentation to them of a new Standard Operating Procedure created by the eight leaders
• Elimination of process delays and confusion as they created a “Tiger page” that now alerted all involved
• Improvement in all but two markers between the baseline and interim polarity assessment