SixSEED Partners

Case Study

Building Team Norms to Sustain Team Effectiveness

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Petra Platzer, PhD NBC-HWC, PCC: CEO SixSEED Partners

Background

SixSEED Partners concluded a year-long Team Development Series with a team of neonatal physicians and advanced practice providers at a community-based hospital outside of a major urban city. The vision of the executive sponsors was to strengthen team bonds and increase the team’s effectiveness for patient care delivery and for their own well-being. Throughout this series, we helped the team increase their self- and team-awareness around their ways of thinking by providing evidence-based tools and frameworks to use in their day-to-day work and team interactions. The team’s medical director and advanced practice providers lead continued threading the tools and framework into the team’s daily work and interactions. They also provided real-time feedback for the team into the session design process to achieve the overall engagement results. In the latest session, the team successfully worked together to “optimize team communications for effective patient care rounds”.

Client Results

The Strategy:

Building on the progress from the last session, the team leaders asked SSP for help on codifying what the team had skillfully demonstrated in the last session – new ways of discussing, listening and coming to decisions on topics that had different opinions. With the series concluding, it was also crucial to their success to define ways for actively sustaining the progress everyone had made, as well as how to intentionally bring new team members into this way of working together. 

The Solution: 

SSP’s Petra Platzer and Lisa Hompe designed a highly interactive and experiential session for the team to craft their Team Norms within their new Team Operating Manual. In this 2 hour in-person session, sixteen physicians and advanced practice practitioners “experienced” a Team Work Cycle by physically walking through it together and noticing their own energies and preferences in the phases. After learning about this cycle and their own natural tendencies, the team then moved through the work cycle process to make simple rules of behaviors as their working agreements for how they are most effective together – and consequently, their patients. 

The Impact:

Through this facilitated, experiential design, the neonatal division created five team norms which all members actively built together and voted on for consensus. Through everyone’s efforts in this series, the team’s improved psychological safety and alignment on their shared purpose helped them in focusing on voicing their individual needs and the needs of the team, as well as in their decision-making process for the final sets of behaviors they are now empowered to uphold and support each other on.

One participant shared she started the session in a low energy state after a challenging day in the NICU. She was pleasantly surprised that her energy was much improved through feeling the energy of the team and the satisfaction from everyone doing this work together – for themselves. Another shared she had never had such a productive outcome from everyone’s participation in this big a group, and in such a short time. The team leaders shared their pleasure in seeing the team really own the process and felt their shared investment in upholding these norms going forward together. 

To learn more about doing this kind of work to support and elevate your team to the next level, contact SixSEED Partners today.

Scaling Leadership

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Collective Honoring of Progress and Harvesting of Thinking to continue driving change for Excellence and Well-being

Petra Platzer, PhD NBC-HWC, PCC: CEO SixSEED Partners 

Background:

SixSEED Partners was invited to design and facilitate a full day retreat for all frontline and senior leaders within the Nursing and Patient Care Services department for two newly integrated hospital centers within an Academic Medical Health System. This was the first full department gathering since the Chief Nursing Officer had stepped into her role in 2021. In the prior two years, we supported the vice presidents and directors to apply polarity thinking to their integration process, creating a culture of “we” instead of us / them. The Chief Nursing Officer’s vision now was to continue scaling this “we” culture through the larger group by celebrating their 2024 accomplishments and looking forward for how to drive the changes needed for optimal patient care delivery. Recognizing that scaling leadership begins with herself, this nurse executive also selected two of her vice presidents to be part of the planning and execution of this whole department retreat.

Strategy:  

The retreat began with intentional time to reflect on the past year and celebrate the numerous accomplishments achieved across the various service lines and numerous inter-disciplinary efforts. This intentional slowing down to acknowledge the best of the past/current state was a generative action to help connect to their hearts and each other. From this appreciative space, we challenged the leaders to focus on the C-Dimension of Work, as first coined by Peter Senge, to collectively name what specifically was working for them within each of their 2024-2027 Strategic Plan Initiatives. Knowing the tendency to defer to authority within clinical realms, the design team leaders helped randomize the participants and we invited everyone to leave their “titles” at their tables and lean into speaking their thoughts, no matter their role. After identifying the best of what has been working so far, we facilitated a modified world café for the participants to think about how they might approach meeting future patient care needs by optimizing their delivery model.

 

Solution: 

Petra Platzer, Vinay Kumar and Lisa Hompe led the 130+ leaders through exercises designed so that everyone could share and build upon each other’s thinking. The group activities enabled all to participate and stretched the leaders to shift from their strength of managing operations to that of designing strategic actions to achieve results. 

The day’s structured activities invited diverse perspectives, including that of the medical center’s CEO whose presence for part of the day allowed him to witness and offer recognition for the collective progress and successes.

Through this experiential design, the participants gained an understanding that in a dynamic and complex environment like healthcare, the way to best lead for excellence and well-being is to scale their leadership through continued development – individually and together.

Impact: 

At the conclusion of this full day departmental retreat, the leaders and frontline managers surfaced existing and new ways of thinking and acting that can help drive their strategic plan and Vizient domains for optimizing the patient care delivery model. Focusing on successes and existing leadership capacity created palpable energy, inspiration and relief in all they can accomplish by working in partnership with each other.

Some of the key take-aways and appreciations participants named include: 

  • • “We need to do this more often! We’re not alone and we’re better together!
  • • “Practice gratitude. Use technology to make workflows easier. Remove barriers.
    Empower others. Celebrate small wins.”

To learn more about bringing this kind of work to your organization, contact us at SixSEED Partners.

Using Self-Awareness to Shift from Drama to Empowerment

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Lisa Hompe MSOD, BSN, ACC

Background:

SixSEED Partners was engaged to help a team of neonatal physicians and advanced practice providers at a community-based hospital outside of a major urban city for a year-long Team Development Series. The vision of the executive sponsors was to strengthen team bonds and increase the team’s effectiveness for patient care delivery and for their own well-being, Our goal was to help them think differently at the individual and team levels by using evidenced-based tools and frameworks to reflect, become more self-aware and integrate the new skills. The series launched with the full team together in person and exploring their individual and group DiSC Workplace Profile® to build self-awareness of their different styles and preferences within the team.

Strategy:  

Following the series launch, this was the first of a 3-part sequence of experiential learning modules (ELM) to continue building awareness and provide additional thinking skills and practical tools for application. These virtually delivered team effectiveness ELM’s involve learning new behaviors by thinking in new ways, applying the learnings in between sessions, and reviewing progress together. 

Solution: 

Petra Platzer and Lisa Hompe worked with the neonatal team’s medical director and advanced practitioner team lead to design the team-based focus areas of work. The design approach intentionally combined individual and cross-functional team learning in real time. To accommodate the team’s shift scheduling, this session was delivered in 2 separate offerings for all to participate and learn together. After reflecting on how everyone’s DiSC styles and preferences appeared since the first workshop, this session introduced the team to 3 Vital Questions® to identify whether operating from a reactive, fear-based orientation or a creative, results-based orientation; to understand which role they may be coming from in those orientations; and how to take action to achieve their desired results.  We shared practical tools for how to identify reactive triggers and ways to shift from the drama (problem orientation) to empowerment (outcome orientation). 

Impact: 

David Emerald’s framework – The Empowerment Dynamic* (TED*) – helped participants become more aware of how to improve their ways of interacting, for themselves and the team’s overall well-being and effectiveness. By participating in this experiential learning module, these frontline clinicians are now equipped to notice and practice shifting from drama-based roles to more powerful results-based roles. The team committed to practicing these new skills and techniques over the next few months to improve team communication and trust. This work will also benefit the patients and families for whom they care. 

If this sounds like something that may be of benefit to you and your teams, and you would like to learn more, please contact SIxSEED Partners for more information. 

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/

SixSEED Partners New Year Message for 2024

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Embracing Resilience AND Transformation

As we step into 2024, we at SixSEED Partners extend our warmest wishes for a year filled with growth, healing and health. The past year taught us invaluable lessons in resilience, adaptability, and the enduring power of courageous and compassionate leadership.

In 2024, we continue our commitment to providing integrated solutions to heal healthcare.  Our journey together focuses on developing leaders and teams who can generate well-being and excellence, in real time, in service to creating healthy cultures.

Key Themes for 2024:

  1. Innovative Leadership: Using time-tested and emerging tools and techniques that get results with less wear and tear on those leading and delivering care.
  2. Collaborative Excellence: One cannot succeed alone. Inviting our clients and colleagues to connect and build innovative partnerships for broader and lasting impact.
  3. Well-being and Resilience: Integrating strategies to care for OneSelf while caring for others, to save time and conserve energy for what’s needed most.
  4. Adaptive Strategies: Providing contextualized development within our client’s real-time, on the ground work. The healthcare environment is complex. Integrating development is vital to learn how to adapt and succeed in current and long-term needs.

Let’s join hands in making 2024 a year of remarkable achievements and profound impact. We are honored to partner with everyone striving to take care of themselves, their teams and our communities.

With appreciation and shared commitment!