Case Study

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

Background

SixSEED Partners concluded a year-long Leadership Development Series with the Executive Committee of a Heart and Vascular Institute by facilitating the morning of their full-day Strategic Planning Retreat. During this series, SixSEED introduced the blended physician and administrator team to vital tools like TheEmpowermentDynamic*, 3VitalQuestions, DiSC styles. and Polarity Thinking. We measured three polarities, or tensions, of most interest to the Executive Committee. One polarity: Centralization and De-centralization, or the competing commitments between their Cardiovascular Services and the rest of the system, was the greatest area for improvement, as well as learning for them. For their 2022 Strategic Planning, the Executive Committee shifted their focus inward to their teams and wanted SixSEED to partner with them on how to approach improving engagement within their Institute.

The Strategy:

SSP’s Petra Platzer and Joy Goldman designed an interactive session to both teach and engage the participants on what engagement means and the difference from satisfaction, for the individual and the leaders trying to make it happen (see graphic, adapted from DecisionWise). Participants also learned about various decision-making styles and practiced making Effective Requests to create shared commitments, which are key elements and techniques in fostering engagement.  Activities were specifically designed to emphasize what they owned and were accountable for as leaders (one pole), as well as what “the staff” own and are accountable for (other pole). Throughout, we compassionately and constructively identified the habit of going to blame / problem-oriented thinking habits and helped to shift the participants into a broader, outcome-oriented thinking process.

The Solution: 

The eighteen physicians and administrators “experienced” engagement through pair activities to practice active listening and reflection and larger group conversations to come to a shared meaning about various topics. SSP’s Petra and Joy infused sections of content throughout the activities and challenged the committee to think differently about their afternoon agenda on the staff engagement initiative. The participants identified that “one size does not fit all” and the elements that result in someone feeling and being engaged, i.e. DecisionWise’s MAGIC (Meaning, Autonomy, Growth, Impact and Connection), cannot be assumed without engaging people appropriately in the process. Through learning about and practicing elements of commitment management, the participants also experienced which saboteurs they may need to address in order to make effective requests that people could commit to, and be engaged about.

The Impact:

The participants looked at their employee satisfaction results with a new mindset and were able to shift to interventions that were less about problem-solving for the staff and more about engaging them around their “MAGIC” elements. Their language shifted from “I need to know and fix” to “We need to ask questions and engage them in dialogue so that, together, we can have the best work environment for the staff, leaders, and patients.” An administrator in the group said “Everyone really participated in this today. That’s success in my book”, while the Chair of the committee shared “as a result of the work we did in the morning (with you), we were able to stay focused on our desired outcomes and more quickly identify our 2022 Institute strategies (including the staff engagement initiative).”

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.

Petra Platzer, PhD, NBC-HWC, PCC; Cliff Kayser MSHR, MSOD, PCC; Dave Levin MD

Background

The complexity, fragmentation, and highly regulated aspects of the U.S. healthcare system results in making the industry resistant to change. Despite the resistance, healthcare has undergone significant change in reimbursement models, consumerism, and information technologies (IT). A small, IT healthcare start-up challenged itself to embrace the reality within the tension between Stability (current status) and Change (future status) versus resisting that change. To support this IT start-up in this intentional process, “NewCo” partnered with SixSEED Partners (SSP) in using the Polarity Approach for Continuity and Transformation (PACT™).

The Strategy:

The first step for NewCo was to establish the NewCo Culture Team (NCT), which was a highly diverse microcosm that had executive sponsorship. The NCT met regularly to guide culture development and determined they would assess the current state of NewCo by conducting an employee “SWOT” survey to analyze Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

The Solution: 

Guided by SixSEED, the NCT learned how the Polarity Map™ could supplement and enhance their original SWOT result analyses. While a standard SWOT implicitly focuses on important dimensions of stability and change, what it misses analyzing are the interdependent connections between those SWOT dimensions. As the NCT and NewCo began to more broadly understand how this and other interdependencies work, they began to see polarity tensions that were a part of discussion or debate in their day-to-day workflow. 

One example of this occurred when a group was meeting to discuss a customer’s “overly excessive” technical support needs. Concerns mostly focused on what the customer was “doing wrong” until a staff member suggested that this might be a polarity: Customer Needs And NewCo Needs. The dynamic of the conversation quickly shifted as members mapped the dynamic. Capturing the wisdom in the Polarity Map™ allowed the group to see a more complete picture of the ongoing tension and enabled them to develop a more productive solution strategy for NewCo and the Customer.

Another example related to NewCo’s merger with a similar size and stage company. Emotionally-laden struggles existed as the company wrestled with whether work could be done remotely or required people to be in a central office as the merged companies had different practices.  Initial discussions were framed as either/or which was causing undue stress and conflict.  A NewCo executive team member was able to lead the new team through a polarity mapping exercise to identify the benefits of Office-based and Remote work, as well as the limitations of each, without the other.

The Impact:

Polarity principles were successfully applied in a small, highly dynamic healthcare IT start-up environment that intentionally focused on building culture. Leveraging polarities played a key role in NewCo’s successful growth, from a few co-founders with an idea to a company with 45 employees, while weathering many storms – including successfully merging with another company.

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

Cliff Kayser, MS, PCC:  CSO

Background

SixSEED was invited to partner with a hospital seeking to support a new Director of Perioperative Services struggling to acclimate to the organization. The hospital sought an Executive Coach to support the leader’s difficult transition to the new role which was also occurring in the midst of the high-stress COVID-19 pandemic environment and severe nursing staff shortages. There was a need to accelerate the leader acclimating given the high revenue impact of her clinical areas.

The Strategy:

The Executive Coach partnered with the leader using a polarity framework:  a structured approach which matched well with the client’s military background.  In partnership with the client’s executive sponsor, they decided to focus on 7 key tensions.  Crucial to the client’s success would be to leverage the benefits of each of these “polarities” while at the same time being aware of her strong preferences for pole values that are shown in bold, below:

Confidence And Humility

Assertive And Cooperative

Candor And Diplomacy

Advocate And Inquire

Provide Direction And Invite Participation

Give Freedom/Trust And Hold Responsible/Verify

Mandatory Protocol And Discretionary Protocol

The strong preferences and combined impact for those pole preferences were creating barriers to her leadership effectiveness. As she became more aware of the dynamics between and among these competency pairs, she began exploring new approaches and creative ways to create “leverage” – to maximize the benefits of each, while minimizing the downsides of overdoing her strengths.

The Solution: 

In partnering with the coach, the client was able to prioritize a key tension for she and her team which was Give Freedom/Trust And Hold Responsible/Verify. She believed her team was framing the tension as an “Or” – and strongly over-relying on Giving Freedom/Trust to one another and falling short on holding one another responsible for follow-through on mandatory safety protocols.

The leader and coach co-designed and delivered a team development session for her 11-member leadership team. In the session, the team mapped and assessed their performance focused on Patient Safety And Staff Safety as it related to how individuals and the team navigated giving one another freedom while holding each other responsible for following safety protocols.

The Impact:

Near the end of the 6-month engagement the client completed a follow-up self-assessment for the original seven polarity tensions. The results are summarized below.  Most importantly, her leaders were able to depersonalize behaviors and recognize tensions as preferences and not as “good” or “bad.”  The client, by increasing visibility, developing relationships, and becoming a better “leader of leaders,” she was able to influence and “scale” systemic change.