SixSEED Partners

Epidemic Leadership

How to Hire a CEO: Neglected Attributes

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

Introduction: Case for Change

Turnover at the CEO position remains high: According to the American College of Healthcare Executives, CEO turnover was 17 percent in 2019.* (ACHE: “Hospital CEO Turnover Rate Shows Small Decrease.” – press release. In Development Dimension International’s 2021 Global Leadership Forecast, that polled close to 16,000 leaders across the globe, 55% of CEO’s indicated developing the next generation of leaders as their top challenge. These statistics and personal experience working with clients who have been traumatized by making a wrong choice, motivated Dr. Larry McEvoy, Dr. Kevin Mosser and I to offer healthcare boards a webinar through The Governance Institute  called “How to Hire a CEO: A Guide for Ensuring Effective Selection at the Most Important Position.”  

For SixSEED Partners, we see the hiring of a CEO as only one part of our sixth seed: Leadership Ecosystem Capacitation.

 

Current Process:  Strengths and Gaps:

Whether in our country or within healthcare, we continue to look to the CEO as a heroic leader and in doing so, often place great emphasis on the CEO’s accomplishments and experience.  It was fascinating to us that the participants on the webinar placed low importance to the role of experience in their candidate selection yet, in practice, it was one of the top three attributes that they assessed. (see graphs below).  Bob Anderson and Bill Adams, in their book: Scaling Leadership: Building organizational capability and capacity to create outcomes that matter most” dispel the myth that leaders that prioritize results and technical expertise have the greatest impact on business results.  To the contrary, after culling through hundreds of thousands of 360- degree -feedback assessments and comments from around the globe, these skills were shown to be non-differentiators for high performing leaders.  Their research identified ten attributes, six of which were people-related.  Some of these include developing others; empowering people; team-builder; leads by example; and good listener.  

We were also surprised with the time paid to assessment results and interviewer ratings, given neither interventions were rated as having great importance to the participants.  In our experience, we agree, in part with this assessment, given our observation that this process is often incomplete, where the personality profile results remain with the search firm and are not used by the hiring company to integrate into designing behavioral interview questions targeted at possible gaps, nor using as development once the candidate is hired.

The Neglected Attributes:

If you’ve read this far, you are probably guessing where we believe you need to focus to have the greatest chances of success for the candidate; your executive team; and your organization.  The two attributes least assessed yet deemed most important to the CEO’s success is their ability to scale leadership, and to leverage and manage paradox (seeming opposite tensions).

Experience matters less in rapidly changing and volatile situations.  What matters more is the degree to which you’ve built leadership and thinking capacity in your organization.  As an example, SixSEED Partners was asked to offer change leadership training to a cohort of internal medicine physicians.  In partnership with the Chief Quality Officer, we designed a workshop where we introduced both/and thinking as an adjunct to traditional problem-solving thinking.  If these physicians have the thinking capacity to leverage individual AND team; mission AND margin; decentralized AND centralized needs; candor AND diplomacy; advocacy AND inquiry among others, then collaboration is strengthened and we increase their ability to lead sustainable change.

The Leadership Ecosystem Capacity Approach to Hire and Develop

What does this mean for you?  Here are several steps you can take make a better CEO hire:

1. Elevate talent development as THE FIRST Strategic priority- for the board; for the executive team and for each leader.

2. Ask your CEO candidates a question similar to the following:  “If your current organization were to give you a grade of A to F in relation to how well you’ve prepared them for your departure, what would they say?  On what would they be basing their rating?”  You want to listen for details around the use of development strategies like rotational assignments; creating a learning environment; internal promotions; and prepared successors.  You want to listen for a blend of “I” and “We” statements.

3. Assess for their thinking capacity to manage paradox:  “Give me an example of a decision you had to make where you felt torn between two or more competing perspectives.  Who was involved?  What was at stake?  What did you consider in your decision-making process?  What did you do?  What was the outcome?  What did you learn through the process?

Let’s hear from you

We’d love to hear your perspective as you and your board plan for your next CEO hire.  Please post your responses on our LinkedIn page or send us an email here.

Transforming our Seeds to help you Succeed

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The SixSEED Partners Team: Petra Platzer, Cliff Kayser, and Joy Goldman

Since our inception, we have had one unifying passion: to make healthcare healthier. 

Two years ago, SixSEED Partners sprouted from a team of colleagues I brought together to work with multiple high potential leaders on a multi-year succession-planning process in a community-based healthcare system. Together, we were able to integrate our specialties of coaching and consulting with a developmental lens, e.g horizontal and vertical development, with the application of polarity thinking to create much more than classical succession planning. We developed a leadership ecosystem capacitation (LEC) model that simultaneously increased individual AND systemic capacities and overall resilience within that organization. As the impact of this multi-pronged model became clear to us – as well as our client – the vision for SixSEED Partners was born.

As we have continued working with that system, and various other healthcare leaders and systems, we have also continued applying the same leadership and system tools to ourselves – individually and our collective leadership team. Through that iterative reflection, our leadership team has evolved into a new structure this year. And through our continuous feedback processes, we learned that our branding was creating some confusion around our unique service offerings. 

With those shifts – and with the unprecedented health crisis that we have all been navigating in the past few months – we took this time to again, practice what we preach. We slowed down. We reflected on what matters to us and how can we be in best service to those we are passionate about serving.

From all those efforts, I am pleased to share with you our new website re-design and re-branded messaging, as a beginning. 

Our mission is simple: we provide integrated solutions to heal healthcareTM

Our service offerings are now denoted as 6 unique “seeds”, which can be approached as individual bodies of work, and ideally, as integrated engagements across multiple seeds to create a lasting result. 

  • Leadership Development
    • Team Development
    • System Integration
    • Well-Being
    • Culture
    • Leadership Ecosystem Capacitation Model

Through this multi-pronged approach at multiple levels, we are able to custom design integrated solutions that leverage the best delivery routes for meeting our clients where they are in their current cycle of work. 

We are not a “coaching” firm, nor a “consulting” firm, nor “a training” firm. We are an integrated solutions firm that can deliver all those delivery routes in order for our clients to create an expanded skillset, not just additional knowledge. 

What is still the same is our focus on improving the capacity of healthcare leaders and teams to lead in times of complexity and uncertainty. If there’s one thing the current pandemic has highlighted even more for so many, it’s the need for resilient people and processes to be able to address unpredictable changes for everyone’s well-being and success. 

What’s important to us and our clients is our integrated approach that includes:

  • Focusing on an overall goal of increasing leadership capacitation within systems 
  • Integrating solutions that address individuals, teams, and entire systems knowing that we need to integrate all aspects to achieve sustainable change
  • Delivering results that impact strategic, operational and cultural outcomes
  • Using a defined, iterative process rooted in evidence-based change strategies

We invite you to browse around our refreshed site to learn more about our approach, our results, and our team.  During this auspicious month officially celebrating National Nurses Day, National Hospital Week & Healthcare Heroes, we are here and ready to partner with you to help you succeed!

Next Generation Succession 2.0: Leveraging Succession to Accelerate Leadership Capacity

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On July 25th, Dr. Larry McEvoy and I had the privilege of presenting the above topic to a room filled with leaders, recruiters, and consultants attending the American Hospital Association 2019 Leadership Summit in San Diego.  We provided a case study that illustrated the application of a different paradigm in addressing succession planning. What the audience most appreciated were the five key shifts necessary to leverage systemic leadership capacity that drives results while fostering better engagement and well-being.  They are as follows: 

  1. “Bet on the herd; not the horse.” Paradigm shift from heroic leader with development of a select few, to increasing the thinking capacity of many leaders.  Focus on the collective rather than individual leadership.
  2. Create deep thinkers who are comfortable with the unknown and who create developer leaders. These leaders see “scaling leadership” as a key accountability area for their role.  Development is not a “nice to have.” It’s an intentional, systemic priority with frequent and varied feedback loops.
  3. Cascading both/and—polarity thinking along with problem-oriented thinking (either/or): Leaders are often promoted for their problem-solving ability.  Unfortunately, all the simple problems have been solved and healthcare is now dealing with complex issues that are interdependent.  This requires the ability to see and effectively leverage the larger system of polarities: mission and margin; tactical and strategic; centralized and decentralized; continuity and transformation.  Cascading a system’s capacity to manage paradox increases the system’s ability to compete in this complex world.
  4. Providing strategic simulation experiences that intentionally take the leaders out of their comfort zones; pairs them with leaders with whom they share different perspectives and apply time constraints that simulate the pressures CEOs face in dealing with real environmental challenges. This exercise provided a real-world “heat” experience that included their presenting to a mock board with challenging questions a CEO would experience from the board.
  5. Be a lens, not a filter: Shifting from silo’d selection and placement of CEO to an integrated process that proactively identifies development needs and structured methods to meet those needs post CEO hire.  The goal of the succession/ development efforts being stabilization of the entire system during times of transition as compared with filling a given role.

Click here to download a copy of our presentation. We’d love to hear from you! 

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References: 

Anderson, Robert, and William Adams.  Scaling Leadership: Building Organization Capability and Capacity to Create Outcomes that Matter Most.  Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2019 

Anderson, Robert, and William Adams. Mastering Leadership: an Integrated Framework for Breakthrough Performance and Extraordinary Business Results. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2016

Johnson, Barry. Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems.  Amherst, MA: HRD Press, Inc. 1996

Petrie, Nick. The How To of Vertical Leadership Development Part II:  30 Experts; 3 Conditions and 15 approaches. Colorado Springs, CO: The Center for Creative Leadership, 2015 (http://tinyurl.com/jrxuvgx)

Not for Beginners: Development in the Health Care C-Suite

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Regardless of the gains we seem to make in health care organizations, executive teams live in a pressure cooker of insufficient performance, on-demand adaptation, and continuous exhaustion.  We’ve tried getting bigger, consolidating and merging to gain big leverage.  It’s working to create health care organizations that are harder to kill, but it’s not making health care simpler, more effective, and more economical.

And…it’s not making people healthier.  Witt-Kieffer published a troubling study in January of this year: Over half the executives in health care would leave if they could.

As a physician and a CEO, I can attest to the pressure and weariness that comes with both those roles.

Is it possible to lead in these high-demand times in a way that is more effective, more sustainable, more meaningful?

Next to that question is the data on executive teams themselves—the prime movers—or stoppers—of entire organizations.  According to research from the Center for Creative Leadership, 97% of CEOs felt that improved function of their executive team would have a positive impact on results.

And on the ground, whispered off the grid and after workshops and in coaching sessions, countless mid-level leaders and physicians observe, “Our exec level needs to work on this stuff.”

In the field of coaching, we’ve managed to move from the idea of coaching as pre-terminal heroics to “coaching is how high-potential people discover how to optimally leverage themselves,” but with executive teams, active development of the team’s powerful position to tap leading-edge technique and knowledge is largely off the radar until there is overt dysfunction.

This only-when-the-cracks-show approach is unfortunate, given that the executive teams of both large and small healthcare organizations are charged with creating reliable and fluid success in the largest and most complex sector of the American economy, in unbelievably complex and urgent circumstances.  In these settings, executive team development is one of the highest forms of leverage for the forward-looking organization.  Development has become the sina qua non of excellent executive teams, not remedial ones.

What work separates advantageous, effective development from “another thing that takes up our time?”

Given their internal relationships, dynamics, biodiversity of functions, and landscape pressures and volatility, healthcare organizations are signature examples of complex adaptive systems, structures so multi-faceted that no less a guru than Peter Drucker deemed them “almost unmanageable,” and that was back in 1993.

Conventional executive teams know they have plenty of competencies, well earned through years of experience.  They also risk the trap of “we know,” when the deeper work is exploring what we’ve never done.  These exec teams recognize the potential in individual and shared leadership acumen around them, but tend to see themselves as static—accomplished, finished, certain.

The best executive teams recognize the challenge of leading complex adaptive systems as an invitation to change the rules of leadership, and that’s where they spend their time.

Creating an organization which is simpler, more relationally connected, and more coordinated defines their development work.  The fields of adult stage development; the neuroscience of performance, learning, and vitality; the network science of collective knowledge rising in fixed and ephemeral networks; the dual realities of intention and emergence, freedom and order; and the origin and diffusion (or extinction) of patterns occupy their learning and practice as they remodel the operating system under the countless tasks and process that define the organization’s success and identity.

We live in a world where we have to do things we’ve never done before as a clinical enterprise and as a disruption-adaptation business—so learning how to lead like we’ve never lead before is essential.  The best executive teams trust their known skills, and they also explore, with discipline and curiosity, the unknown approach.

They understand that creating the impactful future is less about what we’ve done and more about doing together what we’ve never done before.

As one CEO I know puts it, “Every leader has to be an effective environmentalist.”  She’s not talking about hugging trees or signing petitions.

This is not the work of beginning or remedial exec teams.  It’s the work of the best, the bravest, and the most committed.