SixSEED Partners

Polarity Thinking

Both/And Thinking Requisite for Post-Pandemic Leadership

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

Background: Three strategists from PwC published in April’s Harvard Business Review: “6 Leadership Paradoxes for the Post- Pandemic Era”. As we await the publishing of Barry Johnson’s:” AND: Making a Difference by Leveraging Polarity, Paradox and Dilemma: Volume 2 Applications,” in which we have contributed numerous chapters, we feel affirmed in focusing on this essential capacity for post-pandemic leaders. We’re also pleased to see that SixSEED Partners has worked with several individual and system clients to measure these exact tensions.

Both/And different from Problem-Solving

As a reminder, (see prior posts) both/and – polarity thinking supplements traditional either/or problem-solving thinking in order to best manage complex, ambiguous, volatile and uncertain situations- all of which are part of healthcare’s NOW. It’s an advanced thinking capacity as it requires a leader to be able to see (the first step of the SMALL polarity process: seeing-mapping-assessing learning-leveraging) what seems like opposing perspectives. Leinwand, Mani, and Sheppard highlight six of these interdependent tensions. Below we’ve highlighted their six and translated them into language we’ve used and measured with our clients:

We take HBR’s leader-focused tensions and expand into individual, team and systemic tensions. We’ve adopted the ethos behind the quote from a GE leader: “you don’t put a changed leader into an unchanged system.” As we partner with clients, we focus on individual, team and systemic tensions to ensure sustainable results.

Applications to our current work

SixSEED Partners has integrated these tensions in our individual coaching as part of the 360 feedback and development process; in our culture work with Information Technology and Healthcare organizations and medical groups; and in developing and strengthening nurse and physician leader partnerships. Pasted below you can see the results of measuring the tension of Centralization and Decentralization. At a glance, you can see the opportunity to better leverage centralization in this heart and vascular institute. The White infinity loop represents their actual scores as compared with the ideal grey loop. Through dialogue, it was eye-opening for this group of physicians to objectively see how often they fall into feeling victim to the needs of the larger organization instead of noticing their opportunity to better consider system factors as they plan their decentralized program efforts. In being able to consider and measure the both/and, they save time, energy and resources that go into over focusing on their division needs alone.

Let’s hear from you

We’d love to hear how you are helping your leaders see the both/and of these six paradoxes and others. If this work seems like it could help you and your teams, we’d love to talk with you to explore how this approach might help your clinical leaders. Please post your responses on our LinkedIn page or send us an email here.

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Caring for the Organization & Caring for the Workforce

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

Introduction: Case for Change

  • “Joy:  (as told by a hospital CEO)  “I am having a spiritual crisis.  I have dedicated my life to this work and I am exhausted.  I am getting emails from our system CEO at all hours of the night and weekends.  And when are our senior meetings?  Mondays.. so if we want to take a long weekend, we have to wrestle with missing those meetings or attending them on our time off.”
  • From a dear friend:  “My son (nurse in ICU) called me yesterday and told me he lost another patient.  He commented that this is a daily occurrence and he sent me this very poignant video illustrating the journey of his fellow nurses and care-providers.  He doesn’t feel that he can talk to anyone for fear they will think him “fragile” and unsafe.
  • From a senior leader whose position was eliminated:  “I was informed via a 10- minute zoom call that my position was eliminated and that I would be cut off from all communications as of that moment.  I could only go to my office to clean out my belongings with an escort.   I’ve worked for the organization for over twenty years and this is how I’m treated.  I understand the need to re-organize but why wouldn’t they allow me to transition my projects to others?”

The stories above are direct quotes from clients and/or friends.  As we reach the one- year mark for Covid-19 lockdowns and the now 500,000 deaths in the United States, more and more of these stories are surfacing.  SixSEED Partners is committed to providing integrated solutions to heal healthcare and there is no greater time of need than right now.

Crisis in the Making:  Grief, Trauma and Vicarious Trauma:

McKinsey & Company, in a December 2020 publication: “Grief, loss burnout: Talking about complex feelings at work” discuss the unparalleled levels of exhaustion and loss that have become “routine” for healthcare workers.  Provider burnout was a concern before the pandemic- it is only magnified now in the constantly “on stage” demands of taking care of patients and trying to recoup financial losses due to fewer elective surgeries.  The authors of “Healthcare Coaching Through Crisis and Trauma” (February 2021), published through Harvard’s Institute of Coaching, describe the experiences as passing even “severe burnout,” into the realm of trauma, vicarious trauma, and moral injury.”  How are we challenging ourselves to slow down enough to put resources to this significant need?  In many ways, we are reminded of our nation’s tension of leveraging individualism (each person responsible for their status/ wellbeing) with communal good (how are we caring for each other).

The Leadership Ecosystem Capacity Approach to Resilience and Restoration:

SixSEED Partners asserts that we each have a role in better leveraging caring for the workforce as we strive to keep our organizations afloat.  Without workers, we have no margin.  What’s in our control to do?

Please see the polarity map pasted below for some ideas of action steps and early warning signs to address this tension.  

SixSEED Partners recently partnered with an academic medical center to offer a polarity thinking workshop to sixteen internal medicine faculty.  These physicians were learning about leading change in patient quality and safety and we chose to help them expand their thinking to support their leading in complex and unpredictable environments.  They voiced appreciation for the safe space where they got to share with their colleagues and learn that the challenges they were dealing with were not unique to them. They were also able to acknowledge that they needed to assume individual responsibility for self -advocacy and health as they worked so hard at taking care of others- whether that was at work or at home.

Let’s hear from you;

We’d love to hear your perspective as you and your organizations better leverage caring for your workforce. Please post your responses on our LinkedIn page or send us an email here.

SEEDS for Success with New Year Resolutions

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Introduction: Case for Change

Have you given up on New Year’s resolutions because of repeated failures to achieve your goals?  Are you searching for the right way to get sustainable results?  Has the scale betrayed you again in this new year as you struggled to manage your weight amidst a work from home or constant adrenaline rush lifestyle?  You are not alone.  As so many of us do, we look back to our learnings from the past to inform our changes for the future.  We are taking a different spin to a prior post in the context of supporting your wellbeing in this new year.

The Challenges:

As we enter a new year and vow to make changes in our personal and professional lives, we struggle with how best to do that, particularly amidst what we may hear about the failure rate of New Year Resolutions.  In our efforts to find an example that might be universal, 2020 found many of us struggling with weight maintenance given our moving less and staring into a computer screen for 8-10 hours/day.  While there is great literature on successful habit cultivation, they often fail to take a systems’ and mindset perspective necessary in dealing with complex situations.  

2020 has required us to create structures AND be flexible and adaptive; leverage what we know as we advance into what is not known; honor existing familiar traditions as we create new ways of being with each other.  In revisiting our post from May of 2020 on taking ourselves seriously and taking ourselves lightly, we present this spin as it relates to improving personal health goals around weight management.

Leveraging taking ourselves seriously and taking ourselves lightly:  

At SixSEED Partners, we help our clients integrate both/and thinking in addition to traditional problem-solving- either/or approaches.  The elimination of perceptions of “good or bad,” “right or wrong,” helps our clients to take a more systems-oriented approach to complex challenges.  In the polarity map pasted below, you will notice a common tension of a serious/structured weight management approach and a more playful and spontaneous approach to weight management and health. Effective and sustainable weight management requires leveraging both upper poles, and mitigating the risk of overdoing either, to the neglect of the other.  

When we take ourselves too seriously to the neglect of a lighter approach, our inner judgers become active when we find that we’re not meeting our health goals and we’re not enjoying life.  If we overfocus on a more spontaneous approach to weight management (as just one common health attribute), we’re having fun but not meeting our physical health goals.  Using a polarity thinking frame helps us to see ourselves as a system that requires leveraging both poles.

What can you do? (action items and warning signs):

Even as I write this blog, I notice physical signs where my breathing becomes more shallow; there is a sense of tightness and heaviness and I notice my active judger interfering with my free flow of writing.  As I notice my own warning signs of taking myself too seriously, I open my chest more to allow easier breathing; I laugh and put this blog in the context of other problems in our world today; and I take a time out to exercise and move my body which amazingly impacts my movement in thinking.  I also access others more expert than I to help modify and edit, knowing I’m not alone in this work.  See our sample map below for actions you might take for success in weight management and other similar thorny challenges.

Polarity Map of Taking Self Seriously vs Lightly

Let’s hear from you:

What have you found helpful in leveraging taking yourself seriously and taking yourself lightly? In our next blog, we’ll be focusing on our leadership development seed as we discuss a common challenge of holding others accountable AND giving them freedom in doing their job. If you’re interested in learning more about how our team can help yours, contact us today!

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!

Leveraging Specialized Knowledge and Shared Knowledge

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This is the sixth in a series on leveraging tensions during this time of the coronavirus.  For SixSEED Partners, Covid-19 is a powerful reminder of what already exists in our world which is complex and unpredictable circumstances that can cause much pain and expense unless we learn to take a more systemic view and get comfortable leveraging interdependent tensions.  Previously, we covered the paradoxes of:

  • Leveraging Facts AND Faith
  • Leveraging Staying Present AND Anticipating the Future
  • Leveraging Care for Self AND Care for Others
  • Leveraging Assuming Responsibility AND Delegating Responsibility
  • Leveraging Taking Ourselves Seriously AND Taking Ourselves Lightly

The tensions we are highlighting are coming from your real-world challenges.  We’re asking questions and staying present to your pain points, that, in already demanding circumstances, is taking additional energy that you don’t have to spare.  We want to help make this easier for you, while also increasing your capacity to lead others through this pandemic.

As I was listening and participating in a recent SixSEED Partners team meeting, I was hearing stories of inflicted trauma to businesses as a result of one or more of their partners contracting the coronavirus or some other illness and becoming either temporarily or permanently disabled.  The trauma inflicted, in addition to the loss of a loved one, was the impact on the business due to a lack of shared knowledge – knowledge transfer. 

Organizations who understand this tension have been rotating a greater pool of leaders through their Covid-19 Incident Command Centers so that the “show can go on” if one of the senior leaders becomes sick.  As hospitals have struggled with adequate personal protective equipment, and as we’ve learned more about the varying symptom manifestations of the virus, this reality of suddenly having someone out of commission is front and center.

On a personal level, as I’ve heard of couples contracting the virus resulting in one or both of their deaths, I’ve been moved to have discussions with my husband around “information sharing” that we’ve not previously placed as a priority.  Where are passwords; “important documents;” “house maintenance activities,” etc.?  For a system to be agile and resilient, these processes need to be in place so that immediate adaptation can occur.

Below is a polarity map, which outlines this tension of Leveraging Specialized Knowledge and Shared Knowledge.

At SixSEED Partners, we are committed to developing leaders who have the capacity to leverage these interdependent tensions that are here to stay.  We’ve taken the liberty of adding some action steps and warning signs to this map that you can use immediately with your teams.  

If you’d like your own editable polarity map to give yourself the systemic view of the tension you are navigating, or if you have questions about how you might use this information now, complete our contact form and we’ll respond within 1 business day.

Leveraging Taking Ourselves Seriously AND Taking Ourselves Lightly

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This is the fifth in a series on leveraging tensions during this time of the coronavirus.  For SixSEED Partners, Covid-19 is a powerful reminder of what already exists in our world which is complex and unpredictable circumstances that can cause much pain and expense unless we learn to take a more systemic view and get comfortable leveraging interdependent tensions.  Previously, we covered the paradoxes of:

  • Leveraging Facts AND Faith
  • Leveraging Staying Present AND Anticipating the Future
  • Leveraging Care for Self AND Care for Others
  • Leveraging Assuming Responsibility AND Delegating Responsibility

After hours of speaking with our clients who are on the front lines in hospitals or leading medical practices, the tensions we’re highlighting are coming from them—you.  We’re asking questions and staying present to your pain points, that, in already demanding circumstances, is taking additional energy that you don’t have to spare.  We want to help make this easier for you, while also increasing your capacity to lead others through this pandemic.

Below is a polarity map, which outlines this tension of Taking Ourselves Seriously AND Taking Ourselves Lightly in service to creating a healthy workplace for all.  What you’ll notice in the below polarity map that is different from prior maps in the series is an action step that is highlighted in yellow.  This is called a “high leverage action step” since it applies to both poles.  Intentional design of meeting agenda and space is necessary to leverage a business focus and a lighthearted/ energy-giving focus. 

As we’ve spoken to our clients, we see and hear the exhaustion people are feeling as a result of this prolonged pandemic along with the stressors of re-opening elective surgeries while also staying prepared for what could still be a surge in Covid-19 cases.  After weeks of being immersed in fourteen- hour days and incident command centers, your “higher-order thinking” can get worn down by the constant energy out.  Designing in activities that allow you to laugh and keep a “beyond-Covid” perspective helps to build your resilience for the ongoing demands.

At SixSEED Partners, we are committed to developing leaders who have the capacity to leverage these interdependent tensions that are here to stay. We’ve taken the liberty of adding some action steps and warning signs to this map that you can use immediately with your teams.  

If you’d like your own editable polarity map to give yourself the systemic view of the tension you are navigating, or if you have questions about how you might use this information now, complete our contact form and we’ll respond within 1 business day.