SixSEED Partners

Six Seeds

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.

What Makes Us Different?

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Organizations sometimes ask us what makes us different from any other coaching/ leadership & Organizational development consulting group, and we proudly say the following:

1. We apply what we teach to ourselves. We can’t ask our clients to take risks and be vulnerable if we’re not willing to do the same. We create a safe and challenging crucible for our own development as we engage our clients to leverage courage and compassion.

2. We are constantly looking for the both/and– we will help you solve problems as we also invite you to create systems that effectively navigate between persistent and unsolvable tensions. For many of you this year, that has looked like navigating well-being as you drive for high-reliability cultures and excellence. It’s also looked like navigating individual team needs- eg, clinical team needs AND administrative and more centralized needs.

3. We develop you AS YOU DO YOUR WORK. No one has discretionary time these days so we have to help you do the work that needs to be done, while coaching you in the moment to compassionately observe ineffective habits while creating new ones that help to achieve better and faster results with less energy spend.

Does this sound enticing? Tune in next week when we tell you about the great work we’ve done at Greater Baltimore Medical Center and University of Maryland Medical System!

And contact us! www.sixseedpartners.com/contactus

Loyalty AND Autonomy

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A key tension to effectively manage leadership transitions

By Joy W. Goldman, Advisor and Founding Partner

Background

The New York Times recently published a news analysis piece entitled: “Silent no more, Harris seeks her own voice without breaking with Biden.”  The author, Peter Baker, states: 

“The challenge for her over the next 100 days will be to find her own voice without overtly breaking with Mr. Biden, a delicate political high-wire act without a reliable net… Yet even as she wants to demonstrate loyalty to Mr. Biden, she also hopes to show the public who she is.”

This blog is not about politics. It IS about assuming leadership in a way that navigates the complexity of honoring the leadership that came before you while advocating for change that exemplifies your unique voice. The challenge of both authentically respecting tradition and passionately advocating for new change.

Client Examples

At SixSEED Partners, we’ve seen this tension play out in several scenarios.  Perhaps one of these will ring true for you.  

  1. You’ve been promoted to a single entity Chief Nursing/Medical/Executive officer position while the prior person, likely your boss, is promoted to a system-level role.
  2. You lead the merging of two hospital systems – one larger, “mothership” so to speak, and the other a smaller, often community-based entity.
  3. You are hired to replace a C-suite position and you have a professional relationship with the leader exiting the organization.

All of these transitions require you to demonstrate your unique vision and the value you are bring to the role while also respecting the impact of the leader who came before you.  

Common Tensions & Solutions:

In partnering with our clients in these scenarios, we walked them through a structured “Polarity Mapping” process to identify actions that address achieving both goals, or poles, or competing commitments the leaders were facing.

Respect AND Autonomy: For the one “goal” – respect / tradition – we asked what are the set of actions that acknowledge and build upon what the outgoing leadership helped accomplish that is working for the organization where it is now.  For the other “goal” – autonomy / authentic voice – we asked what actions are needed to assertively make the case for change that is required to adapt to an emerging future. After seeing these sets of actions for both goals, the leaders could then decide which actions were needed to accomplish both together, over time.  

Leader AND Team: Once a leader has done this individual work around respect and autonomy, we often expand the polarity mapping work from the leader to the team level. A useful simple Action matrix framework in this process is Start/Stop/Continue/Do Differently, which invites everyone to name what is working and valued in the current culture and what traditions, even if cherished, might now be getting in the way of moving forward with emerging needs. When we did this work with a merger situation, both entities were able to see some overused habits (sounds like “that’s how we’ve always done it”) that they could shift and do differently or stop. As one example, shifting from their default habit of including every leader in all the decision-making, which was causing unnecessary delays in a fast-moving reality, to exploring ways to decrease the layers of input in some of the decision-making.

Confidence AND Humility:  The more senior the role, the more the leader is expected to be confident while driving change. This can be an inherent challenge for those who are promoted to a role that has a larger scope, but also fewer peers with whom they can do strategic thinking and ask vulnerable questions. Confidence requires acting with courage and alignment to one’s purpose and desired results, while humility requires us to ask for help.  For many senior leaders, hiring a coach can provide that kind of safe space to share fears and learn new habits for managing this tension, and many more.

Would you like to learn more about how you can navigate these tensions? Contact us at SixSEED Partners.

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/

Supporting Clinical Peer Leaders

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A Case for Courage and Compassion In Action

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

Our commitment

At SixSEED Partners, our mission is providing integrated solutions to heal healthcare.  In order to do this in a way that stewards the dwindling resources of money, energy and time, and provides sustainable results with minimal wear and tear, we must challenge existing systems and structures that work in opposition to these principles.  This blog focuses on the need to support a vulnerable population:  physicians, advanced practice clinical leaders, and nurses who are promoted into supervisory and leadership roles where they oversee the performance of colleagues who have been, and may still be, their peers.

The Problem:

In healthcare, we have observed the long -cherished practice of taking high achieving and driven clinicians and placing them in supervisory and leadership roles without preparing them for these roles.  Quite often, these positions require the practitioner to supervise and manage individuals with whom they still must work to care for patients.  As anyone who has been in this role will tell you, this is no easy task.  In one instance, they are working alongside their peers to complete a case and, in another, they are informing their peer when they have to work and when the peer’s requests for schedule changes or other privileges are denied.  Knowing how to both support and challenge one’s direct reports mystifies the most seasoned of leaders!

Our Actions:

As we focus on excellence AND well-being, we work with our clients to apply proven frameworks like The Conscious Leadership Group’s “Above and Below the Line,” and David Emerald’s The Empowerment Dynamic to increase self-awareness and learn how to better compassionately acknowledge the inner persecutor/judger while courageously asserting boundaries and actions that are in service to clinicians and patients alike.

The Impact:

Through our work, the clients are able to navigate these complex dynamics or, in some instances, they decide they might prefer staying in their practitioner role without the added demands of supervising their peers.  For informed organizations, they acknowledge the shift in mindsets and behaviors required for these roles and start preparing these ambitious leaders prior to the actual need.  In this way, the leader is set up for success and the organization, leader, team members, and patients thrive.

Want to learn more?  Contact us at: https://sixseedpartners.com/contact/

SixSEED Partners Message for Valentine’s Day

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Adopt One Action that Demonstrates Loving Yourself

“If you take good care of yourself, you are better able to be of service to others.”

“Sustainable self-care is an inside-out process. It is formed with a clear belief and intention to support and love yourself through the choices you make.”

The above quotes are from a recent Center for the Empowerment Dynamic blog from our colleagues David Emerald and Donna Zajonc. In our work to help organizations and leaders create healthy cultures, we partnered with Clinical and Nursing executives and middle managers to help them better manage the interdependent tension (polarity) of “Care for Self,” and “Care for Others.” In prior case studies, we’ve discussed the collective habitual response of perceiving “care for self” similar to a foreign body entering the system. All energy in the system went to expel that practice from the system, labeling it, as the article describes, as being “selfish.”

In prior work with physician and nursing leaders in a different system, when we asked the leaders to stand in the quadrant where they felt most aligned of care for self and care for others, the few who found themselves in “care for self” noticed feelings of shame as they stood in prioritizing their own health and well-being. They wanted to run from the quadrant into care for others or overdone care for others.

For this Valentine’s Day, we invite you to read this article and adopt one action that demonstrates loving yourself. It might be saying no and setting boundaries; it might be allowing yourself time to rest; it might be soothing your inner critic that has you constantly coming up short and saying: “I am good enough.”

Why not respond to this message and tell us how you choose to love yourself? And if you’d like a partner to support shifting your culture to one of well-being AND excellence, contact us! https://sixseedpartners.com/contact/