SixSEED Partners

Six Seeds

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/

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!

SSP’s CEO Succession Story – Part II:

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Moving Forward

November 30, 2023

As of December 1, 2023 – Dr. Petra Platzer will be the new CEO for SixSEED Partners. Please join us in congratulating Petra in her new capacity for our organization.

As a Founding Partner and former COO of SixSEED Partners, Petra Platzer has always been deeply committed to SSP’s mission of providing integrated solutions to heal healthcare. After decades of experience as a cancer researcher, then administrative leader within the Cleveland Clinic and a wellness director in a start-up healthcare clinic, Petra finds her coaching, consulting and organizational development to be the most personally fulfilling in achieving sustainable results. To complement her developmental focus on healthcare providers and their systems, Petra looks to empower people in their own well-being through her role as Director of Georgetown University’s Health and Wellness coaching program. She finds that integrating all these varied skillsets and experiences are the most powerful approach to addressing healthcare’s clear need: increasing everyone’s capacity to navigate the ever-increasing pace and complexity of the work while achieving excellence and well-being.

As Dr. Platzer leads SSP forward, she will continue to drive SixSEED’s mission through partnering with inspiring clients, talented affiliates and dedicated colleagues who all share in the larger commitment to transforming healthcare and impacting the overall health of our communities.

If you read our Succession Story Part I earlier this week, you read about our equal commitment to applying what we share with clients to our own leadership teams. As Joy Goldman began envisioning her semi-retirement some time ago, SSP embarked on its own CEO succession planning process. This entailed addressing what is needed in the CEO role going forward to succeed for our clients and re-orienting the ways of working amongst each other during this past year. Some of SSP’s clients benefitted from this developmental transition during their engagements this summer. Throughout this work of reflecting and looking ahead, the evidence was clear: Joy Goldman has been a visionary, inspiring and strategic leader who is highly respected among all the client systems and affiliates she has cultivated, challenged and supported.

SSP’s CEO Succession Story – Part I:

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Reflecting

November 28, 2023

As of November 30, 2023 – Joy Goldman is resigning as CEO of SixSEED Partners while continuing to serve the company’s mission as a founding partner, advisor and coach provider. This marks the launch of her semi-retirement in her new home in Portugal and creates space to focus on her additional passions of photography, writing and leading “Aging in Place” communities. Please join us in our sincere gratitude to Joy Goldman for her courageous and compassionate leadership and vision as CEO of SixSEED Partners since 2020.

Joy Goldman has always been passionate about making health care healthier for all. Her multiple decades of experiences in nursing, administration and organization development (OD) within community-based and academic medical centers, coupled with more decades of coaching and consulting within healthcare shaped her inspiration to found SixSEED Partners with Cliff Kayser and Petra Platzer.

These SSP founding partners first began working together on a multi-year engagement in a large hospital system with a forward planning, leadership development focus in preparation for the CEO and other C-suite members retiring in the few years ahead. That original succession planning project went beyond conventional approaches by integrating individual and systemic development work that change “thinking structures” to better lead through complexity with courage and compassion. With Joy’s leadership, integrating individual, team and systemic approaches became a key foundation and differentiator for SSP’s work and our client’s successes.

Another SSP hallmark is applying the same leadership principles and approaches internally, as well with our clients. To that end, we began our own succession planning efforts in 2022 to ensure a smooth and stable transition for our clients, our affiliate partners and our families.

Stay tuned for Part II of this succession story – coming on November 30.