SixSEED Partners

Six Seeds

SixSEED Partners Celebrates CEO Petra Platzer, PhD, NBC-HWC, PCC as a Top 50 Women Leader of Virginia for 2026

by Leave a Comment

Petra Platzer, PhD, NBC-HWC, PCC has been named one of the Top 50 Women Leaders of Virginia for 2026 by Women We Admire. We’re proud – and not surprised. Petra has spent her career closing the gap between what leadership espouses and how it actually shows up. This is what walking your talk looks like.

Women We Admire recognizes outstanding women driving change across Virginia, from boardrooms to healthcare systems. This year, Petra is among them.

This recognition reflects far more than one person’s individual effort. It represents the collective work of the SixSEED Partners team, the faculty of the Georgetown Health and Wellness Coaching program, and the healthcare leaders and colleagues who bring trust, courage, and genuine partnership to complex and meaningful work every day. We are honored to work alongside someone who leads with that same spirit.

For Petra, that community isn’t incidental to the work – it is the work. Healthy leaders build healthy teams. Healthy teams build healthy systems. Healthy systems build healthier communities. It starts with one person, and it doesn’t stop there.

What She Stands For

Reduce suffering, enable thriving.

It shaped her as a cancer researcher. It shapes her now as a coach, a leader, and a systems thinker.

She works at all three levels – individual, teams, system – because that’s where real change lives.

Not just in the person doing the work, but in the relationships and structures surrounding them.

She leads by developing other leaders.

A coach approach isn’t just a technique she applies. It’s a capacity she builds in others – and that’s how the work multiplies.

“Let us all continue to support, champion, and learn from one another as we shape what leadership can look like for a healthy and thriving world.” — Petra Platzer, PhD, NBC-HWC, PCC

Day to day, the weight of leading can feel like yours alone to carry. It isn’t. This recognition is a reminder that there is a community of women leaders across Virginia – across sectors, across systems – who are all in this work together, lifting each other, even when they can’t see one another clearly.

That’s the power of a moment like this. It helps us see each other.

Congratulations to Petra, and to every woman honored alongside her.

Stability AND Transformation 

by Leave a Comment

Expanding Access to What Healthcare Leaders Need Most in 2026

Petra Platzer, PhD NBC-HWC, PCC: CEO SixSEED Partners

 As we reflect on 2025, we are grateful for the trust our healthcare leaders and teams placed in SixSEED Partners during a year marked by ongoing complexity and constraint. One message came through clearly across our client work: what was most valuable were developmental tools and approaches leaders could apply in real time, in the middle of ambiguity, pressure, and rapid change.

We also heard variations of this common refrain: “This is exactly what we need, but we don’t have the time – or – our funding is uncertain.”

This reality is not peripheral to leadership today; it’s the context in which leadership must be practiced.

These statements reflect a tension we see across the field: the need for leadership development has never been greater, yet access to it often feels further out of reach.

Our Intention for 2026: Increasing Access

As we move into 2026, SixSEED Partners is embracing a deliberate both/and stance. We are embracing stability and transformation with a clear intention to increase access – to practical leadership development that is timely, integrated, and usable where it matters most: 

  • Practical leadership tools that can be used now, not someday
  • Integrated approaches that connect strategy, people, and systems
  • Development that strengthens well-being and performance
  • Support that meets leaders where they are, while helping them grow into what’s next

In service to our mission of healing healthcare, we remain committed to attuning ourselves to our clients’ current realities and designing future-oriented pathways that build sustainable leadership capacity over time.

Continuing Our Core Themes – With Greater Reach

Our work in 2026 continues to be anchored in four enduring themes that our clients consistently tell us matter most:

  • Innovative Leadership – expanding how leaders think, decide, and act in complexity
  • Adaptive Strategies – increasing strategic competence to navigate uncertainty and deliver results 
  • Collaborative Excellence – strengthening teams, relationships, and systems
  • Well-being and Resilience – growing capacity inside leaders and across organizations

New Pathways Designed for Immediate Impact

To reduce potential barriers and accelerate results, we are launching focused offerings in 2026 that provide immediate access to high-impact tools and approaches, including:

  • Quality as Strategy Accelerator (QxS) – aligning quality, safety, and strategy to drive enterprise results
  • Workforce Stability & Team Effectiveness System – addressing burnout, engagement, and performance together
  • Nurse Manager Capability Lift– strengthening the leadership backbone of healthcare organizations
  • Human-Centered AI Flight Plan – supporting responsible, values-aligned adoption of AI

These pathways are designed to meet leaders where they are – respecting time, budget, and operational realities – while strengthening performance, capacity, and care delivery.

Listening Forward

These pathways are designed to meet leaders where they are – respecting time, budget, and operational realities – while strengthening performance, capacity, and care delivery.

In This Together

We enter 2026 with clarity of purpose and a deep sense of partnership. The work of healing healthcare is shared work. It requires courage, adaptability, and sustained investment in people and systems—especially when conditions are hard.

We are in this together, and we remain committed to walking alongside you – expanding access to what you need to lead well, grow capacity, and ultimately help your organizations and communities succeed.

If you are navigating pressing challenges and want practical, accessible leadership support, we invite you to reach out. Whether one of these new pathways fits – or something different is needed – we welcome the conversation and look forward to partnering with you. Contact us at SixSEED Partners.

Walking Our Talk: SixSEED Partners’ Strategic Team Retreat  

by Leave a Comment

Petra Platzer, PhD NBC-HWC, PCC: CEO SixSEED Partners

Background

 At SixSEED Partners, we practice what we teach. Just as we encourage our clients to pause from the daily demands of healthcare leadership, our team took time for strategic reflection, renewal, and connection—together. 

Last week, we “walked our talk” at the Kayser Ridge Retreat & Learning Center, a haven for reflection and learning near Berkeley Springs, WV—built by one of our founders, Cliff Kayser. In this restorative setting, we stepped back from the pace of delivery to focus on what sustains us: our mission, our relationships, and our own well-being. 

Our Approach

 Recognizing that 2025 has been a year of internal restructuring and external refocusing, we designed our retreat around four key polarities: 

• Taking Care of Each of Us & Taking Care of SixSEED 

• Looking Back to Learn & Looking Forward to Grow 

• Relating & Achieving 

• Head (Thinking) & Body (Being) 

Drawing on our CEO’s deep understanding of SixSEED’s evolution since our founding in 2018, the team reflected on how we’ve continually adapted – supporting healthcare leaders through pre- and post-COVID while evolving ourselves to meet new needs. 

Building on this foundation, our CEO introduced The Big 5 of Strategy®, a framework she’s currently certifying in, to guide the team’s growth and alignment. Beginning with the first competency, “Grasp the Present,” we explored our various strengths and challenges – each of ours, those of SixSEED Partners, and those of our clients and the broader healthcare landscape. From there, we moved into the second competency – “Shape the Future” – to identify our next action steps and levers in 2026 to most effectively advance our mission: to provide integrated solutions that heal healthcare. 

Our Results

 Guided by these reflections, we reviewed our current, past, and prospective clients – along with our six “Seeds” of service offerings – and surfaced a clear, energizing theme for 2026: Client Access. 

Just as healthcare focuses on Patient Access, we’re committed to making it easier for leaders and teams to access the development and partnership they need from us. As their workforce and strategies evolve, so will the ways we help them integrate tools that strengthen operational excellence and well-being. 

We left the retreat with renewed momentum around new framings for our proven methodologies that we’ll be refining and testing with our trusted circle of colleagues and clients. We also walked away with something equally vital: a strengthened sense of connection and the energy that comes from truly teaming together in service of our shared mission. 

Looking Ahead

Moving into 2026, we’re excited to translate these insights into action to make it easier for healthcare leaders to access and integrate solutions that help them – and their teams – thrive. We look forward to continuing this shared journey of healing healthcare from the inside out- together. 

To learn more about doing this kind of work to support and elevate your team to the next level, contact SixSEED Partners today.

Scaling Leadership

by Leave a Comment

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?

by Leave a Comment

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

by 1 Comment

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.