SixSEED Partners

Culture

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/

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.

Shifts Transforming Organizations

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

McKinsey & Co published a report: “The State of Organizations 2023: Ten Shifts Transforming Organizations.” Post Covid life has leaders realizing “we’re not in Kansas anymore,” as Dorothy said to Toto in “The Wizard of Oz.” What has worked in the past will not work now. The challenges are different. As the report states: “The shifts include complex questions about how to organize for speed to shore up resilience, find the right balance between in-person and remote work models, address employees’ declining mental health, and build new institutional capabilities at a time of rapid technological change, among others.”

The report outlines the results of their interviews with 2500 business leaders. Reading the list of ten shifts may have you nodding your head in agreement: “Been there, done that.” The key question is “what are the changes that can be done today that will be cause sustainable improvement?”

At SixSEED Partners, we most agree with their second and third points for transformation: “The second and third points are “must dos,” regardless of the type of transformation undertaken: there needs to be a strong focus on cultivating talent and on investing in the leadership that will take the organization forward.”

As they assert: This is a MUST DO: not a nice to do. This is an investment of resources: not a “cost.” We are experiencing the cost of not doing this now: imagine how we might have fared differently if we had the leadership capacity— the thinking capacity to manage the pandemic and impending workforce challenges?

This capacity includes shifting from accountability with a few to broader, shared accountability and collaboration; from hospital-centric to system-centric; from profits to people; and integrating the best of how we’ve operated until now, with the shifts needed for the future.

We’ve done this work with ourselves, and with our client systems. You can read some of these case studies here: https://sixseedpartners.com/resources/

CULTURE Seed

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

Rethinking Organizational Culture: More than just the “Soft Stuff”

In a recent LinkedIn post by Siobhán McHale, an acclaimed culture transformation expert and author of “The Insider’s Guide to Culture Change”, she invites us to take a closer look at our definition of organizational culture. In a workplace context, culture is traditionally associated with how employees feel – whether they’re happy, motivated, or satisfied. However, McHale suggests a broader and more impactful definition. Namely, culture is “a critical enabler of optimal business functioning.”

This broader definition can unlock a missing key for many organizations. Instead of viewing culture as the byproduct of HR policies, employee satisfaction surveys or staff retreats, culture now shifts to a driver and core component of the company’s strategy for success.

The Misunderstanding of Culture

McHale’s post acknowledges that research on organizational culture doesn’t always show a clear link between culture and performance. The key reasons for this ambiguity include different meanings and indicators for how culture was being defined. As a result, measuring its impact has been inconsistent and difficult to clearly link.

Yes, while culture does include how people feel at work, it’s essential to realize that culture is about so much more. Culture impacts every aspect of a healthcare organization, from access strategies and quality patient care delivery to workforce recruitment and vendor relationships. Depending on the system’s objectives, the desired culture could be adaptive, innovative, patient-centric, agile, quality-driven, growth-oriented, accountable, performance-focused, community-minded, sustainable—and the list goes on.

The real risk lies in relegating culture to the realm of “soft” stuff, as something optional or secondary. When we appreciate culture as a strategic enabler, its ties to performance become more robust and more measurable.

Our Journey in Re-defining Culture

At SixSEED Partners, we support our clients in defining, or re-defining, their leadership culture. In partnering with one academic medical center over multiple years, we’ve used validated tools and cross-disciplinary designs to introduce real-time systems that support clinical excellence and promote the well-being of its clinical leaders. This journey wasn’t just about diagnosing the existing culture, but about shaping a desired one that aligns with the organization’s goals. One evident link by this multi-site leadership team’s culture work to their improved performance has been the establishment of system-wide processes that also incorporate distinct and unique hospital entities. In a multi-hospital system where an “us-them” dichotomy existed, they are successfully evolving to a cultural approach that celebrates the best of the individual organizations (“Us”) and also functions as a unified system (“We”).

The Path Forward

Culture is multi-faceted. It’s not just about feelings, and it’s certainly not an ‘optional extra’ to address when things settle down or there is more bandwidth. Focusing on culture is the foundation upon which the employees and the systems operate, innovate, and thrive.

So, McHale’s question remains: Have you seen culture impact performance at your work?

If you are ready to re-define your culture as a strategic enabler for your system to increase its performance with less challenges along the way, we’re here to make that happen with you. Reach out to us and let’s embark on this transformative journey together.

Read the LinkedIn post from Siobhán McHale here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mchalesiobhan_culture-activity-7112911972588802048-H5lU?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop