SixSEED Partners

Culture

Thank you to our Clients, Partners, Teammates, and Families

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Joy Goldman RN, MS, PCC: CEO SixSEED Partners

As a way to express our gratitude to our clients, partners, teammates, and our families, we wanted to provide an experience that might warm your hearts. If you work in healthcare, your minds and bodies might be weary. We culled our favorite youtube videos and wanted to share some with you so that you might take a few moments to breathe in the spirit of this holiday season. Please pause and invite those you love to share in this heart space with you. Know that you have touched our hearts and we are grateful.

https://youtu.be/cEavsIoMxn8: one link: Yo Yo Ma: Birdsong…. playing in harmony with nature.

Moral Injury: HealthCare’s Public Health Crisis

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A Systemic Lens Perspective

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

Background:  

On March 10th of this year, I published a blog focused on “Caring for the Organization AND Caring for the Workforce.”  The higher purpose of that tension was to support a healthy ecosystem within healthcare.  Writing this close to six months later, not only is that tension still relevant, it has reached a crisis point in healthcare as droves of physicians and nurses leave their organizations and/or professions.  How do we take care of healthcare as a system, as we take care of the public’s healthcare needs?  In this writer’s opinion, right now we are failing.  The purpose of this blog is to invite creative, systemic solutions to this thorny challenge.

Impact and Case for Change:

Panagioti, Geraghty, and Johnson published an article in JAMA Intern Med 2018 (10) entitled: “The Association Between Physician Burnout and Patient Safety, Professionalism, and Patient Satisfaction.  Their review of the literature revealed that there is a 2-fold increase in odds for unsafe care, unprofessional behaviors, and low patient satisfaction amongst physicians experiencing burnout.   Reith published another article in Cureus titled: Burnout in United States Healthcare Professionals: A Narrative Review.   He expands the impacts from both physician and nursing burnout to include higher rates of patient mortality; transmission of hospital-acquired infections; increase in medical errors and an increase in medical student alcohol abuse and suicide.  Of note is that both of these articles were published in 2018:  prior to Covid 19.

One less quoted yet just as serious sequelae for nursing and physician burnout is your ability to get timely and effective care for you and your loved ones.

Complex and Interdependent Challenges:  Variations of Individual AND Team Tensions:

Many of us are familiar with the process of looking at root causes for problems to permanently eradicate the disease.  The challenge with Covid and burnout in healthcare is that they are not problems to solve.  They are systemic and interdependent challenges to leverage that can be boiled down to a tension between meeting individual needs AND meeting collective needs.

Look at the below examples:

Impact (So What?):

  As Einstein said: “The significant problems we face today cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”  We must facilitate dialogues that address these thorny challenges, and which include healthcare worker well-being. If we don’t, physicians and nurses will do more of what they are starting to do which is saying “no more.”  They are saying this as they submit their resignations; leave for higher-paying jobs; or leave the profession altogether.  This leaves hospitals struggling to manage the finances of healthcare with their mission to serve and meet the needs of their communities.  What solutions are people creating to respond to the fear of closing beds and not being able to meet expense needs?  We hear from our clients their staffing challenges as Traveling Nursing companies are perceived as stealing staff from hospitals less equipped to pay higher salaries and offering to those who can.  I liken this strategy to one that hopes to improve nutritional health by offering organic produce to affluent communities while depriving or limiting healthy food choices to lower socioeconomic communities.  When will we learn that localized or individual approaches will not eradicate systemic challenges?

SixSEED Partners Interdependent Solutions:

We believe that these times of epidemic crisis require a different way of thinking and acting to sustainably impact and transform these issues.  Examples include:

  • Leverage Competition & Collaboration:  bring local hospital systems together to look at community health needs and discuss how blending resources and talent might be able to better meet community needs and organizational needs.  Instead of three hospital systems vying for digestive disorder patients, consolidate and refer specialties across hospital systems, in service to patient care AND provider well-being.
  • Medical and Nursing Professional Associations uniting in lobbying their governments to establish temporary laws that promote access to resources and prohibit possible poaching of scarce resources by any one organization at the expense of others.
  • Leverage social media to impress the public of OUR responsibility.  Just as we’ve seen the near -death lung cancer patient with poor color, on oxygen, doing commercials on TV, healthcare workers should be posting photos on social media of their tears; their marked faces; bodies lining hallways due to lack of beds and/or staff.    The story of healthcare’s reality must be presented unfiltered, visible and in a media venue that the public see’s frequently and consistently.  The public has a role and responsibility for decreasing the demands on our healthcare systems and this is one way to keep the public informed of what is happening behind the scenes in the delivery of healthcare.
  • Gather regulatory, professional and education/ training organizations in dialogue around training that could take place to upskill volunteers or provide jobs for those needing work in supplementing nursing and physician staff.  As with scribes, how can we lessen the burden on our clinicians so that they are doing only the highest acuity patient care needs.  The  other tasks which require less clinical expertise can be done by other members of the care team.   

These examples require both/and thinking and require us to get out of our silos, holding our greater purpose and not just our lone survival as paramount.

SixSEED Partners is looking for leaders and systems who are ready to do this work.  We have no time to waste.  The time is NOW.  Will you join us?  If you are curious, please email me directly:  joy@sixseedpartners.com.  

#systemintegration #leadershipecosystemcapacitation #wellbeing #burnout #ecosystem 

A Grounded Approach to Healthy Leadership

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Celebrating the work of Bob Rosen and The Healthy Leader®

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

Background:  

One of our Six SEEDS includes a focus on Well-Being and our passion has only increased given the numerous traumas healthcare leaders and their teams have been exposed to during the pandemic.  It is our firm belief that healthcare delivery can’t be at its best if those working within it are unhealthy.  Therefore, it seemed perfect that we would affiliate with The Healthy Leader® in facilitating their Grounded and Conscious Healthy Leader Content.  Since we’ve been focusing on building resilience, we wanted to showcase the great work that Bob Rosen, Rick Auman, and the team have been doing and the impact it makes in creating healthy leaders.

 The Grounded Leader Model:  Recently, we commented on a posting on Linked In that referenced a Center for Creative Leadership Article on Eight Steps to Become More Resilient.(provide link).  In our work with The Healthy Leader,® we focus on evidence-based research that links the six dimensions of the Grounded Leader to business performance results.  You’ll note in the above graphic that the six dimensions of the Grounded Leader model include: 

  • Physical Health:  How you live
  • Emotional Health: How you feel
  • Intellectual Health: How you think
  • Social Health: How you interact
  • Vocational Health: How you perform
  • Spiritual Health: How you view the world

As we reflect on resilience, we can easily discern that it is the interplay of all six of these dimensions that prepares us for resilience, adaptation and thriving.  Resilience is a root within the emotional dimension yet it is our assertion that one cannot be resilient without growing the other five dimensions as well.

The model also links the six dimensions to the major disruptors of our current world.  For example, the more we attend to the dimension of physical health and energy management, the better able we are to effectively deal with the unrelenting speed of life.  Technology was a gift during Covid 19 isolation yet we would argue that it was an inadequate substitute without the addition of social health and nourishing communities.

All of these resonated with the participants from a Fortune 500 Technology firm for whom we are delivering this content.  Through small group interactions and accountability partners; the support of an online portal with videos and reflection/ journaling exercises, and integration of their organization’s leadership imperatives, the participants are living and learning new habits to support their resilience and that of their teams.

Application: 

To those who might think this content is “soft,” The Healthy Leader® has partnered in conducting research on the impact of healthy leaders to business results.  Ross and Squires published a 2015 article entitled “Tone at the Top: Leadership as the Foundation of Organizational Health and Wellness” in which they describe the impact of leaders who score high in these six dimensions to job performance.  Below you can see two of the charts included in the article.  Of note is the significance of spiritual health to performance.  When’s the last time you discussed spiritual health with your employees?

Let’s hear from you

If you’d like to chat more about The Grounded and Conscious Leader Program, and about a methodical and systemic approach that supports the individual and systemic change and resilience, we’d love to hear from you. Please message us on our LinkedIn page or send us an email here.

#culture, #systemintegration, #wellbeing

Acknowledgment: The Healthy Leader

Team Spotlight: Meet Joy

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Joy Goldman, began her career in healthcare at the Massachusetts General Nursing School over 35 years ago. Out of Nursing School, she began a career as a psychiatric nurse and from there pursued Masters’ degrees in Community Health Education, Strategic Human Resources, Organizational Development, and a certificate in Leadership Coaching. Since 2008, she has been practicing as a Leadership Coach and OD facilitator. 

As a natural big picture thinker, Joy gravitates towards systemic interventions that can multiply impact on a variety of levels such as individuals, teams and systems. Joy finds the most rewarding part of her job partnering with individuals that provides the space to do profound work impacting their thinking and behavior in ways that align with their highest values and purpose. Also rewarding to her is working with her partners and combining their unique talents to create something powerful that exceeds what they could accomplish individually. 

When asked how she imagines the future of healthcare, she hopes to see an integrated system that promotes health for all. In Joy’s words, “I envision individuals taking responsibility for their own health by making better choices and having access to healthy food. I see payors, providers, investors, technology experts, and administrators creating collaborative systems where health is a foundational element of all workplaces. Healthcare is more than fixing what’s broken. Creating health is multidimensional and includes economic, social, and environmental influences.”

Beyond being the CEO of SixSEED, Joy loves to travel, dance, take photos and spend time with her husband.

Maximizing Team Development: Leveraging Theory & Application

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The Forming & Norming Team:

SixSEED Partners was invited to facilitate an executive council retreat for the Heart and Vascular Institute (HVI) of a community-based medical center. The HVI recently re-structured their roles and leadership within the institute to better meet their mission. The Chief Physician Executive of the Institute, in partnership with the Business Strategist, wanted to provide a day of learning and development where the members could build trust, align around shared objectives and engage in establishing accountability. Amidst Covid-19, the leaders felt these objectives were so important to warrant an in-person gathering.  It was clearly as important to the executive team members, who showed up engaged and fully present during the full day team development process. As several of the members are also clinical physicians, it highlighted to us that proper planning can facilitate the space for them to join in this work, which is also important to them. 

Can we learn multiple tools and apply them in 1 day?  YES!

Do you believe it is possible to deliver four different tools in three hours and have participants feel they learned them and could immediately apply them for their benefit? Thanks to Petra Platzer, our COO, we know we can! In less than three hours, the administrative and physician leaders were introduced to Thinking Environments, DiSC®, the Team-Work Cycle®  and the Three Vital Questions®. Petra also facilitated experiential activities that had  participants immediately applying what their learnings to their own work and team dynamics. Joy Goldman further facilitated application of these tools through the team beginning to draft their team charter. Elements of focus were their interaction rules around meeting practices, communication, decision-making, communication, feedback and evaluation.

But was it effective? Yes

We modeled creating an environment for feedback & evaluation by dialoguing on feedback for us within the session. Each participant said the day was effective for them, some surprisingly so, in fact, as they often are skeptical about “these things”. Each also named how one or more tools were new and powerful for them, and immediately applicable in some way. Some spoke about their insights into their own behaviors and styles as compared with others on the team. Others especially enjoyed the powerful visuals by physically going through the team work cycle. They quickly identified gaps, and possible solutions, to some of their self-identified needs for moving more efficiently from ideas to execution. The visual exercise provided the gift of addressing these topics without  blame or personalization, which fostered trust and new understandings together. The best gauge for how effective they rated this was their assertion:  “we need more of this from you.”

How is your team developing together?

Whether your team has been working together for a while, is newly forming due to a re-structure, or is somewhere in between – how are they working together? Is there a benefit to focusing on their ways of interacting and learning additional ways for navigating what seems to be never-ending change together? Making the effort on this work is what makes teams perform higher and more productively, with much less wasted energy and re-work along the way.  Like this HVI executive team experienced, it is often a pleasant surprise and energizing to spend time developing together.  And, without doing this kind of work, teams can often experience side conversations, wasted energy and good, but not great performance. 

What are your experiences in teams for creating clear agreements on how you’re interacting so there’s greater productivity with less wear and tear on the system?  We’d love to hear from you about your experiences and challenges.  

To learn more about applying these frameworks with your teams, contact us at: www.sixseedpartners.com or by tagging us on LinkedIn or Facebook.

Living Our Practices: SixSEED Partners Retreat

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Our commitment

SixSEED Partners applies the tools and processes we use with our partner clients, to ourselves. One way we did that recently was to take some “time-out” from virtual and the day-to-day to do some reflection and self-care in the process of our work. Cliff’s retreat and learning center, “Kayser Ridge” located in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia was the perfect place to “walk our talk.” Here are a few highlights from our SixSEED retreat, which focused on leveraging a few key polarities:


Take Care of Each of Us
AND
Take Care of SixSEED

Appreciate By Looking Back
AND
Grow By Looking Forward

Our Actions

Prior to gathering at Kayser Ridge, we divided the work of the retreat according to each of our “sweet spots:” signature strengths (matching work with the right resource to tap into natural energy). We met between October 2nd and October 4th and each partner facilitated a section of the retreat, with previously agreed upon outcomes.  Tapping into our CEO’s “big picture,” strategic thinking and passion for the application of non-verbal methods of learning and change, we stood in each of our Six SEEDS to celebrate our accomplishments and sense into future directions.  Shifting from a macro lens to a more micro lens,  we next designed and filmed sixty second video summaries for each of the Six SEEDS. 

We spent quality time exploring the challenges and opportunities from the perspective of our client partners, and how this period offers unique opportunities for us individually and collectively.  We agreed to an infrastructure that would allow us to leverage margin with our mission to provide “integrated solutions to heal healthcare”. 

Amidst working hard, we played.  We shared in the preparation and clean-up of our meals, and enjoyed each “breaking bread” experience – complete with stories, laughter, and a few tears. We appreciated and experienced the beauty of our surroundings – more laughter stories over a campfire, under stars, and in the glow of harvest moonlight. Up from behind the mountains facing east, Joy captured images of the sun rising amid and the mountain mist. And in those same moments, turned the tripod to capture the moon setting down behind the western mountains. We watched leaves fall and streams trickle on a valley hike. Lastly, tapping into Petra’s lovable “jester energy,” we posed for photos in our own version of Charlie’s Angels.

Our Results

We have scheduled discussions with two partners we’re most excited about working with in the future; we re-allocated our compensation structure to support our strategic goals; and we secured resources to finish our SEED videos for publication.  We have a renewed sense of purpose in our work around culture, wellbeing and leadership ecosystem capacity as it pertains to providing skills that support depolarization within healthcare and our country.  In addition to these business results, we affirmed why we chose to partner in the first place:  that we are much better together than alone and we truly enjoy each other’s company and find it life-giving.

Our Invitation to you

As Petra articulated in a prior blogpost on the first Vital Question:  “Where are you putting your focus?,” it is easy to get caught in the maelstrom of activity and crisis.  This problem- focus results in wasted energy without accomplishing your desired outcomes.  By holding ourselves accountable to our desired outcomes and allocating time to step back, assess, and plan, we maximized our own wellbeing, while also being productive in our desired results.

We’d love to hear from you about how you’re leveraging taking care of yourselves while you take care of your organizations and appreciate by looking back and grow by looking forward.  Contact us at: www.sixseedpartners.com or by tagging us on LinkedIn or Facebook.