SixSEED Partners

Leadership Development

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

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/

Psychological Safety

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

Continuing our theme of psychological safety, this article by McKinsey & Company: “Psychological Safety and the Critical Role of Leadership Development” describes research linking leadership development to high psychological safety cultures: “Investing in and scaling up leadership-development programs can equip leaders to embody these behaviors and consequently cultivate psychological safety across the organization.”

This article eludes to what we at SixSEED Partners train our clients in which is using both/and thinking to address complex challenges. If we are to sustainably create cultures of psychological safety, we must have leaders who can leverage challenging teams and supporting teams; practice advocacy (telling) and inquiry (asking questions, getting curious); flexing their style to leverage candor and diplomacy; and most importantly, when delegating, giving freedom and holding accountable.

Would you like to develop your leaders to be able to lead their teams toward creating psychologically safe environments? We’d love to hear from you! https://sixseedpartners.com/contact/

Read article here: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/psychological-safety-and-the-critical-role-of-leadership-development

Leveraging Creative and Reactive Thinking for Leadership Impact

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Advanced Practice Provider (APP) Development Case Study: Academic Medicine

SixSEED Partners Affiliates: Lisa Hompe RN, MSOD, ACC; Vinay Kumar, PCC

Background

SixSEED Partners (SSP) co-created and facilitated two virtual leadership sessions working with an Academic Medical Center Advanced Practice Provider (APP) Director and her team of over 25 frontline clinical Nurse Practitioner (NP) and Physician Assistant (PA) leaders.

The Director desired to improve the capacity and leadership skills of her leadership team to then cascade the learning within their teams. These leaders had been stretched with multiple demands, including COVID-19 and staffing shortages. The intent was to provide leadership development for the APP leaders that would be rejuvenating, thought-provoking, and result in a greater sense of team and compassion.

The Strategy

The engagement consisted of two targeted two-hour virtual sessions, held four months apart. The structure supported dyad and small group activities and fieldwork assignments between the two sessions.

The sessions focused on providing the leaders with a framework for creating a mindset shift in perspective and allowing for less reactive behavior and more outcome-focused and purpose-driven creative expression. The content illustrated how majority of leadership happens through communication and conversations.

The first session used the content from the Conscious Leadership Group: Above and Below the Line thinking with practical solutions to switching from below the line to above the line behaviors. The second session reviewed the shared individual and collective learning results that happened between the sessions and focused on the additional content of David Emerald’s Dreaded Drama Triangle (DDT) and The Empowerment Dynamic (TED).  The sessions supported the noticing of oneself to make the shift from a victim mindset to that of a creator mindset.

The Solution

The work created a virtual space for connection, renewal, and rejuvenation. Through interactive dialogue and reflection, the sessions targeted the level of thinking that creates energy that is generative and not draining.

The introduction of small mindfulness exercises at the beginning of the sessions helped shift the team to being present and focused and offered tools for use in the leader’s day-to-day work. The facilitation and content structure supported partnering, shared accountability, and self-awareness.

The models supported a forward-looking, solution-oriented common language for noticing individual and collective leadership behaviors and created a container for exploring relational team dynamics and interactions.

The Impact

The work explored the relationship between a leader’s mental, emotional & physical state and the quality of their conversations, interactions, relationships, results, and effectiveness. This translated to the leaders’ ability to intentionally apply coaching and listening skills with their own teams for a greater, more positive impact.

Through interactive dialogue and facilitation, the participants were able to do courageous work in expanding their own thinking to add purpose-driven, authentic expression to an already strong foundation of problem-solving leadership behaviors. The group walked away with insights to put into practice in their day-to-day work.

The Director said, “this team, in their roles, is always focused on ‘getting to yes ‘ and this work has helped the team to find calm and joy and helps us recover from exhaustion” and it helps them notice “where they are” at any given moment. Others reflected that what was meaningful was learning to notice on purpose and being able to “be at the eye of the storm with courage and confidence”.

The introduction of these models and tools helped to support individual and collective effectiveness. It planted seeds for a future filled with possibilities, while creating a psychologically safe space for dialogue, listening, and vulnerability of their shared experiences.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can bring this tool to your leaders, contact us at SixSEED Partners.