SixSEED Partners

Six Seeds

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.

Developing Leaders As They Work

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A Practical Application of Development in the Moment

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

Our Commitment

With thanks to the great thought leaders at @theconsciousleadershipgroup for their simple graphic on knowing when you’re not present but instead responding from a place of fear or a place of playing it safe (“below the line”). Some might ask: aren’t there times when responding in fear or trying to be safe is healthy? Absolutely! The challenge in leadership is knowing that “line” between a healthy, constructive response and a response that is more from habit and one that gets in the way of success. 

At SixSEED Partners, we work with our clients on practicing in-the-moment behaviors that align with their sense of purpose AND their well-being. Read on for more details on how we are partnering in developing leaders within the context of their work and not in addition to their work.

Our Actions

In this succinct graphic, the Conscious Leadership Group highlights five warning signs for noticing when you are responding from what they call – a “below-the-line” response. These behavioral signs include blaming others, black and white thinking, wanting to have THE right answer thereby making others wrong, and shallow breathing, among others. These are normal reactions to the many challenges in our current healthcare that faces workforce shortages, burnout, and very sick patients.

In partnership with our clients, we have designed a leadership development strategy that helps leaders improve their well-being and results as they deal with patient throughput.

Our Results

At SixSEED Partners, we help our leaders lead first, from a place of courage and compassion, and then invite them to choose a way forward that is more aligned with purpose. When we come from “above the line,” as the Conscious Leadership Group describes, we are more able to see possibilities and solutions that create wins for all contributors. We are present in this moment and can think with greater clarity, focusing on desired outcomes.

With that foundation in mind, we created fieldwork where leaders practice centering when they notice their signals of being below the line and then, from a more centered place, choose a more constructive response that aligns with their individual development goals. They are also partnering with other department leaders whose support they need to improve patient throughput. Their partnering involves learning the other department’s point of view so that their empathy improves and they see each other as the human beings that they are.

Our Invitation to you

Would you like to learn more about how you can help your leaders engage others with less wear and tear on them and their teams? You can see some of our case studies here:
https://sixseedpartners.com/resources/