SixSEED Partners

Succession Planning

Loyalty AND Autonomy

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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.

Transforming our Seeds to help you Succeed

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The SixSEED Partners Team: Petra Platzer, Cliff Kayser, and Joy Goldman

Since our inception, we have had one unifying passion: to make healthcare healthier. 

Two years ago, SixSEED Partners sprouted from a team of colleagues I brought together to work with multiple high potential leaders on a multi-year succession-planning process in a community-based healthcare system. Together, we were able to integrate our specialties of coaching and consulting with a developmental lens, e.g horizontal and vertical development, with the application of polarity thinking to create much more than classical succession planning. We developed a leadership ecosystem capacitation (LEC) model that simultaneously increased individual AND systemic capacities and overall resilience within that organization. As the impact of this multi-pronged model became clear to us – as well as our client – the vision for SixSEED Partners was born.

As we have continued working with that system, and various other healthcare leaders and systems, we have also continued applying the same leadership and system tools to ourselves – individually and our collective leadership team. Through that iterative reflection, our leadership team has evolved into a new structure this year. And through our continuous feedback processes, we learned that our branding was creating some confusion around our unique service offerings. 

With those shifts – and with the unprecedented health crisis that we have all been navigating in the past few months – we took this time to again, practice what we preach. We slowed down. We reflected on what matters to us and how can we be in best service to those we are passionate about serving.

From all those efforts, I am pleased to share with you our new website re-design and re-branded messaging, as a beginning. 

Our mission is simple: we provide integrated solutions to heal healthcareTM

Our service offerings are now denoted as 6 unique “seeds”, which can be approached as individual bodies of work, and ideally, as integrated engagements across multiple seeds to create a lasting result. 

  • Leadership Development
    • Team Development
    • System Integration
    • Well-Being
    • Culture
    • Leadership Ecosystem Capacitation Model

Through this multi-pronged approach at multiple levels, we are able to custom design integrated solutions that leverage the best delivery routes for meeting our clients where they are in their current cycle of work. 

We are not a “coaching” firm, nor a “consulting” firm, nor “a training” firm. We are an integrated solutions firm that can deliver all those delivery routes in order for our clients to create an expanded skillset, not just additional knowledge. 

What is still the same is our focus on improving the capacity of healthcare leaders and teams to lead in times of complexity and uncertainty. If there’s one thing the current pandemic has highlighted even more for so many, it’s the need for resilient people and processes to be able to address unpredictable changes for everyone’s well-being and success. 

What’s important to us and our clients is our integrated approach that includes:

  • Focusing on an overall goal of increasing leadership capacitation within systems 
  • Integrating solutions that address individuals, teams, and entire systems knowing that we need to integrate all aspects to achieve sustainable change
  • Delivering results that impact strategic, operational and cultural outcomes
  • Using a defined, iterative process rooted in evidence-based change strategies

We invite you to browse around our refreshed site to learn more about our approach, our results, and our team.  During this auspicious month officially celebrating National Nurses Day, National Hospital Week & Healthcare Heroes, we are here and ready to partner with you to help you succeed!

Next Generation Succession 2.0: Leveraging Succession to Accelerate Leadership Capacity

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On July 25th, Dr. Larry McEvoy and I had the privilege of presenting the above topic to a room filled with leaders, recruiters, and consultants attending the American Hospital Association 2019 Leadership Summit in San Diego.  We provided a case study that illustrated the application of a different paradigm in addressing succession planning. What the audience most appreciated were the five key shifts necessary to leverage systemic leadership capacity that drives results while fostering better engagement and well-being.  They are as follows: 

  1. “Bet on the herd; not the horse.” Paradigm shift from heroic leader with development of a select few, to increasing the thinking capacity of many leaders.  Focus on the collective rather than individual leadership.
  2. Create deep thinkers who are comfortable with the unknown and who create developer leaders. These leaders see “scaling leadership” as a key accountability area for their role.  Development is not a “nice to have.” It’s an intentional, systemic priority with frequent and varied feedback loops.
  3. Cascading both/and—polarity thinking along with problem-oriented thinking (either/or): Leaders are often promoted for their problem-solving ability.  Unfortunately, all the simple problems have been solved and healthcare is now dealing with complex issues that are interdependent.  This requires the ability to see and effectively leverage the larger system of polarities: mission and margin; tactical and strategic; centralized and decentralized; continuity and transformation.  Cascading a system’s capacity to manage paradox increases the system’s ability to compete in this complex world.
  4. Providing strategic simulation experiences that intentionally take the leaders out of their comfort zones; pairs them with leaders with whom they share different perspectives and apply time constraints that simulate the pressures CEOs face in dealing with real environmental challenges. This exercise provided a real-world “heat” experience that included their presenting to a mock board with challenging questions a CEO would experience from the board.
  5. Be a lens, not a filter: Shifting from silo’d selection and placement of CEO to an integrated process that proactively identifies development needs and structured methods to meet those needs post CEO hire.  The goal of the succession/ development efforts being stabilization of the entire system during times of transition as compared with filling a given role.

Click here to download a copy of our presentation. We’d love to hear from you! 

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References: 

Anderson, Robert, and William Adams.  Scaling Leadership: Building Organization Capability and Capacity to Create Outcomes that Matter Most.  Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2019 

Anderson, Robert, and William Adams. Mastering Leadership: an Integrated Framework for Breakthrough Performance and Extraordinary Business Results. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2016

Johnson, Barry. Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems.  Amherst, MA: HRD Press, Inc. 1996

Petrie, Nick. The How To of Vertical Leadership Development Part II:  30 Experts; 3 Conditions and 15 approaches. Colorado Springs, CO: The Center for Creative Leadership, 2015 (http://tinyurl.com/jrxuvgx)

Rethinking Succession Planning for Incumbent Leaders

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While succession planning traditionally has a focus on increasing the capacity of emerging leaders, there are often overlooked, but very personal and fulfilling benefits for the incumbent leaders.

Legacy can be overrated.

Some look at succession planning for incumbent leaders as a time to create a legacy. This can be an opportunity to leave a mark on an organization that survives far past their years of employment. However, the term legacy has different connotations for different leaders.

Thinking that legacy is a far-reaching goal for a fast-changing healthcare environment, legacy today can be seen as difficult and a rarely experienced event. A concrete legacy example is buildings named for past leaders, yet whose actual contributions are much harder to remember, making this kind of legacy an allusive concept. If memories of actual contributions and influence on the system are more easy to forget, what is the incumbent leaders’ best result from their succession planning?

The ultimate benefit: self-strategy

Shifting mindsets from legacy to self-strategy as an outcome for succession building can be the ultimate gift for incumbent leaders. This self-strategy will give an incumbent clarity about what they truly care about and what they want to spend their remaining time working on.  It is a transformation from what they want to do, to who they want to be.

When leaders start to formulate what they want to be in their next chapters, they can start to focus how and what they spend their valuable resource of time on. With a clarity of what they are passionate about and who they want to become, incumbent leaders can be more selective on what projects to choose and what to distribute to others. They can focus on truly enjoying their work with activities that bring personal engagement. Perhaps most importantly, the time during succession planning can give incumbents choices they may not have allowed themselves in previous times.

Self-strategy and organization strategy

When incumbent leaders start to make shifts in their mindsets, the benefits of these shifts extend to the emerging leader and to the organization at large. People will start to witness what happens when leaders are at their best. When people witnesses incumbent leaders who are passionate about ideas or projects, they also see incumbent leaders at the pinnacle of their careers. That is not only inspiring, but outcome generating as well.

How to create this shift

Incumbent leaders, those who are planning for retirement or promotion, have the unique opportunity to create a self-strategy for self-transformation: one that is filled with the potential of the greatest engagement period of their professional lives, while increasing the capacity of the next tier of leadership.

In order for this transformation to take place, a skilled leadership coach can help shift succession planning to a polarity approach that is strategic for both the incumbent and emerging leaders. Skilled executive coaches are needed for this kind of multi-pronged approach of individual and team coaching that helps leaders visualize the next chapters for themselves, their teams and the organizations.  While incumbents may be able to get there on their own in time, partnering to create an optimal self-strategy in the most effective and efficient ways is highly recommended.

SixSeed Partners offers a suite of inter-collaborative, interdependent and custom-designed services to increase leader and system-level capacitation within the healthcare industry. Email us at info@sixseedpartners.com to learn how we can help you drive sustainable, transformational change within leaders, teams and entire organizations.