SixSEED Partners

Transformational Leadership

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/

    Polarity Approach to Expedite Hospital Integration & DEI

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    Building Leadership Capacity to facilitate culture change and Improve
    Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

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

    Background

    SixSEED Partners was invited to help build leadership capacity in patient care and nursing leaders to support the integration of two separate hospital entities within one health system. After the first year of facilitated work and implementing a collective leadership assessment, this second year was focused on engaging the leaders in recreating a culture that supported integration while allowing for the retention of what was unique and market competitive for each individual entity.

    The Strategy

    SixSEED Partners designed a two-day workshop that introduced the leaders to both/and thinking as a complementary tool to traditional problem-solving – either/or thinking. We were most concerned about surfacing the fears and concerns from the smaller hospital entity, that also happened to be a microcosm of the lesser served, mostly black community. Leaders were divided according to hospital entities and each had the chance to identify most treasured cultural attributes and worst fears of integration with themselves and then with each other.

    The Solution

    Fears that were identified by the smaller hospital included loss of identity; constant comparison and loss of unique attributes; lack of ability to autonomously act; loss of connection to their geographic community; and lack of influence in decision-making. What they valued and wanted to preserve, for both organizations included their unique histories; their commitment to the patients, community, and each other; a spirit of collaboration; shared knowledge; and diversity of staff and patients.

    The Impact

    At the conclusion of the two days, the leaders created a complete polarity map focused on their integrated one system. They had action steps to leverage retaining the best of current culture while preparing to best meet the future. They also identified early warning signs to alert them when they were overdoing either pole: too much tradition and too much change.

      If you’d like to learn more about bringing this work to your organization, contact us at SixSEED Partners.

      An Alternative to Setting Leadership Goals

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      As we prepare for a new year, we propose an alternative to setting goals, perhaps you might play with a different way of thinking and then notice the impact on your goals. In recent conversations with healthcare leaders, the question has come up around: “How do I provide safety and react to the emerging Omicron spread while also moving forward with strategic efforts? Do I put everything on hold in fear of contagion? If we do that, how will we continue to make progress?”

      I applaud this leader as this is a great question that I’m sure others are wrestling with as well. As the enclosed photo illustrates, and with credit to our strategic partners at 3 Vital Questions, Polarity Partnerships, and The Full Circle Group, in order to create sustainable change with less wear and tear on the system, we must expand our thinking to include numerous competing priorities and we need to invest in our staff to be better able to manage complex, rapidly changing dynamics. More to come on this!

      If you’d like to know more, please respond or email info@sixseedpartners.com.