Six Seed Partners

Transformational Leadership

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!

Leading effectively: The importance of giving yourself – and your teams – space to breathe and think

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Are you leading through continuous change? Is the change unpredictable and moving at such a fast pace that it is difficult to keep up and has you wondering what it looks like to lead effectively and with the space to think? Not just for yourself, but also with your leadership team and for your teams across your system?

These are very common questions we hear from our clients, and frankly, what a multitude of articles and books are being written about in the leadership development space. The fundamental principle involved in all of them is similar to the metaphor of the Oxygen mask on the plane: in order to navigate the changing situation (e.g. cabin pressure dropping), we must slow down and put the oxygen mask on ourselves, before we can effectively serve others and take further actions. 

What is that metaphorical oxygen mask for you, your leadership team, and your system as you look to navigate unpredictable and complex situations? One vital tool to answer that question is to create increased awareness through feedback systems – internal and external – focusing on the way we are interacting and taking action with others.

Image by David Emerald, www.3VQ.com

If you read that sentence and felt an added weight or wanted to dismiss that because it’s just “another thing to do,” you may be interested to learn that Peter Senge, known as the father of organizational learning, has long advanced the framework that focusing on thinking about how we think, interact and take action is the critical 3rd dimension of work within every organization.1  This is not extra work, nor soft work – it is the vital groundwork that when incorporated, can support you and your teams to navigate complexity and ambiguity effectively over time.

So back to that oxygen mask metaphor: having systems and structures in place to get feedback on how you are interacting and taking action, the impact it is having to yourself and others – is your way of assessing what the cabin pressure is in your environment.

Internal feedback systems include administering “self check-ins” and establishing a “self care plan” that puts you as a priority on your to-do list, among all the other priorities that your role and organization are asking of you. As leaders, you have this strength developed around planning for implementations, for budget cycles, for change initiatives – you must apply that same skill to yourself before any of those others. In healthcare, the troubling reality – and sad irony – is the increasing evidence that those providing care, administering and leading the health care system are doing a poor job of modeling that care for themselves.  No system – and no person – can sustain over time with that kind of discordance within.  What is your “self care plan?” On a scale of 1-10, how do you rate yourself in implementing your plan successfully? What works for you, and what gets in the way?

External feedback systems include informal, formal, ongoing and easeful ways of giving and receiving information to each other that increases your collective awareness, for the sake of learning and evolving amidst the ongoing change around us. When done effectively, this can raise the learning cycles from single loop, to double loop and even triple loop learning.2,3 What systems do you have in place to learn about the ways you – individually and collectively – are interacting and the impact you are having with respect to your intended results?

In healthcare, most often the external feedback loop stops with processes like HCAHPS and performance reviews. While both provide important information, it is at best partial and incomplete for an overall effective external feedback system. While it is beneficial and important to look backward to review what has been achieved, having only that focus orientation has an inherent trap in its design. Namely, the underlying intention and processes typically do not include two-way communication, nor have the intention of generating growth and development in a forward direction. Effective external feedback systems require a “growth mindset” and a focus on “scaling leadership.”

These two components are your metaphorical oxygen being delivered in the oxygen mask.  Stay tuned for additional articles to expound on these topics.

For now, take a moment to ask yourself – and your leadership teams – the questions posed in this article.  So that our readers can learn and grow together, tell us your story of what you find is working for you. If you recognize any gaps or areas you could improve in, we invite you to share that too.

Reference:

  1. Senge P. (1992) Building Learning Organization Journal for Quality and Participation. 15(2): 30-39.
  2. Argyris C. (1991) Teaching smart people how to learn. Harvard Business Review. 69(3): 99‐109.
  3. Tosey P., Visser M., & Saunders M. N. (2012) The origins and conceptualizations of ‘triple-loop’ learning: A critical review. Management Learning. 43(3): 291–307.

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Not for Beginners: Development in the Health Care C-Suite

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Regardless of the gains we seem to make in health care organizations, executive teams live in a pressure cooker of insufficient performance, on-demand adaptation, and continuous exhaustion.  We’ve tried getting bigger, consolidating and merging to gain big leverage.  It’s working to create health care organizations that are harder to kill, but it’s not making health care simpler, more effective, and more economical.

And…it’s not making people healthier.  Witt-Kieffer published a troubling study in January of this year: Over half the executives in health care would leave if they could.

As a physician and a CEO, I can attest to the pressure and weariness that comes with both those roles.

Is it possible to lead in these high-demand times in a way that is more effective, more sustainable, more meaningful?

Next to that question is the data on executive teams themselves—the prime movers—or stoppers—of entire organizations.  According to research from the Center for Creative Leadership, 97% of CEOs felt that improved function of their executive team would have a positive impact on results.

And on the ground, whispered off the grid and after workshops and in coaching sessions, countless mid-level leaders and physicians observe, “Our exec level needs to work on this stuff.”

In the field of coaching, we’ve managed to move from the idea of coaching as pre-terminal heroics to “coaching is how high-potential people discover how to optimally leverage themselves,” but with executive teams, active development of the team’s powerful position to tap leading-edge technique and knowledge is largely off the radar until there is overt dysfunction.

This only-when-the-cracks-show approach is unfortunate, given that the executive teams of both large and small healthcare organizations are charged with creating reliable and fluid success in the largest and most complex sector of the American economy, in unbelievably complex and urgent circumstances.  In these settings, executive team development is one of the highest forms of leverage for the forward-looking organization.  Development has become the sina qua non of excellent executive teams, not remedial ones.

What work separates advantageous, effective development from “another thing that takes up our time?”

Given their internal relationships, dynamics, biodiversity of functions, and landscape pressures and volatility, healthcare organizations are signature examples of complex adaptive systems, structures so multi-faceted that no less a guru than Peter Drucker deemed them “almost unmanageable,” and that was back in 1993.

Conventional executive teams know they have plenty of competencies, well earned through years of experience.  They also risk the trap of “we know,” when the deeper work is exploring what we’ve never done.  These exec teams recognize the potential in individual and shared leadership acumen around them, but tend to see themselves as static—accomplished, finished, certain.

The best executive teams recognize the challenge of leading complex adaptive systems as an invitation to change the rules of leadership, and that’s where they spend their time.

Creating an organization which is simpler, more relationally connected, and more coordinated defines their development work.  The fields of adult stage development; the neuroscience of performance, learning, and vitality; the network science of collective knowledge rising in fixed and ephemeral networks; the dual realities of intention and emergence, freedom and order; and the origin and diffusion (or extinction) of patterns occupy their learning and practice as they remodel the operating system under the countless tasks and process that define the organization’s success and identity.

We live in a world where we have to do things we’ve never done before as a clinical enterprise and as a disruption-adaptation business—so learning how to lead like we’ve never lead before is essential.  The best executive teams trust their known skills, and they also explore, with discipline and curiosity, the unknown approach.

They understand that creating the impactful future is less about what we’ve done and more about doing together what we’ve never done before.

As one CEO I know puts it, “Every leader has to be an effective environmentalist.”  She’s not talking about hugging trees or signing petitions.

This is not the work of beginning or remedial exec teams.  It’s the work of the best, the bravest, and the most committed.

Want to Transform? Get the Top 5 Tips to Prepare You to Transform Your Organization

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The term “transformation” is used to describe the paradigm shifts that organizations and individuals need to do in order to meet the desired goals for a more preferred future. Transformation can be allusive, but obtainable, with optimal mindset shifts needed for success.

In order to prepare the mindset shifts needed for transformation, here are five valuable tips to best prepare for optimal transformation for individuals, teams and organizations.

  1. Transformation is multi-layered and integrated across multiple levels of leadership, sponsors and strategic partners.

Although mission, vision and strategy are often directed by the top levels of leadership, transformational culture involves a multi-layered and integrated approach. From the top-level leaders to strategic teams, changing mindsets to a transformational culture is a team sport.

  1. Supplementing “either/or” unilateral thinking with “both/and” polarity thinking.

In many cases, thinking in polarities and using a polarity approach to certain challenges can provide leverage and sustainable results that “either/or” thinking alone can provide to address complexity, culture, change and conflict. Like yin and yang, polarities are interdependent tensions “margin AND mission” (an “AND” not an “OR). Organizations need to have optimal focus on reaching the epitome of BOTH, not choosing between both or merely “balancing” the poles.

  1. Transformation requires vertical development of leaders.

Think of horizontal development of leaders as skill acquisition. This can help increase a leader’s situational effectiveness, but is less likely to result in the capacity to think more systemically and effectively handle ambiguity or increasing complexity. Developing those capacities, which lead to sustainable transformation, requires vertical development. Consider a physician that treats a single disease, as compared with population health. Disease management requires horizontal learning. Long-term wellness requires thinking about patients in a more complex and system-oriented manner and being aware of patient population health management that may transform a community.

  1. Human resources is a necessary thinking partner.

All too often, HR is included after visions are planned, strategy is set and decisions are made. Transformation and delivery of results happens through the people in the system. Shifting the mindset of human resources as merely executing the decisions to being a trusted advisor upstream in thinking through the strategy and decisions is vital for true transformation.

  1. Outside assistance is necessary so choose wisely.

Outside consultancies and strategic partnerships are necessary for optimal transformation and perspective, and not all are created equal. Choose wisely and engage partners with a depth and breadth of healthcare leadership experience that have been certified in the ability to transform teams and, who themselves, are proficient in systems and complexity thinking.

Agility is necessary for an outside consultancy to tailor to an organization’s unique needs. They need to contain credible experts in the fields of individual, team and organizational development and transformation.

Most importantly, you need to have a relationship with the people that you will be working with, and not just the face of the organization that sells the service. Outside assistance is necessary, so choose wisely for the most effective results.

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.