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Team Spotlight: Meet Ashley-Dior Thomas

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Meet our Sr. Executive Assistant, Ashley-Dior Thomas! Ashley-Dior is located in Washington, D.C. and before joining our team she worked as an Executive Assistant/Scheduler on Capitol Hill turned full-time entrepreneur. Her passion for helping small businesses become more productive and process-oriented helps our team implement structure as a growing business. 

Ashley-Dior enjoys working at SixSEED Partners (SSP) because of the culture and empathetic nature that the Founders have when it comes to understanding the challenges at hand in healthcare. When envisioning the future of healthcare, she hopes to see a more holistic method used to enact change to the actual structure of the healthcare system. 

When not working, you can find Ashley-Dior running her own R&B club, catching up on articles that pertain to the industry, and most recently, Ashley-Dior got her Certificate in Women’s Entrepreneurship from Cornell University!

To connect with Ashley-Dior on LinkedIn, please click here.

CEO Declaration

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Compassionate AND Courageous Leadership for our Nation’s Healing

“Through this work, I’ve learned that each of us is more than the worst thing that we’ve ever done; that the opposite of poverty isn’t wealth, the opposite of poverty is justice;  that the character of our nation isn’t reflected on how we treat the rich and the privileged, but how we treat the poor, the disfavored, and condemned.”  

–Bryan Stevenson, Director, Equal Justice Initiative

I write to you today as the CEO of SixSEED Partners; as a nurse who has dedicated her life to providing health and healing to all, and as a growing- in- consciousness white, privileged woman who is deeply saddened by the pervasive demonstrations of systemic racism and violence in our nation.  George Floyd; Ahmaud Arbery; Breonna Taylor; Freddie Gray – too many names to do justice to their lives by listing them here.  While I mean this statement deeply – I also believe strongly that these words of support are not sufficient to create real systemic change. Now is our time to ACT.

The question we are facing at SixSEED Partners is one we ask our clients to consider, too. How do we Act effectively, without “reacting”?  As we shift from our anger and sadness to activism and change, we challenge ourselves to focus on the impact we want to create:  our desired outcome, which is to contribute to a just and equitable culture where health is a right for all.

At SixSEED we partner to create “ecosystems” – environments in which individuals, teams, and organizations can all thrive.  Our approaches and tools-of-our-trade surface and honor differences and differing perspectives while moving forward together with increased speed and more sustainability. Healthy and thriving ecosystems require diversity and integrated solutions. 

A frequently asked question is, “Where to start?”   

We believe leadership comes from a variety of places and is always an inside-out job. Here are 5 essential steps we see as necessary for healing and lasting change, at all levels of a system:

  1. Embrace Courage in Being Vulnerable – Critically Self -Assess:  How are we part of the solution or part of the problem?  How do we know?  Whose perspective is missing in our lives and how do we bring that perspective(s) in?  Whether in reading; watching TED talks or YouTube Videos; engaging in conversations with our neighbors or families, we must take individual responsibility to improve our literacy in racism, implicit bias, white supremacy, and anti-racism.  
  2. Hold Self and Others Accountable, While Resisting Blame: It takes courage to resist blaming others and to recognize that Who and What we criticize lives within us.  What difference could it make if we could focus on accountability for behavior, and love the human being before us – and within us? How might making that shift impact us personally, as a leader,  in our organizations?
  3. Hold a Place for Compassion and Forgiveness:  This is easier said than done, particularly when trying with those we consider our “enemies”. Merriam Webster defines compassion as: “the sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it.”  Notice there is no judgment here. It is more a recognition of our common humanity.  That is the outcome we are hoping to create in our world! Regardless of race, ethnicity, sexual preference, income, military status, and so many other differentiators – we are one common humanity.
  4. Be a Diversity Leader-by-Example – Imperfectly:   We don’t need to wait for a formal Diversity Officer to start making changes in our organizations. At every level – personally and in our teams – be intentional to bring as many different perspectives in the room as possible.  Make it a habit to ask questions like: 
    1. “Whose perspectives are missing here?”
    2. “What voice/s are being marginalized, and why?
    3. “How do we ensure all voices are heard?”  
    4. “What is the quality of our listening? Are we listening to confirm what we know or to hear what we haven’t yet considered?”
    5. “What shifts do we need to the practices we’ve accepted?” For example, instead of hiring for “fit,” what if we hired for “non-fit?”
  5. Allocate your time, money, and talent in service to living a vision of a just and equitable culture.  Rev. Angel Kyodo Williams, Sensei said it best: “Love and Justice are not two. Without inner change, there can be no outer change. Without collective change, no change matters.” 

Like all systemic changes, they take intentional learning, development and actions, over time.

To stay connected with what SixSEED Partners is doing to support anti-racism, see  the below key resources and actions we are taking … to be anti-racist and create integrated solutions to heal our nation’s healthcare systems.

In health and healing,

Joy W. Goldman RN, MS, PCC

CEO and Founding Partner

SixSEED Partners 

Self-Learning / Action Resources:

  • How to Be Anti-Racist, by Ibram X. Kendi
  • White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, by Dr. Robin DiAngelo
  • “Deconstructing White Privilege” with Dr. Robin DiAngelo

Organizational Learning / Action Resources:

  • EQUALITY: Courageous Conversations about Women, Men and Race to Spark a Diversity and Inclusion Breakthrough, by Trudy Bourgeois
  • Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race, by Derald Wing Sue
  • “US Businesses Must Take Meaningful Action Against Racism” LM Roberts & E Washington, HBR, June 1 2020 

https://hbr.org/2020/06/u-s-businesses-must-take-meaningful-action-against-racism

Organizations to Follow / Support:

Creating Systemic Thinkers: Going beyond SBAR

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It has long been recognized that nurses and physicians speak in different ways.  Particularly in Surgical settings where providers may experience a sense of pressure with clinical demands, tools like SBAR: “Situation, Background, Assessment, and Recommendation” have been created to help standardize a communication structure between healthcare providers and improve patient safety outcomes.  We believe there’s more to this story and partnered with a community-based health system to improve learning, performance and vitality in nursing and physician leaders.  In the spirit of SBAR, we present our case study using this format.

Situation:

A multi-hospital health system approached SixSEED Partners (SSP), dba Wiederhold & Associates, to conduct polarity thinking training to their physician leadership academy.  This academy consists of approximately 25 physicians who are in leadership roles throughout their system.  As SSP has been working with this system on a multi-year leadership capacity/ succession planning effort, the system has witnessed the benefit of polarity thinking in expanding leaders’ capacity to see the “both/and” along with the traditional, problem-oriented “either/or” thinking.  They now wanted us to present this framework to their physician leaders.

Background:

Since 2015, SSP was asked to create a succession planning program for seven high potential senior leaders, who, at that time, were being considered as possible successors to a CEO who was retiring within three-four years.  SSP partnered with the CEO, COO, CHRO, and another Senior Executive Vice President to create and implement a program that expanded their request to increasing individual, team, and systemic leadership capacity.  Regardless of who may or may not move into the CEO role, we wanted to help position the system to best leverage and respond to increasing complexity within their community, as with mergers and acquisitions, retiring senior leaders, and changing payment models.  Part of our work included introducing polarity thinking and measurement to these senior leaders.

What is polarity thinking?  Barry Johnson introduced polarities in his 1992 book Polarity Management: Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems (Johnson, 1992). The term polarity refers to a specific category of paradox. A polarity is an interdependent pair with an ongoing and predictable dynamic. Two questions help us identify a polarity. They are: “Are there two poles which are interdependent?” and, “Is the difficulty ongoing?” (Johnson 1996:2 81). Understanding polarity theory begins with recognizing the fundamental interdependent pair/polarity of “OR” Thinking and “AND” Thinking. This thinking competency-focused polarity distinguishes a polarity as a unique type of paradox that involves an interdependent pair, and from problems that are unsolvable using “OR” Thinking. Polarities are inherently unsolvable, but can be addressed effectively when key stakeholders recognize them.

For example, consider one polarity such as activity and rest.  At some point, if we focus exclusively on activity, our bodies will collapse from exhaustion, and we will be forced to rest.  Over-focusing on rest is unhealthy for our bodies and we will eventually have to move to avoid the downsides of too much rest.  This is an ongoing dance that has no end.

SSP worked with the health system to identify their most common and impactful polarities of mission AND margin; tactical AND strategic; centralization AND decentralization; and continuity AND transformation.

Assessment: 

As SSP considered the request for polarity training for the health system’s physician leaders, knowing that they also have a nursing leadership academy, we saw the potential multiplier benefit of inviting both audiences into the same room.  Getting back to our introduction, nurses and physicians often have different, and complementary communication styles.  These communication differences, like candor and diplomacy, or advocacy and inquiry can lead to challenging conflicts and unnecessary burnout.  As a consultant team, we saw the benefit of inviting the nursing and physician leaders to participate in defining and mapping out their own polarities.  For the same amount of time and monetary investment, they could deepen the penetration of polarity thinking within their system, resulting in greater engagement from these leaders, greater performance (since they could now see a system to better leverage these interdependent tensions as compared to ongoing cycles of reaction), and greater vitality through less energy going to un-necessary conflicts.

Recommendation:

SSP worked with the steering team for the Physician  AND Nursing Leadership Academies to design and implement an experiential day where the leaders could identify their most urgent polarities;  map out in a very visual and somatic way, their perspective, while also being able to see the upsides of their lesser preferred polarity, and the downsides of over-focusing on their preference.  As an example, physician leaders were able to see the upside of candor, while also seeing that overdoing candor can be perceived as arrogant and rude.  Nurses were able to see their preference for diplomacy, while also seeing the confusion that can occur when they overuse diplomacy and lack candor.

Results: 

To our great delight, the health system had to change the venue of the training due to the numbers of leaders interested in participating in the training.  The leaders laughed and physically moved as they were able to see their bodily representation of their different perspectives.  With coaching on inquiry and dialogue, the leaders were able to be curious (as compared with judging) as they interviewed each other about their differing perspectives.  In this way, their partnering was strengthened as they learned a common language and process for better leveraging polarities in service to their greater purpose of providing quality AND cost-effective patient care.

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.

Smith, Wendy K., Lewis, Marianne W.,  Jarzabkowski, Paula and Langley, Ann. 2017: “The Oxford Handbook of Organizational Paradox.” Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. (Chapter 28: “Paradox and Polarities: Finding Common Ground and Moving Forward Together: A Case Study of Polarity Thinking and Action in Charleston, South Carolina”)  Cliff Kayser, Margaret Seidler, and Barry Johnson