SixSEED Partners

#culture

Building Team Norms to Sustain Team Effectiveness

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Petra Platzer, PhD NBC-HWC, PCC: CEO SixSEED Partners

Background

SixSEED Partners concluded a year-long Team Development Series with a team of neonatal physicians and advanced practice providers at a community-based hospital outside of a major urban city. The vision of the executive sponsors was to strengthen team bonds and increase the team’s effectiveness for patient care delivery and for their own well-being. Throughout this series, we helped the team increase their self- and team-awareness around their ways of thinking by providing evidence-based tools and frameworks to use in their day-to-day work and team interactions. The team’s medical director and advanced practice providers lead continued threading the tools and framework into the team’s daily work and interactions. They also provided real-time feedback for the team into the session design process to achieve the overall engagement results. In the latest session, the team successfully worked together to “optimize team communications for effective patient care rounds”.

Client Results

The Strategy:

Building on the progress from the last session, the team leaders asked SSP for help on codifying what the team had skillfully demonstrated in the last session – new ways of discussing, listening and coming to decisions on topics that had different opinions. With the series concluding, it was also crucial to their success to define ways for actively sustaining the progress everyone had made, as well as how to intentionally bring new team members into this way of working together. 

The Solution: 

SSP’s Petra Platzer and Lisa Hompe designed a highly interactive and experiential session for the team to craft their Team Norms within their new Team Operating Manual. In this 2 hour in-person session, sixteen physicians and advanced practice practitioners “experienced” a Team Work Cycle by physically walking through it together and noticing their own energies and preferences in the phases. After learning about this cycle and their own natural tendencies, the team then moved through the work cycle process to make simple rules of behaviors as their working agreements for how they are most effective together – and consequently, their patients. 

The Impact:

Through this facilitated, experiential design, the neonatal division created five team norms which all members actively built together and voted on for consensus. Through everyone’s efforts in this series, the team’s improved psychological safety and alignment on their shared purpose helped them in focusing on voicing their individual needs and the needs of the team, as well as in their decision-making process for the final sets of behaviors they are now empowered to uphold and support each other on.

One participant shared she started the session in a low energy state after a challenging day in the NICU. She was pleasantly surprised that her energy was much improved through feeling the energy of the team and the satisfaction from everyone doing this work together – for themselves. Another shared she had never had such a productive outcome from everyone’s participation in this big a group, and in such a short time. The team leaders shared their pleasure in seeing the team really own the process and felt their shared investment in upholding these norms going forward together. 

To learn more about doing this kind of work to support and elevate your team to the next level, contact SixSEED Partners today.

What Makes Us Different?

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Organizations sometimes ask us what makes us different from any other coaching/ leadership & Organizational development consulting group, and we proudly say the following:

1. We apply what we teach to ourselves. We can’t ask our clients to take risks and be vulnerable if we’re not willing to do the same. We create a safe and challenging crucible for our own development as we engage our clients to leverage courage and compassion.

2. We are constantly looking for the both/and– we will help you solve problems as we also invite you to create systems that effectively navigate between persistent and unsolvable tensions. For many of you this year, that has looked like navigating well-being as you drive for high-reliability cultures and excellence. It’s also looked like navigating individual team needs- eg, clinical team needs AND administrative and more centralized needs.

3. We develop you AS YOU DO YOUR WORK. No one has discretionary time these days so we have to help you do the work that needs to be done, while coaching you in the moment to compassionately observe ineffective habits while creating new ones that help to achieve better and faster results with less energy spend.

Does this sound enticing? Tune in next week when we tell you about the great work we’ve done at Greater Baltimore Medical Center and University of Maryland Medical System!

And contact us! www.sixseedpartners.com/contactus

Dr. Stephen Karpman’s the Dreaded Drama Triangle and the Empowerment Dynamic by David Emerald Womeldorff

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By Joy W. Goldman Advisor and Founding Partner

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/pepperextrashot_youve-seen-it-ive-seen-it-weve-all-seen-activity-7217125638887915521-LDZM?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

With thanks to Pepper Wilson for providing this fun and practical post on David Emerald’s work of the Dreaded Drama Triangle and the Empowerment Dynamic. Along with The Conscious Leadership Group’s: “Above and Below the Line,” the DDT and TED are our most commonly used frameworks in working with healthcare leaders and teams. Think about it: as a nurse, I went into healthcare because I wanted to improve people’s health. Some might say, I wanted to “save” or “rescue” people. That’s a noble goal, EXCEPT when I over use it and apply it to all aspects of my life!

At SixSEED Partners, we work with our clients to identify their thinking habits of responding as “heros/ rescuers” and invite them to shift to a more empowering perspective that encourages development in their teams and less wear and tear on them. And we compassionately and with healthy humor, invite them to notice their own inner persecutor and help them shift to a more kind and generous approach to self-management. It is no coincidence that we often see that grace applied to others in their lives, once they have mastered it for themselves.

Would you like to learn how you might apply this framework to your teams? Contact us here: https://sixseedpartners.com/contact/

Using Self-Awareness to Shift from Drama to Empowerment

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Lisa Hompe MSOD, BSN, ACC

Background:

SixSEED Partners was engaged to help a team of neonatal physicians and advanced practice providers at a community-based hospital outside of a major urban city for a year-long Team Development Series. The vision of the executive sponsors was to strengthen team bonds and increase the team’s effectiveness for patient care delivery and for their own well-being, Our goal was to help them think differently at the individual and team levels by using evidenced-based tools and frameworks to reflect, become more self-aware and integrate the new skills. The series launched with the full team together in person and exploring their individual and group DiSC Workplace Profile® to build self-awareness of their different styles and preferences within the team.

Strategy:  

Following the series launch, this was the first of a 3-part sequence of experiential learning modules (ELM) to continue building awareness and provide additional thinking skills and practical tools for application. These virtually delivered team effectiveness ELM’s involve learning new behaviors by thinking in new ways, applying the learnings in between sessions, and reviewing progress together. 

Solution: 

Petra Platzer and Lisa Hompe worked with the neonatal team’s medical director and advanced practitioner team lead to design the team-based focus areas of work. The design approach intentionally combined individual and cross-functional team learning in real time. To accommodate the team’s shift scheduling, this session was delivered in 2 separate offerings for all to participate and learn together. After reflecting on how everyone’s DiSC styles and preferences appeared since the first workshop, this session introduced the team to 3 Vital Questions® to identify whether operating from a reactive, fear-based orientation or a creative, results-based orientation; to understand which role they may be coming from in those orientations; and how to take action to achieve their desired results.  We shared practical tools for how to identify reactive triggers and ways to shift from the drama (problem orientation) to empowerment (outcome orientation). 

Impact: 

David Emerald’s framework – The Empowerment Dynamic* (TED*) – helped participants become more aware of how to improve their ways of interacting, for themselves and the team’s overall well-being and effectiveness. By participating in this experiential learning module, these frontline clinicians are now equipped to notice and practice shifting from drama-based roles to more powerful results-based roles. The team committed to practicing these new skills and techniques over the next few months to improve team communication and trust. This work will also benefit the patients and families for whom they care. 

If this sounds like something that may be of benefit to you and your teams, and you would like to learn more, please contact SIxSEED Partners for more information. 

The Healing Healthcare Initiative: Guiding Leaders to Heal a Traumatized Workforce

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In today’s blog, we share the executive summary of: “The Healing Healthcare Initiative: Guiding Leaders to Heal a Traumatized Workforce” from The Schwartz Center for Compassionate Healthcare.

The Healing Healthcare Initiative (HHI) supports healthcare leaders to create a workplace that prioritizes the well-being of healthcare workers, so they can continue to provide high-quality care for patients and their families.

The program’s goals are to help leadership teams implement the framework to address and mitigate risks for healthcare workers through organizational and operational initiatives, policies, and metrics. The program also provides leaders with a psychologically safe space for reflection and peer support.

This work aligns with SixSEED Partners’ mission and vision to create sustainable, healing and healthy cultures to promote health for ALL.

“The program emphasizes communication and collaboration among departments, disciplines, and locations to identify effective initiatives and spread them across healthcare organizations. “Overall, the pilot underscores the significance of sustained leadership involvement in addressing the well-being of health workers and highlights the importance of trust, workforce involvement, collaboration, communication, and peer learning in driving organizational change.” Note the six key principles of the HHI framework and the eight implementation domains to create compassionate, trauma-informed organizational cultures and practices.

Want to know more?  You can reach out to us here:  https://sixseedpartners.com/contact/

Improving Leadership Well-Being in an Academic Medical Center

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Application of polarity thinking and Accountability Structures to Improve well-being & culture change.

Joy W. Goldman RN, MS PCC: Founding Partner and Advisor SixSEED Partners

Background

In our work with Patient Care and Nursing Senior Leaders at an academic medical center, we have been focusing on two key tensions: care- for- self and care -for -others; and integration for two hospitals and with patient throughput strategic partners. Our design for facilitation has mirrored this interdependency: we have focused for this past year on both well-being and integration, setting the vision that team-member well-being and quality excellence can co-exist.

The Strategy

Over the past year, we have blended in-person and virtual team facilitation for thirty nursing and patient care leaders. We have grounded our work with three powerful and complementary frameworks: Polarity Thinking; The Leadership Circle Profile’s Collective Leadership Assessment and Above and Below the Line from the Conscious Leadership Group. 

The Solution

Applying a blended, action-learning framework and a coaching lens to our work with thirty Vice-Presidents and Directors of Nursing and Patient-Care services, we used time-tested frameworks to support a high reliability culture and decrease blame.  We invited the leaders to suggest real-time work applications so that the learning was in the context of their existing priorities and did not add any undue burden on these already exhausted leaders.  Our emphasis throughout this past year and the past two years has been integrating a focus on well-being in the context of creating sustainable excellence.

The Impact

After nine months of blended facilitation and interim “field work,” we heard the following results in the leaders’ change of thinking, emotions, behaviors, and results: “I’ve reduced my heart rate by six beats/ minute.”  “I’ve been modeling setting boundaries around my time at work and giving myself permission to take the weekend “off” from emails and work and I’ve noticed that my team members are doing the same- what I model they seem to follow.”  “I’ve become more present to who is in front of me and I’m listening more.  Before I would be more concerned about getting somewhere on time and now I realize that the person in front of me is more important.  This sense of presence has also impacted my home life and I am more present there.”

Would you like to hear more about how you can develop your leaders, improve well-being and culture, while you do essential work and not separate from your work? We’d love to hear from you! Please contact us here: https://sixseedpartners.com/contact/