SixSEED Partners

healthcare

Celebrating Nurses and Healthcare Workers: An Exercise in Diversity and Inclusiveness

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

History of “Nurses and Hospital Week Celebrations”

The first effort to provide national recognition to nurses was in 1954 when Dorothy Sutherland submitted a proposal to then President Eisenhower:  the proposal was rejected.  It wasn’t until twenty years later, in 1974, that President Nixon signed a proclamation indicating that there would be expansion to individual State recognitions of Nurses’ Day to be an entire week.  In 1996, the ANA (American Nurses Association) initiated May 6th as National RN Recognition Day.  

According to the free dictionary, in 1921, the United States declared National Hospital Day to encourage trust in hospitals in the wake of the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918, and to coincide with Florence Nightingale’s birthdate:  May 12th .  The observance was expanded to a week in 1953 to allow hospitals to plan and implement more extensive public information programs.  

I’ve worked in healthcare for the past forty- plus years and during that entire time, I’ve witnessed sentiments of appreciation for both Nurses’ Week and Hospital Week,  AND sentiments of exclusion:  “Why them and not us?”

Adapting To Present Day: Both/And

I was on LinkedIn recently and saw a similar posting expressing emotion around a desire to expand “National Physician’s Day” (March 30th) to other disciplines/ providers.  The perspective of the person posting was resentment that attention would be paid to a broader cadre of professions and that the expansion took away the special recognition that was deserved to physicians.

What do you think?  Some of you might be saying: “I agree.”  That’s the “right perspective.”   What is the “right” perspective in how to offer these well-deserved recognitions, particularly during a pandemic year when so many have sacrificed time, energy, and sadly, their lives, in service to their profession?  Does sharing make the recognition less special because it includes others and is not exclusive?

Honoring Individuals AND Teams:

While many can and will get into an argument of “right/wrong” in solving this problem, at SixSEED Partners, we would say that this is a perfect example of complexity and interdependent tensions or polarities to leverage.  This is also a wonderful variation on the theme of diversity, equity and inclusion.  Is there a way to celebrate and recognize distinct disciplines while also recognizing the whole?  We would say yes…. This is an interdependent tension to leverage:  A both/and.

Looking at the polarity map below, you will notice the universal tension often experienced in organizations around attending to unique disciplines and individual contributions (parts)—diversity in our associates, while also trying to be equitable in our practices (considering the whole).  If we effectively leverage these tensions, we stay in the upper quadrants.  When we overfocus on either pole, we inevitably get the downsides of that pole.

How does this play out with Nurses’ Week and Hospital Week?  We can imagine nurses saying that they don’t want to share their day with nursing support staff because it distracts from the unique profession that is nursing (Value:  the upside of Individual – Fear: downside of Team).  We can hear the same theme (value—fear) with physicians who want to preserve National Physicians Day for their profession alone.

On the other pole, we can see that an overfocus on diversity/ individuals to the neglect of the whole interferes with equity and inclusion.  Why shouldn’t there be a “recognition week” for each unique discipline?

Leveraging the Both/And:

In our polarity map, the next steps would be to identify action steps and warning signs for each quadrant.  Imagine engaging a diverse workgroup in this process:  what would they say means the most to them in how we might recognize their unique contributions while also appreciating the unique contributions of others?  What might the impact be if other disciplines heard from peers what they appreciate about that discipline/ profession?  How might a spirit of abundance… there is enough for all, contribute to cultivating a spirit of appreciation and gratitude for all:  not only for one week a year but every day of the year?

The pandemic has brought the intimate stories of the work of ALL healthcare workers to our attention.  And, truth be told, while scale might be different, saving lives; witnessing and escorting death and everything in between IS The WORK of healthcare.  

SixSEED Partners has had the privilege of witnessing the courageous work of healthcare leaders and their teams for the past forty-plus years. We celebrate your stamina and courage, AND we honor and hold space for your tears, trauma, grief, and fatigue.  Our commitment in offering gratitude to your work is to courageously offer our work which is to provide integrated solutions to heal healthcare.  Working in healthcare HAS to be healthy.  We honor you every day through partnering with you to make it better.  There is no other choice!

Let’s hear from you

We’d love to hear your insights in celebrating unique disciplines while also celebrating the whole of your teams that contribute to patient care and service. If this work seems like it could help you and your teams, we’d love to talk with you to explore how this approach might help your clinical leaders. Please post your responses on our LinkedIn page or send us an email here.

Team Spotlight: Meet Cliff

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Cliff Kayser is the CSO for SixSEED Partners. For the last 25 years, Cliff has been a practitioner and teacher of applied behavioral science theories and applications – most specifically in the area of values and polarity values dynamics. Cliff most enjoys working in partnership with clients who embrace or are ready to embrace both technical and adaptive approaches to leadership.

He says, “With the commitment to supplementing adaptive with technical in a ‘both/and’ leadership approach, generative and sustainable results will follow – and those results are measurable.” Cliff is a founding partner of SSP and appreciates healthcare for its role as a catalyst for well-being and love – worldwide. Current healthcare-related initiatives include work with a foundation in the Middle East and North Africa as part of Ain Shams University to use polarity thinking as part of leadership development for medical educators. (See published research on this work here!) Learn more about Cliff here.

Grounded and Conscious Leadership

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We declared this in our recent blog addressing systemic racism, which also quoted Angel Kyodo Williams, Sensei: “Love and Justice are not two. Without inner change, there can be no outer change. Without collective change, no change matters.” 

Now is the time for inner change so that we can transform our many economic, social, spiritual and health divides into just, equitable, and healthy systems for all.

To do this – as human beings and as leaders – we must be grounded and conscious to effectively take on this formidable challenge, in addition to all the usual challenges on a daily basis.

Knowing that grounded and conscious leadership is a vital competency for our healthcare leaders and teams, SixSEED Partners (SSP) is strategically partnering with Healthy Companies (HC) because of their vast research, tested applications and impactful results from their Grounded and Conscious Leader framework.

Founded by Dr. Bob Rosen in 1988, Healthy Companies has spent over 30 years culminating personalized, evidence-based solutions that succeed in transforming executives into leaders, staff into teams, and companies into healthy and sustainable ecosystems. Their work has been applied nationally and internationally across the high tech, automotive, banking and healthcare industries, amongst others. Their 2015 research exploring the 6 dimensions of a Grounded and Conscious Leader are proven to predict high performance and improved business outcomes. 

Due to the tremendous synergy between SSP’s and HC’s missions for creating healthy outcomes for leaders and systems, SSP’s Joy Goldman (CEO) and Petra Platzer (COO) became certified facilitators of Healthy Companies’ Grounded and Conscious Leader framework. This methodology for “Developing Grounded and Conscious Leaders” integrates action learning, behavioral science, social accountability, full-brain learning and an online portal for just-in-time tools, all of which support sustainable behavior change.

As SixSEED Partners’ commitment to provide integrated solutions to heal healthcare, we are excited to co-facilitate a virtual workshop with Healthy Companies where participants will explore these 6 dimensions and apply them to their own situations.

See here to learn more about this free virtual offering:

“Grounded Leadership: The Vital Foundation to Lead Through Uncertainty”

August 5, 2020 | 12:00 – 1:30pm EST

Register today! 

 

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!

Leveraging Specialized Knowledge and Shared Knowledge

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This is the sixth in a series on leveraging tensions during this time of the coronavirus.  For SixSEED Partners, Covid-19 is a powerful reminder of what already exists in our world which is complex and unpredictable circumstances that can cause much pain and expense unless we learn to take a more systemic view and get comfortable leveraging interdependent tensions.  Previously, we covered the paradoxes of:

  • Leveraging Facts AND Faith
  • Leveraging Staying Present AND Anticipating the Future
  • Leveraging Care for Self AND Care for Others
  • Leveraging Assuming Responsibility AND Delegating Responsibility
  • Leveraging Taking Ourselves Seriously AND Taking Ourselves Lightly

The tensions we are highlighting are coming from your real-world challenges.  We’re asking questions and staying present to your pain points, that, in already demanding circumstances, is taking additional energy that you don’t have to spare.  We want to help make this easier for you, while also increasing your capacity to lead others through this pandemic.

As I was listening and participating in a recent SixSEED Partners team meeting, I was hearing stories of inflicted trauma to businesses as a result of one or more of their partners contracting the coronavirus or some other illness and becoming either temporarily or permanently disabled.  The trauma inflicted, in addition to the loss of a loved one, was the impact on the business due to a lack of shared knowledge – knowledge transfer. 

Organizations who understand this tension have been rotating a greater pool of leaders through their Covid-19 Incident Command Centers so that the “show can go on” if one of the senior leaders becomes sick.  As hospitals have struggled with adequate personal protective equipment, and as we’ve learned more about the varying symptom manifestations of the virus, this reality of suddenly having someone out of commission is front and center.

On a personal level, as I’ve heard of couples contracting the virus resulting in one or both of their deaths, I’ve been moved to have discussions with my husband around “information sharing” that we’ve not previously placed as a priority.  Where are passwords; “important documents;” “house maintenance activities,” etc.?  For a system to be agile and resilient, these processes need to be in place so that immediate adaptation can occur.

Below is a polarity map, which outlines this tension of Leveraging Specialized Knowledge and Shared Knowledge.

At SixSEED Partners, we are committed to developing leaders who have the capacity to leverage these interdependent tensions that are here to stay.  We’ve taken the liberty of adding some action steps and warning signs to this map that you can use immediately with your teams.  

If you’d like your own editable polarity map to give yourself the systemic view of the tension you are navigating, or if you have questions about how you might use this information now, complete our contact form and we’ll respond within 1 business day.

Leveraging Taking Ourselves Seriously AND Taking Ourselves Lightly

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This is the fifth in a series on leveraging tensions during this time of the coronavirus.  For SixSEED Partners, Covid-19 is a powerful reminder of what already exists in our world which is complex and unpredictable circumstances that can cause much pain and expense unless we learn to take a more systemic view and get comfortable leveraging interdependent tensions.  Previously, we covered the paradoxes of:

  • Leveraging Facts AND Faith
  • Leveraging Staying Present AND Anticipating the Future
  • Leveraging Care for Self AND Care for Others
  • Leveraging Assuming Responsibility AND Delegating Responsibility

After hours of speaking with our clients who are on the front lines in hospitals or leading medical practices, the tensions we’re highlighting are coming from them—you.  We’re asking questions and staying present to your pain points, that, in already demanding circumstances, is taking additional energy that you don’t have to spare.  We want to help make this easier for you, while also increasing your capacity to lead others through this pandemic.

Below is a polarity map, which outlines this tension of Taking Ourselves Seriously AND Taking Ourselves Lightly in service to creating a healthy workplace for all.  What you’ll notice in the below polarity map that is different from prior maps in the series is an action step that is highlighted in yellow.  This is called a “high leverage action step” since it applies to both poles.  Intentional design of meeting agenda and space is necessary to leverage a business focus and a lighthearted/ energy-giving focus. 

As we’ve spoken to our clients, we see and hear the exhaustion people are feeling as a result of this prolonged pandemic along with the stressors of re-opening elective surgeries while also staying prepared for what could still be a surge in Covid-19 cases.  After weeks of being immersed in fourteen- hour days and incident command centers, your “higher-order thinking” can get worn down by the constant energy out.  Designing in activities that allow you to laugh and keep a “beyond-Covid” perspective helps to build your resilience for the ongoing demands.

At SixSEED Partners, we are committed to developing leaders who have the capacity to leverage these interdependent tensions that are here to stay. We’ve taken the liberty of adding some action steps and warning signs to this map that you can use immediately with your teams.  

If you’d like your own editable polarity map to give yourself the systemic view of the tension you are navigating, or if you have questions about how you might use this information now, complete our contact form and we’ll respond within 1 business day.