SixSEED Partners

#teamdevelopment

Building Trust to Improve Psychological Safety: An Experiential Team Approach

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

Background

A clinical division within a community-based hospital was experiencing a decrease in morale and team cohesion, which was starting to affect patient care. In seeing this negative trajectory for the health of their workforce and their quality patient care, the Director of Advanced Practice Practitioners (APPs) and Division Chair showed effective leadership by seeking support. Through the referral of a trusted colleague, this executive sponsor dyad contacted SixSEED Partners to help heal their team.

 
In the Discovery phase, the leadership team transparently shared that, while the clinicians and APPs respected each other as people, the communication flows were breaking down and less collaborative. They were hearing from multiple team members about a lack of trust and decreased psychological safety. One source of tension was the different working styles of the clinicians, such as high drama or micromanaging behaviors. Over time, this left the APPs with varied levels of role clarity, feeling deflated, and unable to fully practice to the scope of their license.

The leadership team felt stuck. The division was short-staffed and covering 24/7 patient care. While it seemed like there was no “extra” time for anything, the leadership also knew that not addressing this team culture issue now would lead to even worse problems later: a disengaged workforce, employee turnover and lower quality care. 

Client Results

The Strategy:

Shifting from the traditional “fix the problem people” approach, our strategy was to build a sustainable culture of trust. We designed a blended approach to support learning and growth at the individual, team and leadership levels. To be effective, we ensured this approach would fit into the team’s busy schedule, foster connection, and provide tools they could apply immediately in their day-to-day work. 

The Solution: 

Dr. Platzer and Ms. Hompe designed and facilitated a five session, nine-month experiential learning series that led the team through an “internal Operating System” upgrade. The group moved step by step through scaffolded learning to:

  • Build Self-Awareness using strengths-based assessments
  • Shift from Drama to Empowerment mindsets and behaviors
  • Move from Assumptions to Shared Commitments

With this foundational work, the team applied their new interaction behaviors to optimizing their team communications in patient rounds and defining their Team Norms for team effectiveness. Clinicians also selected mini-coaching engagements to support further individual development.

The Impact:

Through this work, the team blended and became more effective by building trust, improving collaboration, and communicating more openly. Team members demonstrated safety to engage in discussion, rather than passively agreeing. Patient care also improved. As one example, the team was able to respectfully and supportively raise concerns about one provider’s clinical practices, resulting in improved accountability and better quality care. 

Three months after the final session, we checked in with the Leadership Team. They confirmed the team was still using their new skills and ways of operating – even while under more external pressures and volumes than previously. 

As the Division Chair reflected: “It’s one thing to practice these skills during the sessions, but it’s another to see people still using them together when things are even tougher. This engagement was so worth it!”

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

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.

Loyalty AND Autonomy

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A key tension to effectively manage leadership transitions

By Joy W. Goldman, Advisor and Founding Partner

Background

The New York Times recently published a news analysis piece entitled: “Silent no more, Harris seeks her own voice without breaking with Biden.”  The author, Peter Baker, states: 

“The challenge for her over the next 100 days will be to find her own voice without overtly breaking with Mr. Biden, a delicate political high-wire act without a reliable net… Yet even as she wants to demonstrate loyalty to Mr. Biden, she also hopes to show the public who she is.”

This blog is not about politics. It IS about assuming leadership in a way that navigates the complexity of honoring the leadership that came before you while advocating for change that exemplifies your unique voice. The challenge of both authentically respecting tradition and passionately advocating for new change.

Client Examples

At SixSEED Partners, we’ve seen this tension play out in several scenarios.  Perhaps one of these will ring true for you.  

  1. You’ve been promoted to a single entity Chief Nursing/Medical/Executive officer position while the prior person, likely your boss, is promoted to a system-level role.
  2. You lead the merging of two hospital systems – one larger, “mothership” so to speak, and the other a smaller, often community-based entity.
  3. You are hired to replace a C-suite position and you have a professional relationship with the leader exiting the organization.

All of these transitions require you to demonstrate your unique vision and the value you are bring to the role while also respecting the impact of the leader who came before you.  

Common Tensions & Solutions:

In partnering with our clients in these scenarios, we walked them through a structured “Polarity Mapping” process to identify actions that address achieving both goals, or poles, or competing commitments the leaders were facing.

Respect AND Autonomy: For the one “goal” – respect / tradition – we asked what are the set of actions that acknowledge and build upon what the outgoing leadership helped accomplish that is working for the organization where it is now.  For the other “goal” – autonomy / authentic voice – we asked what actions are needed to assertively make the case for change that is required to adapt to an emerging future. After seeing these sets of actions for both goals, the leaders could then decide which actions were needed to accomplish both together, over time.  

Leader AND Team: Once a leader has done this individual work around respect and autonomy, we often expand the polarity mapping work from the leader to the team level. A useful simple Action matrix framework in this process is Start/Stop/Continue/Do Differently, which invites everyone to name what is working and valued in the current culture and what traditions, even if cherished, might now be getting in the way of moving forward with emerging needs. When we did this work with a merger situation, both entities were able to see some overused habits (sounds like “that’s how we’ve always done it”) that they could shift and do differently or stop. As one example, shifting from their default habit of including every leader in all the decision-making, which was causing unnecessary delays in a fast-moving reality, to exploring ways to decrease the layers of input in some of the decision-making.

Confidence AND Humility:  The more senior the role, the more the leader is expected to be confident while driving change. This can be an inherent challenge for those who are promoted to a role that has a larger scope, but also fewer peers with whom they can do strategic thinking and ask vulnerable questions. Confidence requires acting with courage and alignment to one’s purpose and desired results, while humility requires us to ask for help.  For many senior leaders, hiring a coach can provide that kind of safe space to share fears and learn new habits for managing this tension, and many more.

Would you like to learn more about how you can navigate these tensions? Contact us at SixSEED Partners.

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/

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/