Tune in now to the final Season 4 Moments Move Us episode with Rebecca Coren 🎧
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New Podcast Episode:
Creating Change Through Connection: Leadership Lessons from Season 4 with host Rebecca Coren
Meet Ophelia Byers, VP and Chief Nursing Officer at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital:
“We recognize the impact of stress – general stressors, life stressors, family changes, pressure at work, personal health challenges. Those are things that any human being goes through. Then you think about your employees of color, and you think about the impact of racism on people who are also going through the challenges of just being human. My interest in this is really around understanding the experience of those employees and how workplaces can create actionable frameworks to help support them at work, a place that we spend most of our life and certainly most of our day. It’s really trying to understand how we can retain these employees, engage them, and ensure that the workplace is one of diversity, inclusion, belonging, and ultimately equity.”
Listen to hear how Ophelia and NewYork-Presbyterian weave diversity and inclusion into the entire framework of their organization in order to retain employees and enhance their workplace experience.
Ophelia Byers uses the Wambi value of compassion to remind us that diversity and inclusion is a process, beginning with a self-assessment of our personal limitations.
“There is not always the awareness of what someone’s lived experience is at work. Our obligation is to do some vision correction, and that comes through awareness. It comes through learning and self-study. It comes through a variety of ways, but we have to first recognize that we do not see all and that we really need diverse perspectives from a diverse group of individuals to be able to be more aware.”
Celebrating Black Healthcare Professionals – In our desire to actualize change and celebrate the diversity of mind and thought, we are listening to five Black healthcare professionals who have graciously shared their knowledge and insights on joy, compassion, gratitude, imagination and fearlessness. Watch and listen to our interviews with:
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Meet Nigel Girgrah of Ochsner Health System:
“The Office of Professional Well Being partnered very quickly with our behavioral health service line, and probably the thing that was most well received was rounding on the units that were most distressed and offering structured debriefing sessions. We still stood up again with our behavioral health service line 24/7 crisis support. We developed physical decompression zones where people could go mid-shift or post-shift to just de-stress. Some mindfulness exercises that folks could engage in. We developed something called COVID Connect, which was a peer support program for our employees that did test positive so that they could connect with other employees that had gone through it. We also developed a leader toolkit to help our leaders address the needs of those they lead.”
Listen to hear how Nigel and Ochsner Health System prioritized developing resources for their employees and their leaders to equip them to fight employee burnout during the pandemic.
Nigel Girgrah uses the Wambi value of imagination to reform the healthcare industry by prioritizing collective well-being to overcome challenges, like clinician burnout.
“There’s really no industry more complex than healthcare. As I think about it, in order to meet the challenges associated with healthcare reform, we need the collective of our healthcare workers to achieve great things. I look at well-being in the workplace as a vehicle to get there and burnouts are kind of an existential threat to achieving those goals.”
Lead Authentically: Cultivate Trust Among Patients and Staff – As we begin to shift gears toward a post-pandemic world, how do we, as leaders, secure healthy solutions that strengthen healthcare workers’ resiliency? Here are five learnings from patient experience experts to support more authentic leadership in cultivating trust and improving patient experience outcomes.
As we begin to shift gears toward a post-pandemic world, how do we, as leaders, secure healthy solutions that strengthen healthcare workers’ resiliency? We sat down with five patient experience experts to explore strategies for improving overall well-being within their healthcare systems, and a resounding emphasis was placed on cultivating trust, both with patients, and with staff. Some considerations shared: How can we lead authentically without full transparency? How is trust an important component when it comes to emotional safety? How does taking care of our teams better the patient experience overall? The bottom line: you cannot have a healthy workplace without trust—trust between leaders and their teams, and trust between healthcare teams and their patients and families. Here are five learnings to support more authentic leadership in cultivating trust and improving patient experience outcomes.
Watch the full panel discussion on “How Patient Experience Learnings Can Improve Well-Being.“
Burnout has been at the forefront of many healthcare conversations since . Dr. Adrienne Boissy, Chief Experience Officer at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, noted team members are experiencing more “compassion fatigue” because the demands for care are exceeding their capacity to care. Sven Gierlinger, Chief Experience Officer at Northwell Health in New York City, shared that during the height of the pandemic, he focused more on supporting team members than the patients. The mentality being, that in order to better serve a patient population, support must first be given to the caregivers charged with the provision of care. His team launched Team Lavender, a first aid initiative designed to provide staff timely emotional, physical, and spiritual support. In the pandemic alone, over 300 people completed the well-being training to learn coping mechanisms to better handle crisis, confirming the need for targeted intervention programs. Addressing burnout is critical for boosting morale and demonstrates to staff that their concerns are valid and their contributions are valuable.
Megan Chavez, Vice President of Patient & Family Experience at Cook Children’s Healthcare System in Texas, emphasizes that well-being should be seen as a two-way street. “In a pediatric environment, the staff need to have context of what the child and family is going through.” When thinking of the continuous improvement of the healthcare experience, leaders need to consider where everyone is coming from in order to provide exceptional care experience. Dr. Adrienne Boissy added: “the distinction between patients and caregivers is arbitrary – they are all humans.” Caregiving becomes humanized when more emphasis is placed on the cyclical nature of well-being. As Dwight McBee, Senior Vice President and Chief Experience Officer at Jefferson Health Enterprise, highlighted, “If a team member doesn’t feel safe, they can’t help others feel safe.”
Dr. Adrienne Boissy has been a longtime champion of holistic care. Her authentic leadership style is rooted in a foundation of meaningful care. “When caring for someone, you care for the whole person – physically, emotionally, spiritually, and financially.” Holistic care sees the individual as a whole person, and for patients and staff alike to trust leadership, leaders must also be responsible of the emotional safety of those under their administrations. If leaders want to build trust, they must be conduits of promoting healthy partnerships between staff, patients, and themselves.
Our patient experience experts were all in agreement about the significance of trust in the pursuit of authentic leadership. Dwight McBee expressed, “Trust is foundational. And it’s easy to say, but difficult to practice.” As Sven Gierlinger illustrated, “trust doesn’t come from words, it comes from action.” The COVID crisis and the lack of resources, transparency, and procedure, have weakened trust between staff and their leaders/organizations. This exhibits that trust in the workplace can, and has been, depleted. Dr. Amy Mansue, President of Inspira Health Network in New Jersey, suggests, “Should a leader find themselves in a place where trust is broken, the most important thing they can do is to own it.” To acknowledge one’s failures is to acknowledge their team’s frustrations, and expressing vulnerability and humility as a leader is a powerful way to connect with team members.
A climate of trust is built on effective and open communication. Megan Chavez’s approach to cultivate trust starts with knowledge sharing: “Everything we do for our staff either builds, or takes away, from their ability to perform their jobs. So when we do know something, and can do more for them, we must, and we will.” Dwight McBee underscored that open communication must be proactive: “We as leaders need to monitor and take proactive steps, rather than wait for team members to speak up.” Many employees continue to suffer in silence and only find the courage to voice their concerns when open communication is modeled by their leaders and organizations.
As a final question to all our panelists, we asked, “What is your top priority now as we go forward and how is it really going to move the needle to making impactful change?”
Dr. Adrienne Boissy – The goal is to grow and thrive and be something different, because empathy and vulnerability must become globally accepted as a part of effective leadership.
Megan Chavez – Our laser focus is being very meaningful and intentional about measuring our fractured ecosystem as one whole experience, in order to drive our strategic priorities.
Amy Mansue – Recovery is the goal. Team members want to know that they are working for a healthy organization. And reliability is key. We need to take stuff off the plates of our staff and close the distance between the caregiver and the patient.
Sven Gierlinger – Continue to support team members to make sure that they are thriving. Restore and amplify human connections.
Dwight McBee – Growth. I want to be fully committed to learning and growing and be responsive to the needs of patients no matter what they look like or believe.
Join us for our next fireside chat, “Be A Leader Nobody Wants To Leave,” on Tuesday, June 29th at 1PM EST. Data shows that bad leadership has significant impact on turnover and low engagement. Uncover the importance of getting to the other side of bad leadership with Wambi CEO, Rebecca Metter, as she collaborates with healthcare leadership thought leader, Kris Baird, Founder of the Baird Group, to discuss key components that will help managers elevate their leadership skills. This fireside chat will outline the most important actions we can take to drive retention and build workplaces where employees thrive.
Meet Estrella Parker of Satellite Healthcare / WellBound
“As human beings, we are not doing things. We are actually doing things because they’re meaningful to us. That is what inspiration is really about, and in the modern workplace we’re so driven by technology and we’re getting pinged all the time and everyone has learned how to be productive. It’s really important to inspire people so that their whole being shows up in the situations they’re in at work.”
Listen to hear how Satellite Healthcare / WellBound uses listening and inspiration to create a meaningful employee and patient experience.
Estrella Parker emphasizes the Wambi value of compassion in her recommendation to actively listen to colleagues and carve out the deliberate space to do so.
“Start with listening and when you’re listening, you give space to that person you’re listening to. Sometimes we listen through surveys, right? And so one of the things that we do is really pay attention to what people are saying, what our patients are saying, and when you couple that with what the organization is about the mission that we have, the values that we have, it becomes then a task of making sure that we connect that. We connect the meaning of what they’re doing, the meaning of their role, the meaning of the situation, to what matters to them and to what matters to the organization.”
The Resilience Workbook – Strengthen your organizational resilience and align team goals with The Resilience Workbook, a free 12-page resource to mitigate clinician burnout. Download it here: https://wambi.org/building-culture-of-resilience-workbook/