The CHRISTUS Health Physician Leadership Development Program was recently lucky enough to have Bill Treasurer, CEO of Giant Leap Consulting, lead an interactive discussion about “Courageous Leadership.”
As the participants worked on integrating Bill’s concepts into their work, they identified the areas where they are seeing their physician colleagues, administrators, and nursing leaders, display amazing courage.
(See Also - Covid's Emotional Trauma - Leading with Empathy )
I found a few of the examples to be particularly interesting, and poignant reminders of the nature of the work:
Courage to Show up
During the initial months of the Pandemic, people put themselves at risk just to show up and do the work. We can’t forget this, or the emotional trauma it created.
Courage to Try, and to Fail
More than ever, people are challenged, daily, to solve new problems. Culturally, healthcare organizations are slow to change, slow to adopt new approaches, and slowed by discomfort with trying, and failing. The Pandemic forced everyone to learn to innovate, to try, fail, learn, and try again - and learn to be OK with it.
Courage to Hold Each Other Accountable
In a culture that values professional autonomy almost to a problematic degree, people aren’t accustomed to routinely holding each other accountable to new procedures, processes, or rules.
This is why we’ve had to invest millions of dollars in getting people to follow hand-washing procedures, every time, all the time. The Pandemic presented immediate, and obvious, ramifications when anyone takes a shortcut. People had to get over the discomfort of holding others accountable.
Courage to Continue to Invest in Getting Better
Most organizations figured out how to handle the challenges of the Pandemic. The best organizations realized that they could not stop investing in their people, in quality, in the patient experience, and in developing new programs that meet the needs of their communities.
Courage to Create Confidence in the Future
Confidence in the future is critical to individual, and team, resilience, and engagement. Physician leaders noted that it’s a daily challenge to create a sense of confidence for their teams - as they deal with their own uncertainty, and fears.
Has your team taken the opportunity to find the lessons from the past two years?
To learn more about how we support the development, and success, of physician leaders as they face all of today's challenges, including how we integrate the Activ8 Physician Leadership Essentials Program, powered by Rali, see: Creating a Culture of Physician Leadership
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