It is early, this Saturday morning, and I'm pondering the following questions:
What do we want/need more of in the transformation of health care?
What do we need from leadership? From each other?
What does how we ARE with each other have to do with how we perform together; how we create an environment that allows for transformation?
How does a leader create and nurture an environment that promotes the inspiration, energy, creativity, synergy, resilience and collaboration that transformation requires?
The answers I've come up with so far (and they are only partial answers) are simple AND complex:
When leaders convey sincere respect, value, appreciation, trust, faith, delight, encouragement in their staff, this almost always results in higher, confidence, creativity, and enthusiasm. The result is higher morale, enthusiasm, confidence, competence, collaboration, and cohesiveness. The stage is set to enhance the synergy that is required in transformation.
When a leader expresses impatience, disappointment, or presents himself/herself as being an expert, scolds or criticizes (subtly or not so subtly)-the message conveyed is that there is a lack of value, appreciation, trust, faith, and delight.
Predictably, morale, enthusiasm, confidence, competence, collaboration, team cohesiveness, creativity drop. Synergy is a dusty dream.
Our over-loaded systems create immense pressures for leaders. What I have noticed for a long time in health care (as in many other fields) is that managers (especially middle managers) barely have time to breathe, much less stop and truly appreciate the work that is going on around them. They are caught between the needs of the directors they report to and the needs of the staff that report to them. Plus they have the endless demands of the department, clinic or a project to manage.
And, our traditional problem-solving (hence problem oriented) approach to human systems doesn't often value the importance of appreciation, delight and reflection. This results in a culture of REACTION, rather than RESPONSIVENESS.
Responsiveness requires time to reflect upon one's observations, thoughts, beliefs, assumptions, feelings, and desires. Responsiveness promotes curiosity, openness, learning; resilience. Reaction promotes defensiveness, fear, rigidity and hampers learning.
A healthy system protects the resilience of its managers. I discovered in my master's thesis project that a key factor in enhancing the resilience of managers was to provide opportunity and time for them to build relationships with each other and to notice what is working well. TIME is a big issue here. In order to transform health-care, we need to find a way to value the TIME it takes to build relationship.
