Author: Kevin Nourse, PhD

Categories
Leadership Development

Supercharge Your Strengths or Fix Your Flaws?

strengths and weaknesses

I just kicked off a year-long leadership development academy for a group of 20 physicians members of an international medical academy. As part of the program, I administered an emotional intelligence self-assessment that opened many participants’ eyes to their skills and development needs. A number of the participants asked me whether they should focus on developing their strengths or fixing their flaws.

Developing Your Strengths

The strengths approach to leadership development, popularized by writers Rath and Conchie, is anchored in positive psychology. Their foundational ideas assume that most people are not aware of their strengths. When people develop this awareness and invest time in enhancing them, it enhances their abilities, confidence, and satisfaction. By extension, this approach suggests focusing on fixing weaknesses and does not translate to a sustainable performance improvement. A critical aspect of this approach is leveraging others’ strengths – recognizing that leaders cannot be good at everything. 

Steve, a chief operations officer in a health system, is highly skilled as a project manager and ensures no detail slips through the cracks. However, because he is very good at this competency and enjoys doing it, he rarely thinks strategically about his organization, including longer-term planning and visioning. Given his level in his organization, Steve needs strategic thinking capabilities to perform his role. In developing his project management strengths, Steve might want to consider how he might become more aware of when to tap this strength. For example, a project management perspective might not be the best choice when identifying strategic opportunities and a new initiative vision. He could also consider tapping the strategic thinking capabilities of his second in charge, Maria.

Developing Your Flaws

The more traditional approach to leadership development emphasizes developing flaws or weaknesses. Leaders often identify the gap between their actual and desired behavior to determine what to grow. The leadership development plan then focuses on filling the gap by increasing your skill and confidence. In many cases, these deficits are created by overusing one’s strengths. Overusing strengths can create lopsided leaders with substantial gaps in their knowledge or skill set. Often, the best way to identify these weaknesses is through developmental coaching and a 360-degree assessment.

Although Steve may never be an expert in strategic thinking, he could develop some necessary capabilities in this area to mitigate his weaknesses, enabling him to speak strategy to his boss, the CEO. To achieve this, he could allow his second in charge, Maria, to mentor him, read a good book on the topic, or engage trusted colleagues in practicing this skill.

Hybrid Approach: Striking a Balance

I subscribe to a hybrid approach to development that embraces both methods. This approach assumes the importance of using your strengths and developing substantial weaknesses that could derail your career and limit your success. Further, it entails leveraging the talents of your leadership team to augment your weaker skills. In constructing their development plans, I often recommend that leaders identify one strength and one weakness.

Moving into Action: 7 Key Strategies

Here are seven useful leadership development strategies to consider that combine the strength-based and deficit perspectives:

  • Ask five trusted colleagues to identify your top 3 strengths and their impact, along with specific situations when they are most helpful. 
  • Reflect on conditions where your interactions with others did not succeed and assess the extent to which you may have overused your strengths.
  • Reflect on peak experiences or achievements and determine how your strengths contributed to the successful outcomes. 
  • Consider mentoring others who are interested in developing skills you would consider to be your key strengths.
  • Reflect on your job role and determine the extent to which you can enlist your strengths; consider negotiating a change in your job role with your boss to find ways to align better with your strengths.
  • Identify role models; interview them to find out how they think and behave.
  • Consider how you can leverage the strengths of others on your team to mitigate your weaknesses.

Successful leaders are intentional about their development and take consistent action over time to optimize their potential. Well-crafted leadership development plans include a balance of developing both strengths and weaknesses. By taking a balanced approach, leaders can ensure they are well-prepared for future roles. 

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Dr. Kevin Nourse has more than 25 years of experience coaching leaders who are experiencing transitions to thrive in their new or expanded roles. He is the founder of Nourse Leadership Strategies, a coaching and leadership development firm based in Southern California. For more information, contact Kevin at 310.715.8315 or kevin@nourseleadership.com

(c) 2022 Kevin Nourse

Categories
Coaching Case Study Executive Coaching Leadership Frameworks Leadership Transition

Case Study: Evolution of a Newly Promoted Leader

Successful executive coaches draw upon evidence-based theories to achieve tangible results for their clients. One helpful framework recognizes how leaders evolve according to predictable stages. Consider the case of a newly promoted leader who nearly derailed and how leadership stage theory informed our coaching approach.

Susan is a newly promoted healthcare leader to her role in revenue reporting with four staff members. As a new manager, she felt overwhelmed trying to learn all she needed to know about her role, manage her team, and respond to her boss’s demands. In her role only a couple of months, Susan damaged many key relationships because of her overly assertive communication style. Her manager, the CFO, voiced his desire for her to delegate more downward to join his strategic planning meetings with the CEO. Susan started to doubt the wisdom of taking the promotion and feels exhausted as she works most weekends trying to learn more about the technical aspects of her direct reports roles.

Overview of Stage Theory

Numerous theories explain the process of how one becomes an effective change leader. Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs developed an agility framework that explores leader evolution based on developmental stages. This type of model provides a valuable roadmap for executive coaches support the growth of their clients based on predictable stages of development. As leaders evolve through these stages, they are better able to lead increasingly complex change initiatives successfully.

The five stages include expert, achiever, catalyst, co-creator, and synergist.

  • Expert level managers focus on the subject-matter competence and solo efforts to get things done. As a result, they are generally capable of leading simple change projects. Approximately 45% of managers are functioning at this level.
  • Achiever-level managers are attuned to strategic views of their role and organization, as well as producing results. Research suggests that 35% of managers function at this level.
  • Catalyst-level managers can build capacity by developing and empowering people, building innovative organizational cultures, and adaptive communication capabilities. Approximately 5% of managers function at this level.
  • Co-creators are skilled at building shared purpose, collaborative relationships, and service to others. Researchers estimate that only 4% of managers function at this level.
  • Synergists embrace a holistic perspective that integrates their life purpose with their vocation. Only 1% of managers reach this stage of development. Synergists are capable of navigating the most complex types of organizational change and transformation.

Susan as an Expert Stage Manager

Through initial conversations with Susan it became apparent she was functioning at the expert stage of leader development. Susan experienced limits to her ability to lead change projects – mostly incremental process improvements. These limitations stem from her limited ability to think strategically, over-reliance on her capabilities versus leveraging others’ talents, and limited self-awareness.

Coaching Approach with Susan

As her executive coach, I began with a 360-degree assessment to help Susan understand how others perceived her. We then created a development plan and met with her manager to align on coaching’s successful outcomes. Our goal was to help Susan begin advancing toward the next stage of development: Synergist.

My approach to working with Susan included:

  • Enhancing self-awareness, including her assumptions, self-beliefs, emotional triggers, and unproductive patterns.
  • Reframing what it means to be a leader from subject-matter expert to building relationships with others and leveraging their talents to augment her weaknesses.
  • Building her skills in learning how to enlist and engage her stakeholders instead of overusing assertive advocacy skills and talking at them.
  • Adopting a broader view of her role to examine interdependencies with peers and the organization’s broader direction, including strategic priorities that could influence her focus.
  • Leveraging her talent better by explaining her expectations, providing feedback, and helping team members step up more so she could delegate more.

Coaching Outcomes

After working with Susan for six months, she achieved some notable improvements:

  • She became more aware of her emotional triggers and learned to avoid reacting at the moment, helping improve trust with others.
  • Focusing her efforts more on creating successful outcomes instead of overemphasizing her technical expertise.
  • Developing trusting relationships with her peers and building greater alignment, enabling her to break down silos that limited her department’s effectiveness.
  • More successful outcomes from change projects she was managing since she leveraged others’ talent and skills to augment her capabilities.

Stage theory is a valuable way for executive coaches to support leader growth by defining critical developmental milestones on the journey to the top. These frameworks can be a big difference in helping new managers accelerate their growth and impact as highly effective leaders.


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Dr. Kevin Nourse has more than 25 years of experience developing transformational change leaders in healthcare and other sectors. He is the founder of Nourse Leadership Strategies, a coaching and leadership development firm based in Southern California. For more information, contact Kevin at 310.715.8315 or info@nourseleadership.com.

(c) 2021 Kevin Nourse

Categories
Healthcare Leadership Development Leadership Success

Strategic Leadership: Becoming the CEO of Your Department

The increasingly complex and rapidly changing context facing healthcare organizations, especially in an era of global pandemics, translates to a significant burden on CEOs to demonstrate strategic leadership.   Setting aside time to anticipate potential threats and opportunities is tricky for many CEOs who can easily get trapped in tactical firefighting. The key is building their direct reports’ capabilities, enabling them to anticipate the pressures facing the CEO.

I work with several senior healthcare leaders who have indicated their desire for their subordinates to demonstrate strategic leadership in their departments as if they were a CEO. However, in conversations I’ve had with middle managers, this concept is poorly understood.    So what does it mean to think and act like a CEO demonstrating strategic leadership?

A hallmark of CEO functioning is strategic thinking. Strategic thinkers transcend their functional silos and can consider multiple perspectives in facing issues or challenges. CEOs vary their focus directionally in four ways: inward, downward, lateral, and upward/outward. In focusing on these directions, they consider threats, challenges, and opportunities they can exploit.

Inward Focus

Focus inward, consisting of self-awareness and self-management, and taking responsibility for your behavior and development:

  • Building awareness of your strengths, weaknesses, and emotional hot buttons
  • Asking colleagues for feedback on ways you can improve your impact
  • Creating a development plan that identifies weaknesses you want to develop and strengths to better leverage
  • Taking accountability for your words, actions, and commitments

Downward Focus

Focus downward consists of actions you take to lead and motivate your team, both the individuals who report to you and the team dynamic. Important practices include:

  • Mitigating your weaknesses by leveraging the talents of your direct reports
  • Asking your subordinates about their career interests and finding ways to help them realize them
  • Regularly engaging your team to get their input on critical issues
  • Noticing and recognizing peak performance among your direct reports
  • Communicating desired outcomes to your team and inviting them to determine the best way to achieve them

Lateral Focus

A lateral focus consists of your actions to engage and collaborate with your peers:

  • Developing strong, trusting coalitions among your peers
  • Engaging peers to elicit their input on changes in your department that might have downstream impacts
  • Proactively collaborating with your peers to improve core organizational processes
  • Advocating for your peers even if they aren’t present

Upward and Outward Focus

Focus upward and outward to proactively manage the relationship and concerns of your boss and external stakeholders and customers:

  • Understanding your organization’s strategic plan and how your department supports the attainment of critical priorities
  • Assessing and understanding emerging healthcare trends, best practices, and potential future risks
  • Continually improving the functioning of your department without being asked
  • Anticipating the challenges your boss is facing and proactively suggesting solutions
  • Paying regular attention to the needs – both expressed and unexpressed – of your external clients and stakeholders.

The road to becoming a CEO is a long one that takes persistence, resilience, and passion. Few people successfully navigate this journey. However, the essence of a CEO mindset and behavior – strategic leadership – can be incorporated into your leadership toolkit now and pay immediate returns for your career success and advancement.   

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Dr. Kevin Nourse has more than 25 years of experience coaching leaders who are experiencing transitions to thrive in their new or expanded roles. He is the founder of Nourse Leadership Strategies, a coaching and leadership development firm based in Southern California. For more information, contact Kevin at 310.715.8315 or kevin@nourseleadership.com

(c) 2022 Kevin Nourse

Categories
Goal Setting Leadership Leadership Development Leadership Success

Stepping it Up: Your First Leadership Role

man giving presentation in front of a crowd of people

Steve is a high-potential analyst in his hospital’s finance department and interested in launching his leadership transition. He was selected for a high potentials leadership program I was facilitating, including 360-degree assessment and executive coaching. With the awareness he gained from the assessment, Steve made great gains in enhancing his performance and addressing the feedback issues. He felt ready for a promotion to a leadership role. However, when I asked Steve what he would say in an interview to promote what kind of leader he wanted to be or his vision for a leadership role, his eyes glazed over.

What can high-potential leaders do to set the stage for a promotion to their first leadership role?

Leadership Platform

A leadership platform consists of clarity about your unique and authentic leadership practices and philosophies. Ideally, these practices are based on your core values. In doing so, you are better equipped to enhance trust with your team by demonstrating authenticity and genuineness.  I recall working with a leader hired to into a large healthcare organization. One of the first things she did was to share her leader platform with her direct reports. Among the elements she identified:

  • The best ideas come from people doing the work.
  • Approach me with solutions, not problems.
  • Transparent communication about our successes and failures.
  • I hold myself accountable to the expectations I have of you.
  • We address conflict directly and openly.

So how can you identify your authentic leadership platform? Here are a few strategies:

  • Reflect on effective past leaders you worked for and identify explicit or implicit values they embodied in their leadership.
  • Interview two managers you admire to learn about their core values and how they embody them in their leadership practices. 
  • Consider your deepest core values, and they would be manifest in your leadership practices. 

Leadership Vision

The other element – a leadership vision – is an essential ingredient for any current or future leader. It represents your true north in describing the future you want to create and the strategies you will use to create it. One of the key factors that distinguish a manager from a leader is an authentic vision anchored in one’s sense of purpose and values. One nurse leader I coached identified her vision: Facilitate collaborative interdisciplinary relationships that result in lower cost and higher quality healthcare for lower-income patients. 

A well-constructed vision contains several elements, including your purpose, the future state of what you want to create, and your unique approach to attaining it. Action verbs are essential!

A great way to formulate your vision is to anchor it in peak professional or volunteer experiences:

  • Identify three experiences where you felt a high impact, alive, and engaged; debrief the experiences to identify your impact and the unique skills or strategies you used.
  • Reflect on issues or challenges that trigger anger and frustration in you; these may be great indicators of the kinds of challenges that will inform your vision.
  • Ask four trusted colleagues the following: What are the situations when I am at my very best? 

Successfully advancing into your first leadership role is a combination of timing, sponsorship, having the right skills and experience, as well as demonstrating leadership potential. By proactively clarifying your leadership platform and vision, you will be better positioned to leap from individual contributor to leader. 

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Dr. Kevin Nourse has more than 25 years of experience developing transformational change leaders in healthcare and other sectors. He is the founder of Nourse Leadership Strategies, a coaching and leadership development firm based in Southern California. For more information, contact Kevin at 310.715.8315 or info@nourseleadership.com.

(c) 2021 Kevin Nourse 

Categories
Leadership Development

Virtual Leadership Development: Preventing the Webinar from Hell

Associations are increasingly using virtual classrooms and webinars to develop volunteer leaders as a means for reducing costs and expanding access to geographically diverse memberships. Having designed and facilitated such programs for nearly a decade, I find that no matter how experienced we are in producing online webinars, stuff happens. Technical glitches can quickly negate all the time and energy we invest in creating the perfect learning environment. In this blog post, I share my recent experiences and lessons learned (and relearned) while producing the webinar from hell.

The challenging webinar was a 90-minute session delivered via Adobe Meeting I produced for a long-time client, a large professional association offering a formal leadership development program for its members. There were two leaders from the client organization as guest speakers based in the Metro DC area. I produced the webinar from my home office in Palm Springs, California.

Twenty minutes into the webinar, the network status indicator in the Adobe session turned red indicating I lost my internet connection. I immediately went into triage mode to assess what was happening and how to fix it. Ultimately, I discovered there was a widespread outage in my geographic area. Fortunately, I had an iPhone with an Internet hotspot, enabling me to sustain an audio connection so that the speakers were able to continue and eventually conclude the session.

What can you do to prevent potentially painful experiences when delivering webinars for your association’s leadership development program?

Establish backup internet access

Fortunately, I purchase Sprint cell phone service that included a hot spot to access the internet. Adobe Meeting requires that the webinar host maintain a live audio connection or the session ends automatically.

Sprint service does not allow access to the internet on a cell phone hotspot while also using the voice service. As a result, I was unable to manage the online Adobe meeting classroom and concurrently have audio access. Ultimately, I chose to use my cell phone to remain connected to the audio which allowed the guest speakers to continue their presentation.

Provide copies of handouts

Without an ability to manage the Adobe classroom experience, the session presenters were unable to advance the program slides. Because participants had access to the webinar handout before the session began, the speakers were able to refer to the detailed webinar guide as a backup.

Maintain access to customer service

During the webinar from hell, I was using my cell phone to keep the classroom live and therefore had no way to contact my internet service provider to find out the extent of the local outage. At one point, I used the cell phone feature to add a call to contact my local cable provider and determine whether the disruption was widespread. Unfortunately, when I ended the call to the cable provider, it also disconnected me from the Adobe Meeting classroom. I had to quickly scramble to dial back in lest the session end prematurely.

By having a second backup internet hotspot, I could have easily contacted my local cable provider through an online chat feature instead of calling. This would have prevented a potential disaster in abruptly ending the webinar session.

Build client capabilities 

One factor that made a huge difference in completing the webinar despite major technical setbacks was an educated client. Two presenters from my client organization seamlessly continued the webinar when it became apparent that technical issues prevented the classroom from functioning. Both individuals had experience presenting via webinar and understood the need to be flexible and creative when faced with technology snafus.

Use two facilitators 

Typically when I facilitate webinars, I have a co-presenter for the session. If we have issues, one of us can troubleshoot while the other can maintain interactions with participants in the virtual classroom. In the case of this webinar, I was flying solo and had to juggle multiple roles.

Virtual learning platforms, such as Adobe Meeting, offer significant advantages to associations that are interested in developing future leaders among geographically disperse members. In most cases, the technology works flawlessly. However, the rare instances of major technical glitches can have a negative impact on the quality of these programs. The likelihood of a webinar from hell can be diminished by anticipating the worst and having contingency plans in place.

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Dr. Kevin Nourse has more than 25 years of experience developing transformational change leaders in healthcare and other sectors. He is the founder of Nourse Leadership Strategies, a coaching and leadership development firm based in Southern California. For more information, contact Kevin at 310.715.8315 or kevin@nourseleadership.com

(c) 2020 Kevin Nourse

Categories
Leadership Leadership Success

The Importance of Context and Structure for Leader Success

As an executive coach, I am often invited into organizations to help peak performing leaders get ready for a promotion to transition into a new role. Performance is the result of a leader’s ability as well as the presence of contextual factors that support peak performance. While coaching can help accelerate skill development, learning, and development, it is not very efficient in addressing inadequacies in these contextual factors. Even when there are clear developmental needs among leaders for which coaching can help address, these factors will limit the success of a coaching effort.

What are some of these contextual and structural factors? Consider the case of Barbara, a new senior program manager in a healthcare organization. Her organization embraces a matrix design where she reports to both a clinical and a service line leader, as well as administrative manager responsible for staff management.

Barbara’s managers had widely differing views about the nature and focus of her role as well as outcomes. As a result, she struggled because of the mixed and conflicting messages she often received from each of her managers. Barbara was further disengaged when her two managers decided she needed an executive coach to help her improve her behavior and attitude. While Barbara was open to coaching and achieved some useful insights, it did little to address the lack of alignment between her bosses.

What are some of the structural and contextual factors that impact both executive success and the success of a coaching engagement?

Job Role Design and Success Outcomes

For executives to excel, they should have a well-designed description of their role with a manageable set of responsibilities and performance outcomes. Also, a surprising number of organizations I have worked with are ineffective in communicating to a newly promoted leader about how an executive should achieve the goals of their role – the core competencies and organizational values they should demonstrate in producing results. For example, I recall one leader who faced near derailment because her direct and command-oriented style was incompatible with the norms of her organization’s culture which was highly collaborative.

Clear Accountability

A lack of clear accountability and reporting for a leader can lead to role ambiguity, unnecessary conflict, and diminished career potential. Executives should understand to whom they are accountable. The case of Barbara noted above is an excellent example of consequences of unclear accountability.

Job Fit

Poor executive performance sometimes results from a bad fit with their job role. An executive may have a long list of talents and skills, but if their personality or motivations don’t match the job, coaching won’t make a difference. One typical scenario I see involves individual contributors who are not motivated to be leaders, especially in technical, scientific, and clinical fields. The sad reality is that some organizations continue to embrace the mistaken belief that a successful individual contributor is always an ideal leader. 

In one instance, a technical leader I coached had little interest in managing people but took the role because she did not feel as though she could say no to her boss. As a result, she often ignored performance issues among her direct reports since she was more interested in the technical responsibilities of her job. Moreover, my client did not see herself as a leader, making it exceedingly challenging to help her develop her leadership skills given her self-perception and career interests.

Support from Above

Support comes in many forms – feedback, autonomy, and incentives to perform. I am often surprised at how little quality feedback my leadership coaching clients receive from their managers – to the point that I often wonder whether I should be coaching the boss. Quality feedback is timely and behavioral, whether developmental or positive. It is particularly critical during and after a coaching engagement, where my clients experiment with new behavior and need feedback to reinforce their development.


Autonomy for a leader is also a crucial contextual factor promoting success in an executive. I’ve coached some leaders viewed by others as too passive because they were not proactive in driving change. In some cases, they had the necessary skills to step up but lacked confidence because they were unsure about how much autonomy they had to act.


Incentives to improve performance represent an essential form of support from a boss for an executive undergoing a coaching intervention. For example, incentives like financial and non-financial rewards, greater role autonomy, or recognition. This factor goes hand-in-hand with removing barriers that limit performance improvement. For example, a leader I coached received feedback that she needed to demonstrate greater gravitas or executive presence in meetings with senior leaders. However, her boss limited her access to the CEO and other senior leaders, diminishing the impact of the coaching engagement.

Executive performance is a by-product of a leader’s skills and motivations as well as contextual and structural elements. Executive coaching is an efficient way to accelerate a leader’s ability to perform in a current or future role assuming these elements are in place and functioning well.

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Dr. Kevin Nourse has more than 25 years of experience developing transformational change leaders in healthcare and other sectors. He is the founder of Nourse Leadership Strategies, a coaching and leadership development firm based in Southern California. For more information, contact Kevin at 310.715.8315 or kevin@nourseleadership.com

(c) 2020 Kevin Nourse

Categories
Leadership Leadership Teams Team Effectiveness

Improving Team Building Efforts

Team building is a process of improving the ability of a team to collaborate and help it both achieve organizational results and fulfill the needs of its participants. Because some groups demonstrate unconscious patterns that limit their effectiveness, these engagements usually involve diagnosis, facilitation, and coaching over many weeks and months.

Unfortunately, the investments some organizations make in team building do not translate to improved results. Before hiring a consultant to help you conduct a team building effort to enhance collaboration, consider the following five questions.

How are you defining collaboration?

Your definition of collaboration may or may not correspond with how your team defines it. 

Collaboration is more than team members demonstrating positive teaming behaviors in meetings or team members acting upon top-down decisions. Instead, it implies that members willfully engage each other, share their best thinking with each other, consciously debate ideas, and remain open to feedback from their colleagues – both within and outside of team meetings.

Before I accept team building engagements, I often suggest that CEOs first elicit input from their leadership teams about what it means to collaborate. This practice can help surface any inconsistencies among team members and ensure that a team building initiative will succeed because there is alignment around what collaboration means. 

Is your executive group really a team?

A workgroup is not necessarily a team. Workgroups are traditionally top-down oriented with team members focused on tasks with little or no need for collaboration. However, to be a team implies there are dependencies between individuals on the team, as well as a shared vision. It also suggests that the nature of the work to be done is complex enough to call forth a need for different perspectives. It is not a good investment of organizational resources to conduct a team building effort when a workgroup is not a team. 

Are members of your executive team capable of collaborating?

Some leaders are seemingly not wired to collaborate in a team environment. In fact, some leaders should remain individual contributors and not be expected to collaborate based on their working style and personality. Before conducting a team building session, its critical to assess the capacity of team members to function as a team. For those team members who actively resist such efforts, they may need additional one-on-one coaching and feedback to help them remain open to the idea. 

One healthcare CEO I worked with had a CMO on his senior leadership team who actively resisted efforts to build a collaborative team. The engagement was still positive, but several months later the CMO resigned. The new CMO was strongly supportive of team effectiveness, and the senior leadership team flourished in its efforts to collaborate. 

Are there structures in place that support collaboration?

The lack of structural support for a team and collaboration can diminish any effort to help a workgroup become a team. For example, if executives are compensated solely for their individual effort, there is little motivation to function as a collaborative team. Another example of a critical organizational structure is performance standards. Organizations that embed expectations of success for both business goals and demonstration of core competencies (e.g., collaboration, communication, etc.) provide a compelling incentive for members of the senior leadership team to collaborate.

In the vignette noted in the last question, the CEO did raise the issue of the CMOs resistance to him directly. However, there were no implications regarding negative impacts on his performance appraisal. As a result, the resistant behavior continued. 

How does your behavior impact collaboration?

I rarely take on a team building client if I don’t believe an executive can reflect on how their behavior may contribute to the lack of collaboration on a team. This behavior can be explicit, such as verbally criticizing the ideas of team members in an open forum, as well as non-verbally such as when an executive rolls her eyes when team members share their proposals.

I recall working with an executive team where the CEO was frustrated because team members remained passive and would not step up and address important issues. Upon further exploration, it became evident that he was unable to let go of control of the team – thus, reinforcing a pattern of passivity among these direct reports. I raised the issue with him directly, and after some exploration, he became more receptive to letting the team take greater ownership of their process. As the team increased its trust, this CEO even became willing to allow the senior leadership team to meet without him.

Many sectors, especially healthcare, are facing higher pressure to delivering quality services at lower costs. Therefore, collaboration within the organization, especially at the senior-most levels, is critical. A team building initiative can make a substantial contribution to accelerating this process to become more collaborative. CEOs should ask themselves some critical questions before launching such an effort to ensure its success.

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Dr. Kevin Nourse has more than 25 years of experience developing transformational change leaders in healthcare and other sectors. He is the founder of Nourse Leadership Strategies, a coaching and leadership development firm based in Southern California. For more information, contact Kevin at 310.715.8315 or kevin@nourseleadership.com

(c) 2020 Kevin Nourse

Categories
Healthcare Leadership Leadership Teams Resiliency

Reigniting Leadership Resilience

Steve is a CEO in a 300-bed healthcare system and has four senior executives that report directly to him. With the stresses and demands of the COVID pandemic, he has noticed a palpable decline in their leadership resilience. They are much more emotionally reactive, make poor decisions, and become easily rattled in dealing with emerging issues. Worse yet, their inability to sustain a calm demeanor in the face the second COVID surge seems to be triggering panic among their direct reports. 

The functioning of the senior leadership team in any organization plays a critical role in shaping culture and influencing organizational success. The ability of the executive team to resiliently navigate tough challenges can shape the collective resilience of an organization. What can you do to build leadership resilience in the face of setback and adversity so common during COVID?

Be Aware of the Symptoms of Burnout

Pay attention to the behavior and language used among your leadership team, taking note of self-defeating language and fight-flight-freeze behavior that can spread like a wildfire from one executive to another. Other symptoms of burnout among your team members could include: 

  • Frequent absenteeism 
  • Mistakes 
  • Reduced motivation or increased resistance in taking on new projects 
  • Emotional outbursts 
  • Frequent silence in leadership team meetings 
  • Lack of collaboration 
  • Unproductive conflict 

Identify and Explore the Causes of Burnout

It’s difficult to address the issue of burnout if you are not aware of what’s causing it. There are a number of potential causes: 

  • Inadequate resources to achieve organizational priorities 
  • Role overload of team members 
  • Role ambiguity and confusion 
  • Fire-fighting mentality 
  • Lack of focus on anticipating future challenges 
  • Little or no recognition for team achievements 
  • Inefficient processes 
  • Lack of alignment among the senior leadership team on key priorities 

Be aware that as the team leader, you may be one of the contributing factors to the burnout of your team. In one client organization I worked with, the team leader was so afraid of conflict that he did not advocate for his team when it came to requesting financial resources and managing boundaries with other teams. This resulted in team members feeling overwhelmed and frustrated at the lack of support from above.

Adopt an Appreciative View of Successes and Progress

Most teams look ahead to the next challenge and often forget to celebrate progress as a way to build leadership resilience. This is particularly relevant during the COVID pandemic given the uncertainty of how long it will last.  Many of the leadership teams I have consulted with often claim they don’t need acknowledgment of their successes and yet, recognition is such an integral ingredient to sustaining ones’ resiliency. Make an effort, as a team, to identify progress. Instead of asking the question “where did we fail?” consider asking questions like “where did we succeed?” or “what did we learn?” One senior leadership team I worked with recently committed to quarterly sessions to reevaluate progress toward priorities and acknowledge challenges they overcame together. 

Recommit to Your Collective Values, Mission, and Vision

One surefire way to reignite leadership resilience is to revisit your core values, your mission as a team, and the vision you are trying to unfold. This kind of activity allows a team to revisit with its larger purpose by disengaging from the tactical details and day-to-day frustrations and explore essential questions. Good questions to explore as a group include: 

  • How are we living our core values in our work? 
  • How have we made manifest our vision? 
  • What is the impact of our mission on our community and world? 

Senior leadership teams play a critical role in shaping the culture of an organization. When leadership teams periodically reinvest in their resilience individually and collectively, they are better able to sustain their performance and convey a sense of optimism to their followers – particularly critical during the COVID pandemic. 

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Dr. Kevin Nourse has more than 25 years of experience developing transformational change leaders in healthcare and other sectors. He is the founder of Nourse Leadership Strategies, a coaching and leadership development firm based in Southern California. For more information, contact Kevin at 310.715.8315 or kevin@nourseleadership.com

(c) 2020 Kevin Nourse

Categories
Leadership Resiliency

Building Organizational Resilience Through Leadership

We consider resilience a skill or quality people can develop to navigate challenging times. However, organizational leaders can play a significant role in the ability of their direct reports to build and sustain their resilience in the face of adversity. 

A recent study in Group and Organization Management found that transformational leaders contribute to the capacity of their followers to increase their resilience by evoking positive emotions. The researchers polled people in several Canadian healthcare organizations facing a significant crisis, and participants were members of clinical teams and their managers. The positive emotions experienced by the employees contributed to greater levels of creativity in solving challenging problems in the crisis, resulting in enhanced self-confidence. Among the behaviors transformational leaders use that trigger these positive emotions are a positive vision of the future, confidence in subordinates’ abilities to tackle the challenges created by the crisis, and reinforcing core values. 

The findings of this study are consistent with a resilience-building program I implemented for a healthcare client. The client was experiencing significant change at the senior leader level, which resulted in frustration, disillusionment, and disengagement among middle managers and staff. The leadership development project consisted of three parts:

  1. An electronic survey of staff attitudes about the challenges they faced and factors that helped or diminished their ability to remain resilient.
  2. A training session for the managers in the department on resiliency and exploration of the survey themes.
  3. A training session for staff in the department on resiliency-building strategies and concepts.

The factors staff identified as detrimental to their resilience were needing more clarity and direction, inefficiencies in core work processes, and overwhelming workload. The primary theme associated with sustaining the resiliency of staff was the support provided by managers and role modeling (managers modeled resilience for their direct reports).

Both the study and my client intervention align with the theme of leaders playing a critical role in shaping the resilience of their staff from two perspectives: 

  • Increasing the experience of positive emotions through transformational leader behaviors, including supporting their teams and modeling resilient behavior. 
  • Decreasing the experience of negative emotions by identifying and eliminating their sources, such as removing confusion about goals, improving the efficiency of core work processes, and recalibrating the workload of staff. 

While a leader’s role in sustaining their followers’ resilience is becoming more apparent, researchers need to explore various factors, such as the impact of gender, peer relationships, and the nature of the challenge or adversity that people are experiencing.

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Dr. Kevin Nourse has more than 25 years of experience developing transformational change leaders in healthcare and other sectors. He is the founder of Nourse Leadership Strategies, a coaching and leadership development firm based in Southern California. For more information, contact Kevin at 310.715.8315 or kevin@nourseleadership.com

(c) 2020 Kevin Nourse