This is a response to Marcelo’s blog post here:
Marcelo’s honest and heartfelt sharing of his education ministry is very humbling to me. As the principal of his school, I really do sense the challenges that he faces, yet I can sense his undying perseverance and hope that he has for the school and the staff. In Marcelo’s post, he described the many challenges the school is facing and one of them is the fact the institution is still in its infancy and just celebrated their fifth year anniversary. Marcelo continues by stating a young institution can be fragile and unbalanced and it is essential to find the right path that will lead to healthy growth and bring the institution into full maturity.
Reading the above description reminds me of many new emerging businesses that are trying to succeed in the market. When I was in high school, I worked for one such retail store in Vancouver. This business specialized in importing and retail small car accessories such as air fresheners, light bulbs, decals, and other decorations that one would put in their cars. For the first few years, the business was booming and the owner decided to quickly expand from one retail location to three high profile locations. However, nothing is for certain in this volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world (Ungerer, M., Ungerer, G., & Herholdt, J., 2016, pg. 3). After working for this business for a few years as a part-time job, I have left to pursue other opportunities and continued with my undergraduate studies. A few years after I left, I noticed the business started to deteriorate, closing one location after another until eventually, all retail locations are permanently closed.
While I have no concrete answer to prevent from such an event from happening. I do believe fostering a culture of agility is one way of strategic acting in the face of uncertainty and turbulence (Hughes, R., Beatty, K. & Dinwoodie, D., 2014, pg. 127). From Marcelo’s description of the recent events with staff turnover and other uncertainties, the ability to make a fast and effective action in these types of events. Hughes et al. (2014) state “agility involves more than an organization’s time to act” (pg. 127) and may include acting outside of the organization’s and cultural norms in order to create an effective strategy. I remember reading Marcelo’s previous post and he indicated how the culture has greatly influenced how the institution and staff operate, I wonder if there is an opportunity to be creative and able to find solutions that could be effective in managing these challenges? Hughes et al. (2014) further suggest “even if you can’t change the culture of the whole organization, you can take steps to change the culture and the behaviour of the people in your part of it” (pg. 128).
Thank you Marcelo in sharing your journey with us. God knows your heart and love for the people and the students and I will continue to pray for His work to be done at your school.
References:
Hughes, R., Beatty, K. & Dinwoodie, D. (2014). Becoming a strategic leader : your role in your organization’s enduring success. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Ungerer, M., Ungerer, G., & Herholdt, J. (2016). Navigate strategic possibilities: strategy formulation and execution practices to flourish. Randburg: KR Publishing.
As I am reading Stella’s blog post, I can immediately sense the frustrations that she encounters in her workplace, but also the desire for an improvement. I really appreciate Stella’s honesty in sharing her thoughts and situation. As a father of two young children and one of them just entered Kindergarten, I really appreciate our educators here in British Columbia. For the past two years, my wife and I were struggling to make a decision in terms of whether to place our son in a public school or private school system. On one hand, we have the public school system where it’s is accessible and it is completely funded by the government. The resources that we would save would mean we can invest it in other types of learning such as after-school sports or music program. On the other hand, we very much value the Christian school setting, where our beliefs and values can be further reinforced by the school community. With the recent media attention of the SOGI123 resource implementation in various school districts, as a parent, I feel the public school system no longer provide parents with the opportunity to provide input to their own child’s education. Ultimately, we have decided to place our son in the Christian private school that is in our neighbourhood for the above reasons, in addition, to show support in the private Christian school system. My son’s school is now expanding in capacity and looking towards building a new campus. This is a good sign that we have many people in our community that values Christian teaching at our schools. As a response to Stella’s comments on exposure, I would like to provide a bit of an encouragement that while public school systems do seem to engulf by the public sector, there are many families that appreciate the Christian schools and teachers in the community. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Working under a Health Authority, such as Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH), presents specific challenges in terms of staff engagement and retention. In its rigid corporate environment, there are many restrictions and limitations in terms of what the organization can do to engage and motivate health care workers. One way to motivate staff is a reward system. The rewards system is designed to align the goals of individuals with the goals of the organization (Galbraith, J. R., 2014). With any government-funded organization, the spending by any department can be heavily scrutinized and held accountable to tax-payers. This means spending on items outside of regularly mandated activities is highly discouraged. In contrast, my wife is a supervisor at a private medical imaging clinic. They often provide gift cards in small increments as a token of recognition for staff who did a good job. Throughout the year, the company also host and paid for various events such as Christmas celebration and family activity day to increase team morale and create a tighter community. These incentives appear small but can create a big impact in terms of engaging staff members and create a sense of ownership within the organization. When our such spending is out of the question, the health authority will need to utilize strategic thinking to find creative ways to achieve the same outcome. In one of my previous 
There is a lot of distrust in union workers. Like many government agencies, health care workers are unionized. While there are many benefits for staff such as job security and fair employment process, the union can also create a lot of unnecessary tension and distrust when there is a conflict between the leadership team and staff members. Union organizations tend to be skeptical of many directives from the leadership group and advise union members to always consider “what’s in it for me”. This type of perspective foster a culture of selfishness and apathy when comes to organizational interests. In terms of dealing with human resources in the health care setting, we must first establish trust by making common sense with transparent communications. Our leadership team is faced with many challenges such as new directives from higher level agencies. Often, these directives will translate to some less desirable changes to the frontline staff. As strategic leaders, we must help others in the organization make common sense of the world around them, the challenges they collectively face, and how they will face them together (Hughes, Beatty, & Dinwoodie, 2014, p. 84). Even when details of the directive is not relevant to the frontline staff, providing the information will help staff members understand why certain decisions are made. As suggested by Hughes et al. (2014), “unarticulated knowledge can cause people to feel unclear or confused about the apparent disconnectedness between the priorities, policies, and processes of different teams, departments, or divisions in their organization” (pg. 85).
The culture of learning is key to engage staff. Achieving the enduring performance potential of the organization requires the hearts, minds, and hands of all to be engaged (Hughes et al., 2014, p. 41). To do this, the strategic leaders must be willing to learn from others in all levels of the organization, including frontline staff. The result of engaging staff members in different levels and departments is the creation of new connections and relationships that would foster higher levels of motivation and morality (Imbenzi, Williaume, & Page, 2013, para. 14).
Two years ago VCH conducted an employee engagement survey to assess the health of the workforce. The results of the survey were abysmal, with over 47% of health care workers stating dissatisfaction and disengagement with the organization. The CEO of the organization has made it her priority in VCH to address these concerns. Since then, many different initiatives have rolled out such as abolishing the employee absence program and promoting a learning series on change. Yet, even though the idea of this initiative is good, not many changes have happened within the organization. In fact, many staff members that I know are confused and not sure what is happening within the organization. I believe this is because the initiative is missing a few key items:
I have been reading many of the blog posts and especially enjoying the integration of our learning to our professional careers and how both the health and education sector are so closely related. I would like to focus my response to Pierre’s encouragement to Marcelo, to create more groups to tackle difficulties due to the perception of more work (Florendo, 2018). As mentioned by Florendo (2018), the urgent day-to-day activities often keep us from achieving important goals. This is very similar in health care and education settings. We are often inundated by urgent, but non-important issues where we have no other time to plan and act on important matters. In addition in forming more groups to tackle difficulties, I would also suggest the use of the Eisenhower Matrix to assist with prioritizing various tasks and projects. The matrix is sort into four quadrants: Important-Urgent, Important-Not urgent, Not important-Urgent, and Not important-Not urgent (Scott, 2018). Very often, we are plagued with work that is urgent and requires immediate attention. Some of these are important, but many more are not important. What’s critical of note is many of our important, long-term goals and strategies fall under the important-not urgent quadrant. When we are too busy and only spend our time with urgent issues, we often neglect what’s really important and impactful to the organization or team. As suggested by Scott (2018), we should be spending most of our time focusing on quadrant 2 items and not the other way around. Following the suggestion of this matrix can help individuals or team to refocus on what is the most important tasks that would fulfil long-term strategic goals.
I really appreciated Marcelo’s response to Kamal’s post in sharing his experiences in communication and recognition with his own team. Marcelo mentioned in his post on the challenges he had with communication in Paraguay due to its culture is so important and relevant in our culture here in Canada as well. In my experiences as an Environmental Health Officer (EHO) in Vancouver, we routinely perform inspections at various restaurants and food places. Vancouver’s pride in its multi-ethnicity means we have many restaurant operators originated outside of Canada and allowing our citizens the opportunity to taste cuisines from all over the world. This also means as EHOs, we often have to work with operators from different cultures. If we are not culturally sensitive in our communications with operators, we often misunderstand each other and reach a different outcome. For instance, when a verbal order is directed to an operator who is accustomed to the North American culture, we expect he/she to listen to our instructions and ask questions if they do not understand. The “silence is agreement” model is often used. However, in other cultures, silence can be interpreted differently. In order to “save face”, some operators would stay silent even when they are uncertain or confused by the situation. They may not agree with the directive but continue to keep silent. The result of this is the EHO would leave the premises thinking we an agreement was made and yet when returning later for a re-inspection, all the same issues persist because the operator did not understand what needs to be done.
Pierre’s blog post on his personal experience with a high-producing health care team is an interesting and thought-provoking read! In summary, Pierre was part of a high-producing team in health care, where the team consistently achieved the highest level of accreditation, yet upon his evaluation of the team based on the Strategic Team Review and Action Tool (STRAT) as described by Hughes, Beatty, & Dinwoodie (2014, pp. 290), the performance of the team appears to be poor in terms of strategic leadership. From your description of the team and its dysfunctional leadership, it is definitely not surprising to hear from your evaluation. But the fact the team continued producing at a high level leads me to believe there were some positive aspects that came from its leadership team. Despite leadership’s nepotism and lack of engagement of other staff members, staff turnover still remained low. From my own personal experience, success rarely happens by accident and I wonder if there some positive experiences or strategies that can be gleaned from this experience and from the previous leadership team? One of my mentors encouraged me some time ago and said, “people who are learning to be leaders will learn many different ideas and strategies as they progress but it is up to them to decide what works well for yourself”. I would personally love to hear more of Pierre’s insights on this, especially when he is now in a leadership position. It sounds like there will be quite a challenge in the future ahead for Pierre in creating a high-functioning, strategic team.
I believe there are many secular people and organizations already recognized the importance of attending the needs of others and have implemented some form of TSL, even though it may not be called that. If you read my introduction post, I love coffee! While Starbucks’ coffee is average, in my opinion, I have to agree that Starbucks is a great international coffee company that is non-christian and yet, demonstrates TSL. Starbucks mission is “to inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighbourhood at a time.” (Ungerer, M., Ungerer, G., & Herholdt, J., 2016, p. 55). Starbucks’ values also include the following as mentioned in Ungerer et. al. (2016):
Thank you for everyone’ encouragement with regards to my original post! I am truly happy to know that my thoughts were thought-provoking and resonated with people. I also hope that the video was a good reminder for all of us, as TSL, to “stay above the line”. It is more difficult in practice than in theory. As mentioned in the video, our brains are programmed to perceive “threat”, especially in this volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambitious (VUCA) world (Ungerer, Ungerer, & Herholdt, 2016). We will need to intentionally take ourselves to be “above the line” if we want to be effective in leading others.
This is the Health Angels first post! Who are the Health Angels you ask? We are a dedicated group of health care professionals who are pursuing their passion in becoming strategic leaders in our fields. The Health Angels name is actually a word play of one of the notorious motorcycle gang that is prominent in Canada and United States where members typically ride Harley-Davidson motorcycles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hells_Angels). But not to lose focus, we are the Health Angels, strategic leaders in health care!
Transformational servant leadership (TSL), is a concept consisting of the ideologies of transformational leadership and servant leadership (Imbenzi, Williaume, & Page, 2013, para. 11). The combination of these two concepts is strategic in nature to effectively engage followers to achieve the organizational purposes by attending to the needs to the followers (Imbenzi et al., 2013, para. 34). When considering strategic leadership direction for health care, TSL greatly shifts the focus of a predominantly service-centric industry to learning-centric in order to focus the most important asset, which is the personal and intellectual property of the organization (Imbenzi et al., 2013, para. 38). In other words, the paradoxical shift of the focus from patients (outward focus) to staff (inward focus) is a strategic way to increase staff engagement and improve health care for patients.
Health care professionals are overworked. Speaking from personal experiences of working in Canada under a government-funded health care system, we have some of the most caring and dedicated staff members who decided to enter into the field because of their passion to serve and to help others. However, the challenges with the Canadian universal health care system is the lack of accessibility and availability of care in a timely manner. For example, recent studies have illustrated access to family physicians in Canada is becoming increasingly difficult due to physician shortages and increase rates of chronic illness (Ansell, Crispo, Simard, & Bjerre, 2017, p.2). One of the results of this is patients turn to urgent care in the hospitals for non-urgent health issues which contribute to the long wait times. CTV News Vancouver (2017) reported emergency room wait times are the worse in the province of British Columbia compared to other areas in Canada with about ninety percent of emergency visits were complete after 8.4 hours in the 2016-17 fiscal year (Miljure, B. and Mangione, K., 2017). Waiting for health care appointments can often impose a physical and emotional burden on individuals who are in pain or worried about serious health conditions. However, the excessive wait times not only puts a burden on patients but to health care workers as well. With patients lining for hours at hospitals, health care professionals are in extremely high demand, resulting in staff being overworked, missing necessary meal breaks and working in overtime shifts constantly. Many professionals that talked to mentioned burn-out as one of the factors of job dissatisfaction.
Approximately one month ago, my wife and I visited our elderly grandmother who was admitted to the hospital due to a kidney failure. Grandma was sharing a room with three other patients who are also in care. During this nighttime visit, two of the patients in the room require assistance and had called for help on numerous occasions but to no avail. They groaned and call the alarm for help until eventually, a nurse came in. The nurse was busy and her hands already full, running and hustling about. The nurse told them they will have to wait as one of her colleague called in sick and unable to work. She later added there were six other patients that are waiting for her assistance as well. I felt bad for this nurse, who sighed and walked away, didn’t even bother to apologize or make an excuse. Our health care professionals work tirelessly to care for those who are in need. This question comes up often: who will care for those who care for us?
In 2012, all health authorities in British Columbia faced a budget cut mandated by the federal government. In the efforts of reducing the overtime costs and excessive sick-time, many health authorities went through a dramatic change in health care worker’s scheduling. The result of this change led to many dissatisfied workers having to work shift times that are unfavourable to their lives. Many committed individuals felt this schedule change was unnecessary and they provided various alternative strategies that would help fulfil the budget mandate without having taken this step. In subsequent surveys that were conducted of the staff in Vancouver Coastal Health indicated job satisfaction and engagement is at an all-time low, with much to do with this imposed change.
There is no money. With various constraints and mandates from higher levels of government, a TSL must utilize critical thinking in order to continue to support our health care workers. When monetary incentives are out of the question, the TSL will need to utilize critical thinking and consider alternative means to motivate staff members such as providing additional learning and development opportunities.