This is a response to Pierre’s response to MSSL ET1 – “EL EQUIPO DIRECTIVO” here:
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.
In addition to the above suggestion, I would also want to touch on Pierre’s and Marcelo’s point to “there is no blame”. While I understand the cultural challenges to this point, I think it plays out very often in the North Americal culture as well. Very often, leaders forget to hold others accountable in their team. Lepsinger (2010) reported the following in a research study:
In our survey of over four hundred senior and mid-level leaders, 40 percent report that employees in their organizations are not being held accountable for results and 20 percent report that managers in their organizations do not deal with poor performers. It also appears that the presence or absence of accountability in an organization makes a difference—77 percent of leaders in top-performing organizations report that “employees at all levels are held accountable for results,” compared to only 44 percent in less-successful organizations.
We often believe creating a system of accountability is only required when certain individuals or teams are low-performing, or perhaps it is considered too “micro-managing” when leaders expect regular check-ins with their team members. Yet, increased accountability can enhance team performance, experience more success, and express more satisfaction with the members of their teams than those who are not held accountable (Lepsinger, 2010). My personal encouragement to all TSL is to consider accountability as a strategic tool to enhance the effectiveness of their team, whether it is in health care or educational settings.
References:
Florendo, P. (2018). RESPONSE TO MSSL ET1 – “EL EQUIPO DIRECTIVO” Retrieved October 20, 2018, from https://create.twu.ca/pierreflorendo/2018/10/19/response-to-mssl-et1-el-equipo-directivo/
Lepsinger, R. (2010). Closing the execution gap: How great leaders and their companies get results. Jossey Bass.
Scott, R. J. (2018). The Eisenhower Matrix: How to Make Decisions on What’s Urgent and Important. Retrieved October 20, 2018 from https://www.developgoodhabits.com/eisenhower-matrix/
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.