We’ve learned so much in our Leadership Quest and taken on new tools and communication frameworks to be sure we can lead well. We’ve also worked to lean into servant leadership and our ServiceFIRST principles to ensure we’re fully supporting our teams and bringing the best out of our employees.

This time of major transition and change could be one of the biggest leadership challenges we’ll face in our career with so many new and unexpected surprises to navigate. Even with all of the excitement ahead, our teams may be feeling worn down, worn out, and tensions and miscommunications are sure to happen as everyone is pushing their hardest to the peak.

We’ve come so far as a leadership team, scaling the summit and working our way to the peak. We’re getting so close now, we can see the finish line, but we may be starting to feel that as close as we are, we don’t have the stamina to finish this climb.

This feeling is 100% natural and many times we lose steam because we’ve become so focused on the goal and getting all the work done that we’ve begun to neglect our physical and mental health. Instead of investing in our resilience reserves, honoring our routines, and building our connection and collaboration with our team, we forsake all of our best practices for one more push, one more bit of work, one more sprint toward the finish line.

Our work as leader is so important to our organizations. Supporting and guiding our teams is a great privilege and responsibility that can help enhance our employees’ experience, improve patient care, and lead our health system to greater innovation, efficiency, and impact. But, as leaders, we also need to ensure that we are being supported and encouraged in our roles, too.

Without built-in support and community, leadership can become a very lonely experience. We can feel isolated which can lead us to operate within silos, decreasing trust and collaboration with others, stifling creativity, collaboration, and innovation.

Making our way to the summit and preparing for the transition to the HCMD, we’ll need our teams more than ever to help us navigate all that lies ahead. We’ll need a strong, robust team to maintain the strength and fortitude to get us to the top of the peak.

In Triannual II, we learned that our “one thing” as leaders is to develop people and processes, to grow ourselves and our teams in order to deliver exceptional patient care.

One of the key ways we can help grow our teams is through intentional employee rounding – regular opportunities to check in and assist our employees with any challenges and struggles – and through coaching.

Moving to the HCMD and getting to be inaugural team of an incredible state-of-the-art medical campus may be one of the biggest and most exciting events of our career.

It’s amazing to be involved in such a major innovation and part of the leadership team that is helping to make a 1-in-100-year leap toward our next stage of growth and evolution as an organization.

One of the toughest challenges as a leader is broaching crucial conversations.

Our bodies are hardwired to flee from danger and one of our biggest threats in the workplace is the threat of conflict and confrontation. It may sound more benign than running from a saber-toothed tiger, but actually, all of the same fight, flight, or freeze responses are activated in our bodies when we need to have a tough conversation, as when we’d need to literally run for our lives!

These conversations are so hard to approach because we know they are costly. The three key elements of what makes a conversation “Crucial” are that there are high stakes, strong emotions, and opposing opinions.

Any time we take on a major quest, we know we need a map to get us to where we’re headed. We need an itinerary, travel plan, GPS, and directions to get us safely to our destination.

But, as we learned at Triannual III, simply having the HOW is not enough. We can’t just plan for how we’ll get to where we’re headed, as humans, we also need to know WHY.

Last week, we discussed the importance of creating a 90 day action plan – a clear strategic roadmap you can use to plan out the next three months of transition for your team.

Setting goals and mapping a clear path to success will help you maximize the next three months and ensure the move to the HCMD goes as smoothly as possible and that employees and patients are well cared for during the move.

If you’re having trouble determining the most essential tasks to plan for, here are 4 habits every leader must master in order to successfully lead their team through transition:

We’ve been traveling up the mountain for quite a while now and we’re getting so close to the summit, we can finally see the peak.

We can see the end goal of reaching the top and are beginning to get a glimpse of how our hard work will come to fruition. With the opening of the new campus three months away, it’s time to re-engage our leadership skills and dig deep to create a solid plan that will get our teams to the top.

This Tuesday, January 24th, we heard from leadership and change management coach, Dr. Rachel Headley about Growth Mindset and Four “Culture Types” that help us understand how different people respond to chaos and change.