Every year, it’s essential to set the strategic direction for what you’d like to accomplish and where you’d like your department, team, and individual work as a leader to go. 

It’s important to work through this work on your own, but also incredibly valuable to gain input from your team. Working together, you’ll be able to align your visions and create even more positive change as one cohesive unit.

Take some time and think about the Four Focuses of a Leader: Resilience, Engagement, Experience, and Innovation. Now, define what you want to accomplish this year in each of the four areas. Even if you’re not accustomed to yearly planning, try to think about overarching improvements that could be made in these buckets and how you could fix your focus on making those shifts in each category this year.

Questions to Guide Your Yearly Planning

1. Building Resilience: What can you do to build personal resilience and resilience within your team?

2. Inspiring Employee Engagement: What can you do to be a more engaged employee and help inspire employee engagement within your team?

3. Improving the Patient/Customer Experience: How can you improve the patient/customer experience for your direct customer and where can your team elevate the customer experience for those they serve?

4. Innovating Operations: Where can you help innovate operations and how can your team improve operations within your department and sphere of influence?

Review your notes on pages 15-17 of your Planner and define your goals for the coming year.

Keep this list in a prominent place and review it at least quarterly to be sure you’re still on track.

As we acknowledged in our firefighting lesson, we know that leaders are constantly pulled in too many directions, feeling responsible for everything, yet defeated because after fighting all of the fires, we’re not able to accomplish much of anything. 

With this Leadership Quest, all of Trinity Health is committing to reorienting our leaders around four – that’s right, only four – core focus areas, simplifying our work as leaders to: Resilence, Engagement, Experience, and Innovation.

We will rebuild our conversations with. our leaders and direct reports who are leaders around these core focuses to help us align our work throughout every level of the organization.

1. Resilience: a focus on cultivating personal and team wellbeing, building connections and a deeper sense of community, and finding purpose and meaning

2. Engagement: providing clear and motivating leadership to our teams, developing and coaching our employees to become their best, and crafting a cohesive and uplifting employee experience

3. Experience: elevating the patient and customer experience, enhancing the user experience for potential and future patients, and serving our community

4. Innovation: improving processes, operations and services, driving growth that is sustainable, repeatable, and substantial, and having impact at scale.

Narrowing our focus will help us maximize and reclaim our most valuable resource as leaders – our time.

Review the Four Focuses of a Leader on page 12 of your Planner.

Resilience is an essential foundation for all of us, and an important focus of a leader.

As Dr. Brene Brown says, “Joy, collected over time, fuels resilience, ensuring we’ll have reservoirs of emotional strength when hard things do happen.”

Intentionally building our resilience helps to equip us to handle anything that may come. It gives us the internal and emotional strength we need to respond with our highest capacity and create the greatest, most positive change.

Here are tools for building our resilience:

1. Bucket List: in this lesson, we focused on outlining our bucket list – making a go-to list of everything we can do to fill our bucket so we’re able to immediately fill up our tank when our reservoirs are running low. Set a date with yourself or a friend to check off some items from your bucket list on a regular basis to keep your reserves full.

**In Triannual II, when we dig into employee engagement, a great tool to support our team will be knowing what’s on their bucket list. Knowing the most effective way to encourage and recharge our team will help us be compassionate and effective leaders.

2. Resilience Routine: Hal Elrod’s Miracle Mornings book set the framework for building out our resilience routine and reclaiming the first hour of each day to doing whatever we need to fill our tank. He suggested six types of activities with the “SAVERS” acronym that will help us start the day right:

–Silence: quiet your mind, block out any chatter, and focus on your breathing

–Affirmation: repeat encouraging words to help you overcome your fears, achieve your goals, and feel happy

–Visualization: walk through your day and imagine meeting everything that comes with a successful outcome

–Exercise: get your blood flowing and increase the oxygen to your brain with physical movement like yoga, walking, or working out

–Reading: find positive, inspiring material to improve your outlook and help you grow and develop as a leader

–Scribing: spend time journaling to process your thoughts, set your goals, and reflect on everything you’ve already achieved

**Design your Resilience Routine and start your own Miracle Mornings with the exercise on page 14 of your Planner.

Painting the picture from where we’d like to go from here, we stopped to envision what the future of leadership and success at Trinity Health could become.

We received many great responses for what ONE word would describe success with the most common responses including teamwork, communication, accountability, and transparency. 

We also worked with our table teams to draw out the vision and saw great images of sunshine, teams working together, rainbows, self expression, and joy.

Some of the words we used to capture the essence of the drawings included: positive environment, collaboration, encouraging, communication, balance, leadership, focus, united, motivated, community, direction, bright future, happy, and hope.

These are visions captured directly from you and your fellow leaders and all of these future state visions are possible. Committing to this Leadership Quest with a willing and open heart will allow us to make these visions a reality.

Check out a closer look at the future state visions in the gallery below. 

Painting the picture from where we’d like to go from here, we stopped to envision what the future of leadership and success at Trinity Health could become.

We received many great responses for what ONE word would describe success with the most common responses including teamwork, communication, accountability, and transparency. 

We also worked with our table teams to draw out the vision and saw great images of sunshine, teams working together, rainbows, self expression, and joy.

Some of the words we used to capture the essence of the drawings included: positive environment, collaboration, encouraging, communication, balance, leadership, focus, united, motivated, community, direction, bright future, happy, and hope.

These are visions captured directly from you and your fellow leaders and all of these future state visions are possible. Committing to this Leadership Quest with a willing and open heart will allow us to make these visions a reality.

Check out a closer look at the future state visions in the gallery below.