After we looked back on our COVID experience, we took a moment to assess where we are now in our role as leaders and in our life.

The chart above (and easier to read on page 6 of your Planner) offered a pulse check with four states – In Crisis, Struggling, Surviving, or Thriving – with key physical and emotional characteristics of each.

While you may have been surprised at your results, it’s important to remember that experiencing any of the states is completely normal and our experience on the spectrum may ebb and flow – as we saw from capturing our state now and during the height of COVID.

Our goal with the Leadership Quest is to give you the tools and resources you need to feel supported and equipped to tackle anything that comes and to help you build your resilience to allow you to move more regularly toward thriving on this continuum.

One of the greatest benefits to the quest is being in a room with 230 other leaders who are facing many of the same challenges that you’re facing.

Team up with one of your fellow leaders to work through whatever you’re facing or take advantage of the EAP and Orexo resources offered by Trinity Health. You’ll find info to access those resources in the Employee Assistance Section of your Employee Handbook.

We know all too well that our role as leaders can be chaotic – especially within healthcare. This chaos can be captured best with the image of firefighting. 

As leaders, we’re often running from one fire to the next, causing us to feel overwhelmed and like we’re never gaining any traction.

We feel as though we’re stretched incredibly thin and we’re never able to stop to get a breath, let alone take the time to vision, strategize, plan, and do the most essential tasks of a leader.

Throughout this Leadership Quest, we’ll be gathering tools to help reorient our work, Getting at the Right Level and getting out of the heat of the everday fires into the more visionary work of leadership.

We’ll work to move from responding to urgent and unplanned tasks to inspiring, movtivating, and influencing our team with a forward focus.

We’ll also work to innovate our systems and processes to increase efficiencies and prevent fires from happening as well as work to develop our employees’ strengths and abilities to help build even more leaders who can also preemptively decrease the firefighting that’s necessary to keep the organization running.

For the list of tasks within each category of work – Firefighting, Managing, and Leading, open to page 8 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. 

 
While we work to reshape our leadership practices and make positive, external changes to the way Trinity Health functions, we know that so many things are still beyond our ability to control.

We can’t stop pandemics from happening, can’t prevent major blizzards from shutting things down, and can’t control many of the day to day problems that we’ll face in our work as leaders. However, we CAN control how we approach those challenges and the mindset and attitude we embody as we take things on.

Arthur W. Frank studied many patients facing terminal illnesses and uncovered three narratives of hope and despair that will shape the way we approach our leadership quest: Restitution, Chaos, and Quest.

1. Restitution: the restitution narrative is when we encounter something difficult and we yearn to go back to the way things were – to live before the diagnosis or “back to normal” before COVID. We spend our time wishing and waiting to go back and can feel angry and disappointed when things aren’t as they used to be.

2. Chaos: the chaos narrative is for the folks who get stuck in the middle. We’ve lost sight of the past yet can’t see a way through or imagine the future. Things are out of control and we can’t figure out what steps we need to go forward. We’re lost in the middle of the storm, stuck in the heat of the fire, and can’t find peace or direction about what to do.

3. Quest: the quest narrative is an internal determination that allows us to face uncertain circumstances with peace, power, and a sense of purpose. We walk into uncertainty head on, confident that something positive will be gained from the experience.

Our goal in this leadership program is to help you “Embrace the Quest.” We want to equip you and empower you to face any challenge with confidence and calm, feeling ready to handle anything that comes because you’ve got all of the right tools, a supportive team, and an internal certainty that good things can be gained from every experience you’ll face.

To help you embrace this empowered mentality and move from choas to quest, we’ll dive into four essential elements:

1. VISION: knowing where we are headed
2. FOCUS: understanding our role along the way
3. ALIGNMENT: removing what no longer serves us
4. ACTION: what we can do to get there

These four pillars make up the content of Triannual I and will set us up to embody the role of a leader.

To embrace the quest mentality, we have to believe that we have the power to effect change within our environment and believe that we have control over what happens in our lives.

Are we active participants in creating our reality (internal locus of control) or are we passive recipients to the work of fate (external locus of control)?

Locus of Control is a measurement of that internal capacity and our sense of agency to effect change within our lives. Working to develop a stronger internal locus of control and eventually embrace the quest mentality is a muscle we can develop  and strengthen. 

Here are four ways to strengthen your internal locus of control:
1. Positive self talk
2. Taking ownership of situations
3. Strengthen decision making and problem solving skills
4. Set challenging personal goals

Embracing and developing our internal sense of control also helps us effect change in our organization and move higher in the ladder of accountability.

When faced with issues at work with coworkers and patients, we can get stuck with blaming, excuses, and waiting and hoping for things to get better, displaying an external locus of control and abdicating responsibility and accountability.

Or, we can see the problems that arise and believe that we have the agency and capacity to effect change and climb the ladder to more positive and hopeful outcomes – building from acknowledging the reality, taking ownership of the problem so we can develop solutions, and implementing those solutions to bring about positive change.

The higher we climb on the Ladder of Accountability, the more easily we can move beyond the chaos and problems at hand and create a stronger, healthier environment for us and our teams to thrive.

Learn more about the Ladder of Accountability from leadership expert and Leadership Roundtable guest speaker, Jared Narlock here.