Weaving Courage and Coaching for Healthcare Leaders

Courage & Renewal Facilitator Dr. Hanna Sherman recently interviewed her colleague, facilitator Penny Williamson, ScD.  Penny was among our very first facilitators.

Much of your work has been in the field of healthcare. Could you share with us how Courage & Renewal work has informed the way you design and lead programs in your work?

My intention was always to bring this work into healthcare since that has been the work of my life and the culture that I am deeply embedded in. Courage & Renewal work has informed everything I do. It has been enormously transformative.

I lead Courage to Lead retreat series for healthcare leaders, creating trustworthy communities for groups of physicians, healthcare leaders, behavioral scientists, psychologists, etc.  In addition, we have woven Courage & Renewal principles and practices into the work we call Relationship Centered Healthcare, which is the philosophy that in healthcare everything is centered on the relationships between and among doctors, patients, students, family members—and grounded on the relationship with Self. 

As an example, my colleagues and dear friends, Tony Suchman and Courage & Renewal facilitator Diane Robbins, and I have created a leadership institute called Leading Organizations to Health (LOH) that is a weave of Courage & Renewal work, theories and skills designed to help health care leaders to foster and sustain relational cultures in their organizations. This “virtual fellowship” focuses on bringing one’s authentic presence into the work of leadership and working with a range of skills and theories to effect culture change.  We create a trustworthy community for the work, and in this context, participants -- all of us -- continually return to our learning edges in service of creating more humane, functional and relational organizations in which all can thrive. 

LOH meets four times a year for three-day sessions, with monthly peer coaching calls in small groups between gatherings to support and coach participants through specific challenges as well as affirming their successes. Each participant chooses and works on projects at three levels throughout the year: internal work (the core of the work); interpersonal work (relationships with colleagues or others), and organizational-level work (an example would be creating a relationship centered board of directors from one that is more hierarchical).

How do the participants bring that back to their work environments? What impact it has had?

That’s been the most thrilling. We never imagined that it would be as transformative and immediately practical at the level we consistently have seen.  My sense is that this transformative learning comes about through the alchemy of people being affirmed and supported for the gifts they bring, learning useful skills and theories, and being able to be vulnerable and work on essential challenges in the trustworthy LOH community. The quality and depth of learning is just magnificent and ongoing.

I have seen organizations shift from silos to learning organizations, seen new programs start that seemed impossible, seen poetry used and relationship-building introduced in organizations where the participants thought it would never happen. I’ve seen safety and quality initiatives come to fruition in a relationship-centered context.

By fully showing up themselves, participants have invited and led the way for others in their home organizations to show up fully as well.  

For medical and administrative healthcare leaders, the ability to be in deep conversation about their work with peers and to show vulnerabilities and to get direct help is unusual. What is especially unusual is the combination of teaching people to be in a circle of trust, where honest open questions are offered as the mainstay of the coaching environment. And too – the mix of open honest questions and “no fixing” is usefully complemented with direct sharing of ideas and best practices. Participants learn when to ask their peers honest open questions, when to share what they’ve learned in their own experience, and when to directly advise or share their knowledge.
   
What would you say are the deep yearnings or common themes among the physicians, medical educators, healthcare leaders who come to Courage to Lead programs or Leading Organizations to Health?

The common themes include how to find balance, how to find meaning in life, how to not give oneself away.  There is a yearning to find ways to be whole in organizations that run counter to the deepest desires that they have for their students, their patients and themselves.  As leaders, participants want so much to help create those environments, but don’t know how – as their training is in caring for individuals.  And too, there is the burnout and fatigue that come with overwork that seems to be endemic in our society and certainly in medicine.

Many find their work isolating and wish for kindred spirits. Again and again I hear physicians and others in healthcare say, “This is such a lonely profession. We are around people all the time but I don’t feel safe,” or “There’s no one to talk to,” or, “No one else feels the way I do.” That is a theme that emerges and needs exploring. It’s why these communities that we form are so essential for people—to experience that it is possible to find circles of trust and make meaning with colleagues and with those we serve both at LOH, and usually, surprisingly, back home as well.

What has this work meant for you personally?

This has been the work of my life and of my heart. I have moved with this work to live an undivided life more of the time.  Courage work has opened the way for me to find and express my voice and to discover the truest expression of my work in the world. Through this and related work, I’ve found kindred partners and communities. In the midst of so much that is wrong in the world, I am renewed and inspired continually by how much is possible in each human being, each group, and also am more forgiving and able to hold the paradoxes of  the dark times, as well as the light times, in my own journey.