By Mary Kelly. This was originally published on Mary's blog.

Last week I was inspired by a group of RNs who are also in leadership positions. They have tough jobs.
In the high-pressure environment of healthcare, nurse leaders often find themselves at the forefront of both patient care and administrative responsibilities. The relentless pace and emotional intensity can lead to burnout, characterized by emotional exhaustion and diminished personal accomplishment. When the leader of a nursing team experiences burnout, it not only affects their own health and well-being, but can also undermine their confidence in their leadership abilities.

Burnout among nurses, particularly those in leadership roles, can manifest as persistent tiredness, frustration, reduced motivation, and a sense of inefficacy – even when everyone around them thinks they are doing an excellent job. These symptoms may cause a leader to doubt their ability to manage and inspire their team effectively.

In talking to a friend last week, she confessed, “I feel that if I cannot manage myself, I have no business managing anyone else.”

The first step towards overcoming this doubt is recognizing burnout as a legitimate, addressable condition rather than a sign of personal failure.

What can she do to overcome burnout and doubt?

1. Acknowledge the Symptoms. Leaders should assess their own symptoms of burnout and recognize the need for change. This involves accepting that even leaders need help, and that seeking support is a sign of strength, not weakness.

2. Seek Help. Consulting with other professionals can provide best practices and ideas to manage stress and cope with the emotional demands of the job. Simply knowing that others are experiencing the same things is helpful.

3. Build a Support Network. Leadership does not mean going it alone. Building a network of peers who understand the unique challenges of nursing leadership can provide crucial support. Peer groups, mentoring relationships, and professional networks can offer advice, empathy, and encouragement.

4. Delegate. Effective delegation is a key skill for any leader. By entrusting tasks to others, nurse leaders can reduce their workload and focus on tasks that require their expertise. Empowering team members not only alleviates the leader’s burden but can boost the rest of the team’s confidence and competence.

5. Implement Work-Life Balance. That means work when it is time to work and leave work stress behind when it is time to be home. Nurse leaders are so used to caring for everyone else that it can be exceedingly difficult to leave work at work. Leaders must prioritize their well-being by setting boundaries between work and personal life. This may mean taking full advantage of days off, engaging in hobbies, and spending time with friends and family, as well as having alone time. Rest and recuperation are essential for maintaining the energy and perspective needed for leadership.

6. Gain Insights. Instituting regular feedback sessions with team members can help leaders gauge their effectiveness and address any concerns early on. Last week a group of medical leaders used my Leader’s Blind Spot Assessment to gain valuable feedback on their superpowers and abilities. This reinforces strengths, and highlights areas for improvement, providing a clearer path forward. 

7. Celebrate the Wins. It is important to recognize and celebrate the achievements of their teams and their own contributions. Acknowledging success boosts morale and reaffirms the leader’s role and impact.
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Burnout is a serious challenge, particularly for those in nursing leadership. By recognizing the signs, seeking help, and implementing practical strategies to manage stress and workload, nurse leaders can regain their confidence and continue to inspire and lead their teams effectively. The key is to remember that taking care of yourself is essential to taking care of others and being able to thrive in even the most stressful situations.

By Steve Gilliland
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Typically, a business owner or manager wishes the best for their organization, and part of that entails ensuring their staff members give it their all. However, there’s a fine line between supporting or motivating and micromanaging employees.

Micromanagement is a management approach characterized by intensely careful supervision and control over minute parts of an employee’s work. Many inspirational speakers speak about this and showcase how it can have a detrimental impact on your staff. Read on to learn how it can affect your business as a whole.

LOW MORALE

Micromanaged employees feel their work autonomy slipping away. Ultimately, it leads to employees who cannot take pride in their work and the results they produce. They may no longer wish to go above and beyond for their organization.

Motivational speakers consider micromanagement a morale killer. Whether on purpose or not, those who engage in micromanagement neglect the skills and information that staff members have developed throughout their careers. This prevents the latter from pursuing additional career-related growth.

LOW PRODUCTIVITY LEVELS

Maximum productivity is challenging to accomplish under constant observation. Micromanagers frequently interrupt their staff by asking questions and making arbitrary changes to their work.

Employees are compelled to slow down and reschedule important tasks to accommodate ongoing input and modifications to their procedures. Additionally, micromanagement can make workers doubt their skills and knowledge, ultimately increasing their reliance on supervisors for direction. Keynote speakers highlight the employee’s importance and how their creativity is important for a company to operate well.

POOR MENTAL HEALTH

Great effort goes into maintaining proper mental health at work, but micromanagement strongly affects people’s emotional well-being and makes them feel unappreciated in the workplace. Professional motivational speakers emphasize the significance of mental health in the workplace. Although it may sound severe, employers can incur an annual productivity loss expense of up to $51 billion due to their staff’s mental health struggles.

HIGHER EMPLOYEE TURNOVER

Micromanagement can cause people to leave a company as they become exhausted by constant and relentless monitoring. A business’s momentum could decrease further when employees leave—due to the need to train new personnel and retrain current staff for new responsibilities. Motivational speakers suggest companies recruit and hire the right people who don’t showcase micromanagement abilities.

LOW CREATIVITY AND ENGAGEMENT LEVELS

Creativity is driven by engagement. Workers will feel less responsible for an organization’s success if they’re alienated and disempowered due to constant micromanagement. Since micromanagement hinders employees’ ability to innovate, it gives them little to no room to reflect on their own performance and work toward improvement. The most prosperous companies grow when many people present ideas and thoughts for their improvement.

Teamwork also declines due to a micromanager’s judgment and opinions. Teamwork fosters improved communication, increased creativity and organization, and general contentment inside an organization. In comparison, a lack of cooperation and synergy can substantially harm your business over time.

Planning your next event? Get in touch with us at the Capitol City Speakers Bureau today to schedule your ideal speaker and make your event  a success!​​​​​

By Ron Culberson. With a master’s degree in social work, Ron Culberson spent the first part of his career working in a large hospice organization as a clinical social worker, middle manager, and senior leader.  As a speaker, humorist, and author of "Do it Well. Make it Fun.The Key to Success in Life, Death, and Almost Everything in Between", he has delivered more than 1,000 presentations to associations, government agencies, non-profit organizations, and corporations. His mission is to change the workplace culture so that organizations are more productive and staff are more content. He was also the 2012-2013 president of the National Speakers Association and is a recognized expert on the benefits of humor and laughter.

Does this sound familiar?

It’s the Saturday of your high school prom. You had a crush on another student for several months and a few weeks before the prom, you got up the nerve to ask them to go with you—and they said yes. You rented a tuxedo or bought a dress, made dinner reservations, and arranged for transportation to the big event. When you go into the bathroom to take a shower that Saturday morning, you look in the mirror and see a pimple the size of Rhode Island on your forehead.

Panic sets in. You search online for 24-hour emergency dermatology clinics and discover that apparently, dermatology is not a 24-hour emergency business. You run to the drug store and pick up concealer cream but since it doesn’t exactly match your skin color, once it’s applied, it looks like a patch of Silly Putty with a bubble in the middle of it. It reminds you of a joke involving carpet layers, a lump in the carpet, and a missing hamster.

You then try to cover up the pimple by combing your hair across your forehead. Not only does this look ridiculous, the pimple pokes through the locks of hair like someone peeking through the shower curtain looking for a towel. By noon, you’re exhausted from trying to hide, cover, and conceal, so you simply give up, realizing that you have little control over human biology.

Later, when you finally get dressed, you look in the mirror and realize that your clothing fits perfectly and the muted colors blend nicely with your drab alabaster skin tone. But there in the center of your forehead, all you can see is a red neon sign that warns, “Bumps A Head.” Later, at the prom, you’re convinced that your date keeps staring at your forehead. At the same time, you notice that they have a wart on the side of their ear that you never noticed before. It’s actually more obvious than your pimple.
(Please note that the previous example may or may not have been based on real events. Let’s not focus on that right now but instead, let’s look at the problem.)

As much as I would like to think that I can overlook the occasional blemish in my life, I must admit that I’m terrible at it. Early in my career, one of my front teeth looked like it was heading for the exit. It seemed to bend more and more every day until it was approaching a right angle.

As a speaker, I’m very aware of anything that might distract the audience from my profound insights and engaging repartee. That’s why I don’t typically call attention to my good looks and chiseled physique but rather try to make my appearance blend into the background. This tooth, however, was projecting my Appalachian-ness a bit too blatantly and I was very self conscious. Ironically, no one ever mentioned the angle of my tooth and when I pointed it out to a friend, he said, “Oh, I didn’t notice.” 

And that is the problem with my perspective. I am acutely aware of problems that are usually of no concern to others. For instance, a few weeks ago, I was dining at a nice restaurant and excused myself to go to the restroom. Before returning, I started to wash my hands but the water pressure was so high, the water shot out of the faucet, up the side of the sink, and directly onto an area of my pants where no moisture should exist after a trip to the restroom. All the way back to my table I kept brushing my pants and saying, a bit too loudly, “Wow, that water pressure in the bathroom is like Old Faithful. Boy, those sinks can sure spray the water. I’m drenched. Gee, gosh, wow!” 

When I arrived at my table and continued my nervous declarations, everyone just glanced my way but never paid any attention to my pants. I was sure they would accuse me of having an unfortunate toilet incident or suggest that my bathroom skills were not what they should be. But alas, I was the only one who cared.

As we go through life and in particular, as we go into the holiday season, perhaps it would be helpful if we didn’t always focus on the pimples, the crooked teeth, and the wet spots in our lives. Instead, maybe we should try to see the good around us rather than the one thing that’s creating a challenge. When we realize that the problem is only a small part of who we are and that our lives are full of smooth skin, straight teeth, and dry pants, the blemishes might not seem so important. 
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I guess what I’m saying is that maybe, we should get better at seeing what’s right rather than what’s wrong. It seems so obvious, doesn’t it? Well, it is. In fact, it’s as obvious as the pimple on my face.

Planning your next event? Get in touch with us at the Capitol City Speakers Bureau today to schedule your ideal speaker and make your event  a success!​​​​​​

By Kenneth Kaufman

A couple of months ago, I got a call from a CEO of a regional health system—a long-time client and one of the smartest and most committed executives I know. This health system lost tens of millions of dollars in fiscal year 2022 and the CEO told me that he had come to the conclusion that he could not solve a problem of this magnitude with the usual and traditional solutions. Pushing the pre-Covid managerial buttons was just not getting the job done.

This organization is fiercely independent. It has been very successful in almost every respect for many years. It has had an effective and stable board and management team over the past 30 to 40 years.

But when the CEO looked at the current situation—economic, social, financial, operational, clinical—he saw that everything has changed and he knew that his healthcare organization needed to change as well. The system would not be able to return to profitability just by doing the same things it would have done five years or 10 years ago. Instead of looking at a small number of factors and making incremental improvements, he wanted to look across the total enterprise all at once. And to look at all aspects of the enterprise with an eye toward organizational renovation.

I said, “So, you want a makeover.”

The CEO is right. In an environment unlike anything any of us have experienced, and in an industry of complex interdependencies, the only way to get back to financial equilibrium is to take a comprehensive, holistic view of our organizations and environments, and to be open to an outcome in which we do things very differently.

In other words, a makeover.

Consider just a few areas that the hospital makeover could and should address:

There’s the revenue side: Getting paid for what you are doing and the severity of the patient you are treating—which requires a focus on clinical documentation improvement and core revenue cycle delivery—and looking for any material revenue diversification opportunities.

There is the relationship with payers: Involving a mix of growth, disruption, and optimization strategies to increase payments, grow share of wallet, or develop new revenue streams.

There’s the expense side: Optimizing workforce performance, focusing on care management and patient throughput, rethinking the shared services infrastructure, and realizing opportunities for savings in administrative services, purchased services, and the supply chain. While these have been historic areas of focus, organizations must move from an episodic to a constant, ongoing approach.

There’s the balance sheet: Establishing a parallel balance sheet strategy that will create the bridge across the operational makeover by reconfiguring invested assets and capital structure, repositioning the real estate portfolio, and optimizing liquidity management and treasury operations.

There is network redesign: Ensuring that the services offered across the network are delivered efficiently and that each market and asset is optimized; reducing redundancy, increasing quality, and improving financial performance.

There is a whole concept around portfolio optimization: Developing a deep understanding of how the various components of your business perform, and how to optimize, scale back, or partner to drive further value and operational performance.

Incrementalism is a long-held business approach in healthcare, and for good reason. Any prominent change has the potential to affect the health of communities and those changes must be considered carefully to ensure that any outcome of those changes is a positive one. Any ill-considered action could have unintended consequences for any of a hospital’s many constituencies.

But today, incrementalism is both unrealistic and insufficient. Just for starters, healthcare executive teams must recognize that back-office expenses are having a significant and negative impact on the ability of hospitals to make a sufficient operating margin. And also, healthcare executive teams must further realize that the old concept of “all things to all people” is literally bringing parts of the hospital industry toward bankruptcy.

Healthcare comprises some of the most wicked problems in our society—problems that are complex, that have no clear solution, and for which a solution intended to fix one aspect of a problem may well make other aspects worse.

The very nature of wicked problems argues for the kind of comprehensive approach that the CEO of this organization is taking—not tackling one issue at a time in linear fashion but making a sophisticated assessment of multiple solutions and studying their potential interdependencies, interactions, and intertwined effects.

My colleague Eric Jordahl has noted that “reverting to a 2019 world is not going to happen, which means that restructuring is the only option. . . . Where we are is not sustainable and waiting for a reversion is a rapidly decaying option.”

The very nature of the socioeconomic environment makes doing nothing or taking an incremental approach untenable. It is clearly beyond time for the hospital industry makeover.

Planning your next event? Get in touch with us at the Capitol City Speakers Bureau today to schedule your ideal speaker and make your event  a success!​​​​​

By Kristin Baird

​When working with organizations on culture change, I like to lead the executive team on an exploration.

We discuss times when they have been successful at implementing a major change. In addition to the successes, we discuss times when their attempts were foiled. From there we draw out comparisons between the two.

THE FUNDAMENTALS OF CHANGE

I’ve had these discussions with dozens of executive teams over the years. Two clear themes emerged as fundamental to success.

1. Burning platform – Typically the most successful changes were those incited by a burning platform.
2. Alignment at all levels of the organization.

COVID aside, one of the burning platforms often cited in these discussions is the implementation of a new EMR. The burning platform was crystal clear to everyone. At a specific date and time, a switch would be flipped and there would be no turning back. That fact forced action to align everyone.

CHANGE TAKES TIME

You can’t flip a switch and change your culture. You cannot say that Monday at 8 AM we will have a new and improved culture. But what leaders can do, is learn from what helped make other types of changes successful. These include:

• Embed “super users” as coaches. Of course, there is a big difference between super users in software technology and coaches who foster service behaviors that align with the vision. Each super user serves as a champion of change. The similarity is in the conscious development of internal “go-to” people who can coach on specific issues and give support as needed. A train-the-trainer model is particularly helpful in this situation.
• Align around the big “why.” When it comes to culture, the big why is about being a place where patients choose for care, where employees want to work, and where providers want to practice. To achieve the alignment, you need non-negotiable standards. Again, with the train-the-trainer model, trainers become embedded coaches fluent in the organization’s standards for excellence.

Change is inevitable. By starting with why and embed a champion of change, it will be easier to get everyone aligned.

​Planning your next event? Get in touch with us at the Capitol City Speakers Bureau today to schedule your ideal speaker and make your event  a success!​​​​

By LeAnn Thieman. This was originally published on LeAnn's blog.

​At first, I thought my message, “We are always role modeling whether we want to be or not,” was for parents, but now I know it is for everyone, because indeed, we are all always role modeling.

No matter how old you are, those younger than you are watching to see what you do and say, then they decide their behavior. This includes not only our children, but candy-stripers, patients, visitors, staff members.

Much is written today about obesity and inadequate physical activity in the younger generation. There is a lot of-finger pointing to the supposed blame…fast food, TV, computers, lack of exercise, video games, changes in society’s values.

One that doesn’t get as much press is the importance of role modeling.

We’ve likely all heard, “Do as I say, not as I do.”  But they do as we do.

Studies consistently show that parents are the most important role models for their children. Peers and media have less influence. Children are constantly observing their parents’ values and how they handle their lives.

A Stanford University School of Medicine study found that 64% of children with overweight parents became overweight, compared to 16% of those with normal weight parents. Genetics was a factor, but environment, food types and amounts, and exercise that kids observed were significant factors.

​When children see their parents and other grownups actively involved in physical activity, sports, and exercise, they likely adopt those values and behaviors too.

What are you role-modeling to those younger than you?

Planning your next event? Get in touch with us at the Capitol City Speakers Bureau today to schedule your ideal speaker and make your event  a success!​​​​

By Steve Berkowitz

​In a previous blog, I discussed the first step in the critical analysis of artificial intelligence in healthcare—an operational or working definition of artificial intelligence. I would now like to take that definition and take the next step—develop a descriptive model of AI that would illustrate the evolution of artificial intelligence and help us better understand the future of AI in healthcare. 

The model I propose has three components. Each one can evolve separately as well as influence the progress of the others. The ultimate AI application or outcome is a function of the effectiveness of all three:

1. Hardware – The rapid development of processing power
2. Connectivity – The integration of the individual unit into neural networks and the internet
3. Software – The evolution of machine learning and complex reasoning 

HARDWARE – THE RAPID DEVELOPMENT OF PROCESSING POWER

When I talk about the evolution of the individual processing unit, I am primarily referring to the unprecedented progress that has been made in the past sixty years in terms of fulfilling the mantra: faster, smaller, cheaper. 

Moore’s Law, coined in 1965 by Gordon Moore, an engineer at IBM, stated that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit will double about every two years. This doubling process has continued unabated to this day. Processing speed and efficiency are essential in the ultimate evolution of AI, and until very recently, it has been the rate-limiting step in the development of advanced capabilities such as language processing and complex machine learning. It has only been in the last five or so years that we have had the processing capability to have such entities as GPT and deep learning applications. Now that this limit has been attained and exceeded, true advanced intelligence is operationally and commercially feasible.

One can only imagine what will be possible as this capability continues to double. The recent development of quantum computers, for example, which rely on using quantum mechanics and subatomic particles to power the processing, is currently in the research stage, but it promises to further jumpstart this cycle of “faster, smaller, cheaper.” AI will operate more effectively, a million times faster and more efficient.

CONNECTIVITY – INTEGRATION OF INDIVIDUAL UNIT INTO NEURAL NETWORKS AND THE INTERNET

Put simply, not only is the individual processor becoming faster, smaller, cheaper at exponential rates as mentioned above, but each individual computer unit now has the capacity to become interfaced and connected to multiple units and form large computer networks. These neural networks have the potential to give each computer access to enormous amounts of data, including becoming part of the internet of things, or the “cloud.” 

The ability to work as large systems makes the AI process much more robust. All systems would have the potential to communicate with each other and learn from each other… and even influence each other. Neural networks using artificial intelligence resemble the human brain, in which thousands or millions of individual units become interconnected and organized into layers. The output of one of the individual entities is now the input of another entity. This synergistic interaction further empowers AI to do extremely complicated processing such as deep learning and to do so faster, smaller, and cheaper. 

SOFTWARE – THE EVOLUTION OF MACHINE LEARNING AND COMPLEX REASONING

Now that the hurdles of requisite speed and power as well as the ability to interconnect on complex levels have been considered, the model now moves on to the actual application of learning algorithms and logic models. As algorithms and systems become more sophisticated, more complex logic that simulates or even exceeds human logic, are incorporated into the model. Supervised learning, where models, trained with labeled data sets and pre-set algorithms, can now progress to unsupervised learning, and even reinforced learning. This allows the AI to evolve and move beyond the initial data sets and algorithms. 

As I mentioned in my last blog, not only can this learning bear enormous benefits, but it also has the downside of potential negative effects of emergent properties, and even hallucinations. Not only can the model readily incorporate the most basic form of reasoning, deductive reasoning (going from the general to the specific), but it also can begin to develop more complicated patterns of inductive reasoning (going from the specific to the general). The potential further exists to incorporate or “learn” more advanced forms of the human reasoning process such as creativity, emotions, and even empathy. 

AI has not acquired these traits yet, but if the human brain can learn these traits, why couldn’t AI too? And do so more quickly and efficiently. I believe we will see increasing complexities of AI resulting in applications that combine deductive, inductive, and more creative forms of reasoning.

Once again, we can only imagine what the ultimate applications will be able to accomplish as the three stages of hardware, interconnectivity, and software come together and mutually advance.

MODELING THE FUTURE OF AI IN HEALTHCARE

As healthcare executives better understand the application of AI, it is valuable to conceptualize the model into these stages in looking to the future. I hope this model gives us a better framework in which to analyze the evolution and future of artificial intelligence, particularly AI in healthcare. 
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Putting the model back together, we see there are three major components: the hardware, connectivity, and the software. All three will continue to quickly evolve, and work collectively and synergistically to improve the ultimate sophistication of the application outputs. Products that now flood the media daily have resulted from the evolution and development of these three stages. 

Planning your next event? Get in touch with us at the Capitol City Speakers Bureau today to schedule your ideal speaker and make your event  a success!​​​​​