Leadership Has Evolved. Have You? Alex Sydnor

Here on Radio Maine, we explore and celebrate creativity in the human spirit. Today we are doing this with an experienced celebrator of the human spirit and creativity. This is Alex Sydnor, who has many, many years as a leader across multiple industries and has spent a lot of time thinking about creativity. So thanks for coming in today. My pleasure. Thanks for inviting me. I think what I love about you is you and I met in the healthcare industry, but you've been in the arts, you've been in academia, you've been in healthcare, and I think there are things that you've brought across the different silos that I think we can all learn from. So talk to me why you chose to go in the direction you've gone in. Well, to think that all of our, where we are in life is always a choice is probably a fallacy. I moved into healthcare from the arts. I worked at a decorative arts museum actually raising money and moved into healthcare, raising money. Not really intending to move into healthcare truthfully, but certainly. So I got into healthcare through the avenue of philanthropy, which was my kind of career before working in the arts, humanities, higher education, and really fell in love with healthcare as a career. And after a few years on the senior team of a healthcare organization added healthcare administrative roles, strategic planning, marketing and communications to my portfolio. And I've never looked back. It's been a great experience, but it's also, as you point out, I bring things to the healthcare world from my whole life of experiences, which was in a much more creative sort of sectors. And how have you found people's level of receptivity when you bring things from other industries into healthcare? Do people buy into that idea? Do people embrace that idea? Well, I don't think there's a single answer, so it depends on the people. I have worked with leaders in healthcare who are physicians, and actually the CIO, chief Information Officer, IT professional at one of the healthcare organizations I worked in was one of the most creative inspiring leaders I've ever worked with, and he's the IT guy. So it varies. Some are more receptive than others, and part of that's the people, part of that's the environment of that organization. I do find that when we're open to ideas from other sectors, ideas from other disciplines, I think we become richer as leaders. We are actually more open and can bring in more and different experiences to shape how we're engaging with our teams and how we're leading our organization. Some people, the idea of being open is kind of scary. Some people like following along a very specific path. Maybe it has worked for them in the past to some extent, maybe it hasn't really worked for them, but they feel like it's worked for them. So how do you move people into a space that can feel a little bit scary at Times? Yeah, yeah. Sometimes you're doing that on a one-on-one basis, but in organizations we're typically doing that in groups. So you have groups of leaders needing to have difficult conversations and there is absolutely, I think, methodology that you can deploy in convening teams in such a way that you develop trust but also create channels for people to share things without judgment. I like to use post-Its as a way to get everybody to write their idea down on a post-it if it's a tough topic because then the idea is committed. They share it perhaps even without saying it, but just putting it on a wall and it's out there now for the group to discuss and they commit to that before someone else shares an idea and then they go, oh, my idea is different. I don't share it. So they have to commit in advance. There's little things like that that can really help groups address the kind of dynamics that can keep people from not feeling that they're in a trusting place, that they can add those ideas. Having a culture within a team, which is hard to develop any culture within a team that actually also values the challenge, they actually encourage challenging ideas. One of the most, I think productive teams I've been a part of, argued a lot. It was actually part of who we were is that we countered each other's ideas. We left the day all friends, it wasn't a personal thing. And because we had that great dynamic, sometimes challenging conversation, we made better decisions. I think what you're describing is so important, the idea that this willingness to move through conflict willingly with one another can be so rich on the other side. And yet what I hear a lot in this day and age is people, first of all, we've already said they fear uncertainty. They kind of fear the open space at times, but they also fear the possibility of friction. So many times I hear people and they say, I'm conflict avoidant or I don't like conflict. And what I've come to understand about myself is you can avoid conflict in one place, but it's just going to pop up somewhere else in a different form. So how do we help people to understand that conflict is not inherently bad? Yeah, that's a great question. And I do think that within a work environment where you're working with a team, it is important that the team and the leaders of the team and perhaps the leader of the team set that expectation. So you have to lead by example from the top. And I think that again, there's just got to be a concerted effort to build a culture that says it's okay to disagree as again, as a process to actually require the disagreement. So within strategy work, where I do a lot of my work, one of the tactics is that every new initiative, if there's a change effort that's being put forward or a new strategy that the people recommending that strategy also have to recommend the opposite so that they're arguing against themselves at the same time that they're arguing for themselves. I believe this will be true in the future, so this is how we should move forward. Okay, now I'm going to tell you if I'm wrong about the future. This is how this is going to fail, this is why it's going to fail. So that's a way of bringing in the contrary view, but actually not doing it with conflict because you're not asking another team member to now sort of debate them. The debate does happen at that point, but the debate is invited by the person who's making the proposal. So having worked with you in various settings, I know that one of the things that you do very well is facilitate, and it is something that I know you've gotten some training in, but also I think you probably were naturally drawn to the idea of facilitation. I'm just guessing. So that is a skillset in addition to kind of an attitude. So talk to me a little bit about that. Yeah, so it is a skillset. When I first moved into strategy work, I had done facilitation as a leader of my own teams, for example, but I know I didn't know very much. So I did actually go to the leadership strategies. It's an organization that did a training in facilitation. It was phenomenal and in part I realized how much I didn't know and left there with just an incredible toolbox of ways to engage people. And there is, again, there's very rudimentary, I guess, things to do to get people talking, et cetera. But I think one of the things that's critical and what this training taught me is that for every hour of a meeting you have, you really want an engaged meeting where people are talking. It's an hour of prep. It's an almost a one-to-one ratio. And if any leader and any person who's needing to facilitate and not just hold a meeting, but really facilitate an engaged meeting, invest about the same amount of time that the meeting will last in preparing for the meeting and being very thoughtful about how will I get the folks to engage? How will I bring information forward or how will I make them feel comfortable? How do I build trust at the very beginning and how do I manage whatever communication dynamics occur in that team so that divergent ideas are shared? For example? There's planning that goes along with That. I think that's so incredibly powerful, this idea that we might sit in many, many meetings, but there's a way to make meetings better or not so good, and that if you actually are intentional, you're going to get better results from the meeting, that you're intentional in the planning, that you're intentional in the process. And yet I think for some people they think, well, it's just a group of people. Do whatever you want, and I wonder how we can help people to understand This. A great question. I think that having within an organization, having some templates for how meetings are supposed to go is helpful, but it doesn't address, I think what is a core challenge, and that is that the person's running the meeting actually have to be genuinely curious about the perspectives of the other folks in the meeting. They actually genuinely have to want a conversation, not just to get to the end of the meeting. And that's a little harder to teach, I would say, is that genuine curiosity in the perspective of others. And that again, I think within a work setting, there is work that can be done I think as a team to develop that as a cultural value of that curiosity. And then with technique, figuring out a way that every meeting is run in such a way that there are a couple of fundamental things we do to create safety, but also then to invite engagement. But it does start, I think, with just a genuine curiosity and appreciation for the perspective of any member of the team, no matter their rank. I'm going to tiptoe into an area that you may or may not feel comfortable with, but feel free to decide you don't want to answer this question. So you and I worked together on my PhD in leadership studies, and I interviewed you multiple times and thank you for that participation. It was really great to have your perspective. A big focus of the leadership studies PhD was diversity, equity, and inclusion. And one of the things that we've done a lot with is inviting people to the table but not necessarily giving the opportunity to engage because it's been very, I think, unfortunate that we've done more with representation than we have with, well, again, engagement. So if we really are saying that we want diverse voices, but we're not creating opportunity for those voices to be heard, then that's going to create ongoing disconnect. Is there a way that we can get there? Yeah, that's a great question and I'm happy to jump in with you on that. I do think that in many cases we have representation, diverse representation, equitable representation, but when you don't, and I'm kind of get back to my last answer, I guess if you don't actually have the genuine appreciation and value for the diverse perspective, if you're not willing for your own point of view perhaps to be challenged, then that representation won't get you the value you're trying to create. And I think that's some really deep leadership work for people to reflect and teams to reflect upon what is their dominant view and actually go out proactively to find the divergent view, the alternative view. How do we bring that in? It's there to be had clearly. And when we think about DEI today, frequently we're talking about racial diversity, L-G-B-T-Q, et cetera. There's actually diverse views within levels of an organization. And in many cases, organizations haven't done a good job of appreciating the frontline person's view either. And when you're looking at change efforts, that's a view that's surprisingly a diversity equity view that we're not seeing. And if we don't do well at that, how will we do well? Well leading to much deeper work if we're going to do well at actually engaging a truly diverse audience. I've loved the work I've done in actually engaging ethnography to go out into the community to follow people in their daily lives, to better understand their lived experience so that we can be responsive to it. It's that kind of deep work that's going to be necessary. When you and I have talked before about the community health work that you're doing, one of the things that I've really enjoyed hearing from you is the possibility that a healthcare organization can be at the table but not the dominant voice. And that what you really are hoping for is to build stakeholder conversation, foundational work and be appreciative of the work that other people are doing and not try to reinvent things. But again, I think we've become this very unwieldy behemoth, the healthcare system We are, and I think health hospitals, right? Hospital systems are the 900 pound gorilla in that. And so if you're working with community-based organizations, you have to be very, very sensitive to that power dynamic. And I've had a couple of situations where one, working with independent physician practices, another was with community-based organizations. And in both of those occasions, we intentionally didn't meet in the hospital's buildings because we didn't want the hospital in those cases to be overshadowing and essentially shutting down the valuable input from those other stakeholders by wielding its weight. And so sensitivity to those power dynamics and being intentional about power sharing is critical when you've got a very large health system working with small physician practices, independent physician practices or community-based organizations. The other thing that I know has been important to you is the idea of the narrative. So in the work that you do, a lot of the decision support team that you've worked with, obviously that is very numbers, data of a very quantitative sort. Yeah. Also important, Also important, incredibly important. However, the qualitative data that you get from conversations and the creating of a narrative has been critical to the work that you've done in helping parts of the healthcare team, let's just use as an example, really move toward reaching their mission. Well, I do think narrative is critical, and sometimes that narrative is just using paragraphs instead of charts and graphs, and in part that's a way to document the richness of a conversation or the richness of a perspective about the future, for example. And other times it's actually truly telling a story, right? An impactful story of a person's experience as a way to get people to see and even feel what's happening in that patient experience and how we can affect it differently. Numbers are critical. I love them. I work with them a lot and enjoy them. I think they're critically important as we think about performance in our organization. They engage only one side of our brain and we need to engage both sides of our brain and perhaps our heart as well if we're actually looking for change. I remember in a situation I had, I was thinking about on the drive down this morning, a health system I worked with where we were trying to make a change in our patient engagement. And the first sort of ask of me was to make our patient engagement stores better. We wanted better scores. I don't really think that's not really going to get people's attention. I actually convened a group of leaders and put out a couple of scenarios, paired them up, and they worked on mapping out an ideal scenario, an experience for four different patients and four different patient kind of scenarios. And then after they shared that with the group revealed to them in a sealed envelope, an actual experience written by a patient in that health system that matched that scenario, which unfortunately was not a very positive experience, we had the narrative of those two, my belief of what the ideal is in this group, plus the actual of a rather negative experience of a patient. And it was those two opposing narratives that created the aha moment for that team to start making changes. The narrative in the story are key. I Think about the most frustrated I've ever had patients feel with me talk about being in conflict as a doctor for many, many years. I can't help but be engaged in conversations that are conflictual because I'm not necessarily representing myself when I show up with a patient. I'm representing every disappointment that the patient has ever had with healthcare, and I've come to some level of peace with that. I don't love it, but that's just the way that it is. And I think that when I hear the highest level of frustration it is that they do not believe that we are actually listening to their lived experience. We are making assumptions about how they live, what they want, how do we get past that? How do we start to actually listen more deeply to the people that we're supposed to be working with? And I don't want to say these are our patients. We are doing things to, I want to say we're all together on the same team. How do we get to that Place? That's a great question. Also, healthcare wasn't really designed well for patients. I mean, I think it's designed better for providers and insurers and regulatory agencies and what have you. So it's probably not designed well to create that experience for patients. We're not going to make a wholesale redesign today in our brief time together, but the amount of time that patients are able to spend with their caregivers is critical. Probably also better coordination across all the members of the care team. And you and I have talked a lot about care team and how we have everyone from the person greeting the patient at the door to the medical assistant, rooming them to the nurse they might encounter with the physician, then perhaps a care manager afterwards or a community health worker. They don't all have the same information. Those members of the team and how do they coordinate so that they can appear as one listening body on behalf of that patient, not just you in the exam room with the patient because the patient's encounters with the health system with that practice, probably six, seven different people. And how well coordinated are they? And I think Jeff Brenner from the Camden Coalition was one of the ones who pioneered the pop health meeting where every Friday they got together every Monday morning and talked about their challenging patients and they had all those members of the team in the same conversation once a week. And I think those are critical steps that'll help the patient experience. I can't help but feel a little bit, I don't know, frustrated, sad, even a little angry about the fact that for some reason we don't value non-patient care time spent on planning for patient care. I mean, it has been so incredibly difficult to even get our daily huddle because as a physician, my time is scheduled, you get this patient 20 minutes later, you get this patient, we get this patient. So any time that's taken out of my schedule to do anything else other than see patients, which is what we're reimbursed for, whether it's a population health meeting or whether it's leadership, physician leadership, it's undervalued. And what's valued is face-to-face time with the patient because insurance pays for It. And there's your key I think, is that our reimbursement model in healthcare, it's part of the system that drives the design and the reimbursement model and how we get reimbursed dictates where we prioritize. And I think that's where we get about the design of healthcare. It includes how healthcare is paid for, and I think the Affordable Care Act has shifted that perhaps not as quickly as we thought it might have, and there's lots of resistance to change within the healthcare system in systems to adopt to that. But it is part of the design problem I think, of healthcare. Well, you're right. We're not going to be able to solve all of this at our brief. No, we're going to need more time together. Yeah, exactly. We're going to have time to invest in this. But I do think that there are more and more people who are interested in doing things differently is what I'm seeing. Maybe not quickly differently, but there are more people who are saying, okay, there's something about this that isn't really working. What I saw having been a frontline provider and also a leader all the way through covid, and I know you were in leadership through Covid as well, is that on the other side, we didn't even really have time to take, stop, take a breath and say, okay, what did we learn? What can we do differently? Instead, it was, oh my gosh, we've got all these financial challenges and now we need to hunker down. We need to get back to what we were doing Before and we were tired And we were Exhausted coming out of the pandemic. We were tired and understaffed. Yes, all of the above. So there's absolutely good reasons why we would want to return to where we were, but the fact is that where we were, it wasn't great. So how do we actually sort of pry open just even a few moments to reflect on where we were and how do we rejuvenate ourselves? Because I actually look inside healthcare now and a lot of people who were there for the last four or five years, they're still really tired. I think it has to be a practice. So whether it's rejuvenation and refilling the cup, so to speak, as a team after challenging experiences or really tough times or whether it's a practice of thinking critically or thinking creatively, I think it's muscle memory. So we should be doing it all the time. So how do we do that every week? How do we do that every month and how do we do that every quarter? That's again about building practice, which those are behaviors influenced by what you think and what you believe, which then creates culture. But it has to be that practice because you can find the time. I mean, as you and I know within the administrative world that we've lived in, there is actually time in the calendar. We don't like to go to that meeting. It's not managed well and you don't get a lot out of it. So it's managed really great meetings, but let's schedule that time to be reflective. It'll fill us up and create that muscle memory and that practice, that habit that creates trust. We got to have the trust environment creates that culture of challenge in a positive way. So you're hearing diversion views and bringing those out and inviting the creativity, but doing it regularly. I love the way that you're bringing creativity into this conversation because I mean, clearly we have an entire podcast around creativity in the human spirit, and we interview people that are artists, but we interview a lot of other people because creativity is not limited to, I'm going to put paint on a canvas. Talk to me about your definition of creativity and how you've sort of brought it into your own Life. So I wish I was an artist actually, but I'm not, to be clear. I do too, and I'm not Either. Yes, and I've tried various things and that's not my channel of creativity. And I've lived my whole professional life in sort of organizational life. And I think there's phenomenal opportunity to be creative right there. And I think that's probably my creative channel in how we engage people, how we create again, that right dynamic in a group to get an outcome that you want. That is a creative process. And in the area of strategy, we're talking about the future, which is unknown. It is inherently a creative process. We are writing a story with our own ending in the future, which we can't actually predict. We might think we can predict on that spreadsheet and those metrics, but we can't because the future is going to be different than the past. That is a creative process. And I think if we just embrace that idea, again, it's part of that practice, it just becomes our viewpoint and the design thinking methodology for process change and product and service development. One of the speakers and area in that area says that design has no medium. And I think creativity is the same. If we think that as you point out, creativity isn't just about paint on the canvas, it can be anywhere and it can be an organizational life. And I think that it enriches most of us if we find a way to bring that creativity into whatever our work environment is, it does fill the cup for everybody in their own way. Well, I think you're right, and I think we spend so much time in a work environment. Honestly, I love trying to run a meeting in such a way so that it feels somewhat entertaining in the organization. You and I most recently worked for. We used to start the meetings with wins, and I actually think it's a great idea. I think we should all start any conversation with what is it that, what's working? What is working well, What's working? Yeah, that's a great example of a daily practice or a weekly practice that gets you started thinking creatively about what's working and sets your mind to the positive things and recognizing that as challeng as you are in other areas, everything's not broken. I think that's special. I get a chance sometimes to work with groups that work specifically lean process management, which is very kind of regimented, numbers oriented process design. And as I talk to teams that are training in lean, one of the things I like to say to them is because one of my own concept of what we're trying to get out of a lean process improvement is we're taking friction out of work. So we're going to make things more efficient, which is very left brain, I guess, right? It's efficient. We're going to save time, we're going to get rid of waste. Yes, those are all true, but we're also reducing the kinds of things in work that when you go home at the end of day day you go, oh gosh, I had a day, I had a day today. Let me tell you, I had to do this thing three times before I could get it done. If we can reduce the friction in work, what are we doing? But creating more space for joy in work, that to me is what, that's the right brain. Let's touch the heart of why process design is so valuable is it creates more room for the joy in the work. And we all have a right to have joy in our work, and it's there to be had. There's plenty of time and space for it if we make that priority. I love this idea and I think it's so incredibly important because I know your work is in strategy and transformation, or at least some of the work that you have previously done and are doing now. And when we look at complexity theory, they talk about the positive energetic attractors and the negative energetic attract. And that if you actually want to create change, you have to put three times as much focus on the positive energetic attract as the negative energetic attractors. So if all we're ever doing is solving problems and moving friction, then we're only ever going to kind of maybe stay where we are. But if we're actually simultaneously saying, alright, we're going to acknowledge the pain, but we're going to move toward the pleasure, then that is actually how change happens. And there is positive in every experience. There are things that we have that we do well, no matter what fires we're putting out today, there are still things that are working and moving from a position of appreciative inquiry, which is finding the good, let's focus on the good, is a different way of problem solving. And it works really well in cultural change and a group process where perhaps you don't have the ability to just measure a negative result or a breakdown, for example. So when you're working with groups back to that conversation of narrative, appreciative inquiry, it's very much a narrative process of getting folks to identify that which is working and then instead of fixing the problem, do more of what is successful. And you can have the same impact, same positive change effect. And I love appreciative inquiry, and I love strengths oriented leadership. I do find that it's actually very true, whether you're talking about sitting with a patient or whether you're talking about sitting with a medical leader, it really is knowing you fundamentally have the tools inside of yourself. And in fact, you probably are utilizing many of them right now to do really good things in your life, or even just simply survive. You're here. So something must be working. Something's working. And I think that one of the issues with medicine, of course, is that we've moved towards a place of avoidance. Everything. It's preventive medicine. We want to prevent disease, we want to prevent heart attacks, we want to prevent cancer. So that is all true. And also how do we move people to a more wellness oriented approach? And whether that's as a person, as a community, as a healthcare system, I think there's a real power to that. I think so too. Leaders tend to get to where they are thinking that they do well because they solve problems. So leaders have a tendency to be solution oriented, to fix problems, fill gaps. And I would imagine medicine is similar. You see people who are sick. So lemme solve the problem. And again, a focused on what is working, what can we accentuate that's already successful? How can we build confidence frankly, whether an individual or groups based on the successes that we've had, and also learn something from them. We've all had successes, things are working. Let's focus on those and see what we can accentuate. Well, I assume that we're going to end up having to bring you back in again. And by having, I mean we would want to, because I really enjoy the conversations. I always enjoy the conversations I have with you, and I really appreciate your coming in today and sharing the conversations that I get so much value out of with the Greater Radio Maine audience. So thank you for being part of This. It's been a pleasure being here. Here on Radio Maine, we explore and celebrate creativity and the human spirit. Today, we've been doing this with a long time leader and executive in healthcare and many industries, Alex Sidor, and I hope that you will take the time to think about creativity in your own life. What does that look like? If you're not an artist, how are you being creative in your own business? Because certainly in my conversation with Alex today, it's really making me think about a lot of things. Thank you for joining us today, and thank you for being here, Alex.