Negotiating Change and Conflict Resolution
Physician leaders negotiate every day – with other physicians, other clinical workers, administrators, governments, research funders and even their friends and romantic partners. Negotiation is the art and science of securing agreements between two or more independent parties. It is a craft that must hold cooperation and competition in creative tension. It is difficult to do well. Even the most experienced (and confident) negotiators often fall prey to common biases, errors in judgment and bad strategies. During these sessions, participants will practice, analyze, reflect and practice again.
Difficult Conversations
For most of us, the workplace includes many interactions that have the potential to create significant anxiety (e.g., addressing a staff member’s performance problems, dealing with the failure of a partner organization to deliver on its promises, managing a superior’s unreasonable expectations, explaining why you can’t follow through on a promise of your own). Meanwhile, human beings are generally conflict-averse. The deep-seated desire to avoid anxiety-producing situations often leads to deep managerial dysfunction: avoiding conversations that should not be avoided and botching conversations that we cannot afford to botch. This interactive session is designed to offer practical tools, approaches and frameworks for effectively handling those difficult conversations and reducing the anxiety that is often associated with disengagement.
The Leader as a Coach
This session is based on a Rotman experiential workshop that focuses on identifying and successfully seizing upon informal coaching opportunities for your employees. It will further develop the art of managing difficult conversations. Coaching, done well, can help build critical relationships and improve the performance of your team members and your team. Specifically, this session will involve a series of interactive coaching sessions developed by Rotman in an Ontario community hospital. All participants play the role of a superior (providing feedback) and subordinate (receiving feedback). All sessions will be filmed and participants will receive peer feedback based on session videos.
Inclusive Leadership: Why It Matters
Over the past couple of years, there has been a timely call for greater demonstration of organizational commitment to and capacity for putting a strategic lens on the work of equity, diversity and inclusion. This important imperative constitutes the backbone of a leadership approach that is necessary to raise important questions about how leaders can address societal inequity and, at the same time, seize opportunities for greater organizational inclusion and engagement at all levels. In this highly interactive session, participants will work with five key insights on how leaders can assemble such a leadership approach in their organizations and the broader health system.
Teamwork and Collaboration
In this interactive and practical session, participants will explore the importance of teams and their need for leadership. Teams expand capabilities beyond what a single individual can do. Yet, as much as we hear stories that praise a team’s success, we see instances where teams have led to disastrous consequences. Good teamwork requires leadership. This session will give participants the opportunity to see leadership in action, in the context of practicing a core function that teams serve — making high-quality decisions. In this session, participants will conduct a team decision-making exercise. The discussion following each exercise will focus on helping participants understand how they can lead their teams to higher-quality outcomes.
Integrative Thinking
What do you do when you feel forced to choose between two mutually exclusive, yet sub-optimal options (think of some of the assumed trade-offs of the quadruple aim)? That is the question we will address in this session. We will introduce the ways in which successful integrative thinkers have resolved this tension and then explore the process of integrative thinking for ourselves. We will ask how we can use the tension between opposing models – different views of the world – to create better answers. We often see such “model clash” between governments/payors and providers, between administration and clinicians, and even between providers. When faced with clear either-or alternatives – between ideas, perspectives or people – how might we do something other than to simply evaluate and choose? We will explore the concept of integrative thinking, discuss some of the key tensions we face in healthcare and together formulate ideas to create new, integrative solutions.