Podcast | LEIPA- The Leadership Emotional Intelligence Performance Accelerator

Better Never Stops | LEIPA- The Leadership Emotional Intelligence Performance Accelerator

Brenda: Thank you for joining us for Better Never Stops, our podcast for healthcare leaders and everyone committed to transforming healthcare. We interview leaders from our clients and partners around the world, as well as leaders right here in Seattle who work to maintain a culture of continuous improvement at Virginia Mason Franciscan Health. In each episode, we hope to explore a philosophy of go see, ask why, and show respect. My name is Brenda McLeod and I’m the Associate Executive Director over engagement operations at Virginia Mason Institute. I’ll be your host for this episode of Better never stops

Today we are talking about one of our newest service offerings, the leadership, emotional intelligence, performance accelerator or LEIPA. When I first learned about this model, I kind of thought, yeah, sure, I know about this kind of model, understanding your colleagues, personalities can help us all work together better, but as I learned more and actually did the leap of myself, I realized that this is actually something very different, and that’s what today’s episode is all about. But we’re not going to just tell you about it. We’re actually going to dive deep with someone who is right in the midst of experiencing the program, and we’ll be talking with one of the founders and CEO of Leadershape, the developers of this model. But first, I want to start by introducing Wendy Korthuis-Smith, who is executive director here at Virginia Mason institute. Thanks so much for joining us today, Wendy.

Wendy: Delighted to be here, Brenda, thank you for hosting.

Brenda: Wendy, tell us a little bit about your role here and about your experience with the LEIPA model.

Wendy: Great, thank you for that. So my current role, as you noted, is executive director of the Institute where our vision is to transform healthcare across the globe. However, I think it’s perhaps important to note my first experience with Virginia Mason began over 30 years ago, in the mid 90s, focusing on leadership development, and with a long standing belief that leadership is a cornerstone for transformation, we became clear on what leadership would look like for our organization, what would we expect of our leaders and what would we expect of ourselves? Since that time, you can imagine, we have a long history with leadership development, tools, models, assessments, as well as what we call Leader Standard Work. So if you fast forward to today, where I think we’re even more acutely aware that leadership continues to be a cornerstone, key for transferable, scalable, sustainable improvement and innovation. It’s about bringing the ideas and the voices of many to the table and then delivering on results for those that we serve. And while we’ve worked with leaders across the globe, helping them leverage lessons learned from our journey, really sharpening their skills and abilities to lead, we felt we were missing something, something to help individuals, teams and organizations really crystallize this important work. And when we learned about LEIPA, it was a natural fit and extension of this work, and it’s so aligned to our principles, our concepts and beliefs, and it provides the depth needed from a competency, capability and behavioral perspective. So by far, it’s my favorite leadership development approach and experience really brings that rigor, clarity and actionable development opportunities for individuals and teams, and really has become a game changer for us and our clients. And so just my last comment, I would say, is like, how do we know for us at The Institute, it’s important for us to walk in the shoes of our clients, to really model what we teach, to lead with integrity and light the path for others. And so we embrace this opportunity to experience LEIPA firsthand with ourselves and our leadership team, and the journey has been really rich. So far, we’ve identified our own target areas for greatest impact, both individually and collectively. So there’s a lot I could say, good. I’m going to stop there, because I’m excited to hear the other voices of Greg and Adam,

Brenda: And I know you have been working closely with Greg Young, CEO of LeaderShape, and one of the developers of the LEIPA model. He is joining us on the show today. Greg, thanks so much for being here.

Greg: Thank you for the invitation. Brenda, I’m really looking forward to it.

Brenda: So Greg, can you tell us a little bit about the LEIPA instrument?

Greg: Sure. So I should start out by saying LEIPA is not a psychometric it’s a development tool for leaders, and it’s based, as the title suggests, on emotional intelligence and leadership styles. What makes it unique is that it doesn’t compare people to a norm or a band of averages. What it compares is observed behavior. And what is observed and what would like to be observed among the among the raters. So it’s also set on a 360 model, and it focuses initially on emotional intelligence competencies, and we’ve also included an additional three, which is trustworthiness, conscientiousness and communication, in addition to Goldman’s motion intelligence competencies. And what that does, because we’re comparing observed versus desired, it makes it culturally neutral, so we can use it in any context, in any sector, anywhere in the world. And because you’re comparing what is observed with what you’d like to see, then actually it takes into account that context. What it then goes on to do is to compare the prioritization of Goldman six different leadership styles. So that’s visionary, the coaching, the Democratic, the affiliative, the pace setting and the commanding. And it asks the candidate, their boss, their direct reports, their raters, to rank the order of importance of the leadership style that they believe should be correct in their context. And then, because we’ve got the competency in the different ei competencies, then we can guide through the development plan the individual to develop individual behaviors that best equip them to deliver that leadership style, and all that is backed up with verbating comments. So start doing, stop doing, do more of, do less of. And that gives a really comprehensive picture that the facilitator can use as a coaching tool, as a development tool, to help feedback or to generate from the candidate the insights that inform their own development program.

Brenda: Another option for organizations is to go and do a team LEIPA, can you tell us a little bit about the team LEIPA?

Greg: Sure. So what the team Leaper does, and we it is team. So we don’t do it for huge numbers of people, because usually a team comprises of around 10 to 20, fewer than 20 people. So we keep numbers to that. But what it does is it brings, brings together all the individual leapers. So we generate a heat map so you can see, then individuals in the team and how they compare with their ability to deliver the different behaviors, and then the individual leadership styles within that so from a team perspective, it shows you what the team is strong at what the team has got for development opportunities, and you can work together within the team to develop those things. I should stress that both the individual and the team LEIPA are all conducted under confidential terms. So even in the team LEIPA, it doesn’t reveal who is who in the in the report

Brenda: We’ve been talking about the LEAP model a bit already, and it has this really powerful tagline, leading beyond the ego. Can you tell us a little bit about what that means, and why is that at the heart of your approach?

Greg: Sure. So the word transpersonal, or leading beyond the ego, really stems from transpersonal psychology that was started around 1905 and we started using the the term around 2011 and transpersonal literally means beyond the ego. So more and more we find leaders discontent with the way things are going, because they tend to find that many leaders lead for power, prestige, recognition or reward. So the ego tends to get in the way of their performance as a leader, and indeed in many of the many of the programs that we run, when we ask people who is an inspirational leader, or ask people of a leader they’ve been influenced by and the other way around, leaders that they don’t find that were very good, often it’s the ego that comes in with the leaders that weren’t So good. So a transpersonal leader is somebody who’s reached a level of leadership maturity where they recognize the benefits of setting aside their ego in their leadership practice, so they have a strong sense of personal purpose in service of a greater good, rather than that power, prestige, recognition and reward, and it’s the integration really, of rational intelligence, emotional intelligence and spiritual intelligence, so these people no longer have the fear of being judged for making the right decisions. And because of this, they can be radical while also being ethical and authentic as leaders. And this is wonderful. I’m really enjoying getting this big picture sense of the model.

Brenda: And how it works, and now I want to hear from someone who is in the midst of experiencing it. Let’s introduce our third guest, Adam Sewell-Jones, who’s the chief executive at North and East Hertfordshire NHS Trust. Thanks so much for joining us. Adam,

Adam: Hi, Brenda, as always great to be with you.

Brenda: I’ve had the chance to work closely with you as you and your team experience the LEIPA model, and I’m really looking forward to hearing about your experience. I kind of want to start at the beginning. What was your team’s initial reaction to the idea?

Adam: Well, I guess taking a step back, the very first introduction to this was really when myself and one of my colleagues attended a session that Greg did the Virginia Mason Institute put together. And so we came away from that impressed and intrigued by the opportunity. And then when the team at VMI asked us if we’d be interested, certainly a couple of couple of us were quite excited about the idea. And at first we did the individual LEIPA, so development as us as individuals, and then we moved through to doing it as a group. But at first it was a hard sell. We were concerned about the business that we all have, and I know it was a concern that VMI had, but I think the team were able to move forward in part because the cultural shift we’re seeing in the organization from our bigger partnership of implementing a management system and the learning culture that sits alongside it. So although it would be more work, I think the team were really quite excited about doing it.

Brenda: So tell us about the results workshop.

Adam: Okay, so maybe I’ll go back to for people listening to this to understand actually what kind of happens. So each of us had to choose a group of individuals where we including our line manager, our colleagues, some peers from outside the organization, and those people we lead, they all filled in a survey setting out what they kind of expected from us and what we were able what we demonstrated, and then it allowed people to use that scoring system and also to look at the comments in order to play those back. So we each had a individual workshop where the results were fed back to us, and one of the VMI team coached us through, how do we turn that into action? But probably the most exciting bit was when we did this as a team, and Greg came in, and we were lucky to have him with us to facilitate, and he took us through the science behind the method and managed our natural tendency maybe to look at the real scores, rather than looking at the gaps between what was expected and where we were, and we were able to work that through look at the data. And then VMI colleagues pushed us on a really important point, which was, it’s great to do a bit of navel gazing and think about what it’s telling us, but the change only happens when we actually work on an action plan. So that was the end of the workshop where we pulled together the action plan to set up what this means for us going forward,

Brenda: And what were the biggest surprises and takeaways? Did you get any feedback from the team?

Adam: Yeah, I did. One surprise was how energizing it felt at a time when we all were really busy, and some of this reflective stuff can feel quite draining, but actually there was a real buzz. And although the individual scores were anonymized, there was quite a big range across the team under the many things, but the team didn’t really focus on the individual. There was a real sense of, how do we move forward as a team together? And that’s where the conversation came and actually it was really easy to coalesce around some key themes that we were able to pull out to start to build upon.

Brenda: Have you seen any impact for the patients?

Adam: I guess it’s always difficult. When you’re an executive team, you feel a bit removed from the patients, and I think we realize that our biggest offering to our patient community is how we lead our people, and I think the we with the evidence demonstrating such a strong correlation between a leadership capability and patient care by making us a better group of leaders, I’m really confident that Those that deliver that care will be a better equipped and the patients will see the benefit through that.

Brenda: Wendy, I know, when we first started working with Adam and his trust, he had a special desire that he expressed around moving his team. Would you like to talk a little bit about that?

Wendy: Well, I can certainly start, and I’d love to hear Adam’s perspective on this. But I recall Adam that during our diagnostic, we had this conversation where I think you said something to the effect of I can have a great group of Leaders, but what I really need is a great leadership team. And so thinking about that notion of the relevance and the importance today of not just individual great leaders, but how do you really get that collective intelligence, that leadership team that can kind of tackle the challenges of today and tomorrow, and I was so inspired by that, and I love the notion of that. And then turning to the opportunity with Team LEIPA, it just felt like this perfect fit. But I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.

Adam: Yeah, I think you’re right. Wendy, there was a real sense. And I think the words I probably use were, I have a team of excellent executives, but not an excellent executive team. But what was really encouraging when I arrived in the organization, they got that they were already working on some team development, but it is so important, because all the academic rigor demonstrates that the power of teams is massive, and if you’ve not actually unlocked that in terms of getting the best out of your individuals when they’re all pulling together, it can be a problem. And so for us, the idea of a team LEIPA was a real gift, because I think the team were in the right space for it, and it was a fantastic tool to be able to marry up with that ambition.

Brenda: Thank you, Adam. When you look back at this process, what do you see as the easiest part and the hardest part of this?

Adam: Well, I think the easiest part was actually filling in the questionnaire. It’s straightforward, it’s intuitive, it makes sense, and it doesn’t take much time at all. I guess the more difficult bit is to get the real power you want a good group of raters feeding back. The problem is, when you do it for yourself, you’ll know, you know that you’re going to get some benefit, because it will give you a development plan. But if you’re asking someone else to respond, they don’t really get the benefit. And therefore, the hard bit is having to constantly chase them up because in the busyness of their experiencing, and you’ve got a deadline because you’re trying to line things up. So that was the most difficult bit, but actually it felt a really easy process to go through.

Brenda: And what are you most proud of looking back?

Adam: I think the fact that we’ve got a real clarity in our next steps, so it is something we can definitely point to and say we are now going to get the benefit of this going forward. And I think the other thing is just the way the team responded. It’s difficult in senior leadership roles to feel vulnerable and to be really open to see the opportunities improve, rather than justifying how well you’re doing, and I’m really proud of the team I lead, which it feels every single day. And yeah, that really, really came through very strongly.

Brenda: Greg, would you add anything to what Adam just said?

Greg: Oh, I would. I’d love to build on what Adam just said, because having facilitated that exercise, what I observed was a conversation that was developing on a whole different level, I think, than the usual transactional conversations that go on in the executive team.

A lot of the time the executive team are thinking about them out there and how we interact with them out there. What I really observed was, how are we going to be with us in that room? And that was the transition, I think that informed the development program that Adam you and your team put in place, was this whole higher order conversation, which I think began people to be vulnerable with. How are we going to be with us as a team, and how is that going to impact the way we lead the organization?

Brenda: Adam, what would you say your top takeaways are from this work.

Adam: So I guess repeating the last comment, make sure you build in enough time to chase the responders, very practical, but hugely important, and use as many responders as you can get for that rich picture, but similarly linked to time, put enough time in your own diary for the personal leap to develop your development plan. It’s really important. This is a gift as a senior leader, and we rarely prioritize our own development. So that will be the second one, and probably a third one, which is very personal, make sure you take time to read the survey properly, because I didn’t and I had to ask for it to be opened up again when I was rating my team because I hadn’t read the question properly. So a schoolboy error there,

Brenda: But easily fixed if I recall correctly. What do you think the prerequisites for success for you were?

Adam: I think, making sure the team understood the value up front. So, When they are busy, they can prioritize, but also, as I’ve mentioned already, I think just having a team that are in the right space for it, so that they can be open. We heard some difficult messages. One of the themes that came through in our team was a gap on empathy. And for a group of healthcare leaders, that’s quite painful if you just want to dwell on it. But interestingly, when you see the tool, you understand, not only was it our number one area for development in the global group who have done it, it was similarly the number one area, but be willing to be curious, understand what that means, and have a real desire to improve on it. So I think having the team in the right place is really helpful. I think you can get some benefit however your team are, but I think that really made it successful.

Brenda: Greg, would you have any words of advice for people as they enter into this process, in this kind of same vein around prerequisites for success?

Greg: Yeah, I would. And again, you know, Adam, you use the word gift. I think that if you go into this exercise, you know, this is not, this is not something around that’s going to go into personnel records or are used in assessment centers, this is your personal gift for your own personal development as a leader. And I think if you go into it with the mindset that this is an opportunity to have conversations with the people around you to help you develop as a leader. You know many people in in either in the health service or in business or in in any line of life you know, hope that they get good feedback from those people around you. And by good feedback, I don’t mean praise, but I mean authentic feedback. And this is a really good vehicle for helping you in a really constructive way, improve your behaviors as a leader. I think that that’s really important. And the development program that comes out gives you, if you like, an opportunity to talk and have a conversation with those people around you. And if you keep it alive, if you keep going back to it and think, actually, how am I doing with this then becomes something which is more sustainable than going through a 360 process, getting the report, sticking it in a draw, never visiting it again, it then becomes part of your personal development journey.

Brenda: Adam, what would you say your biggest lessons are?

Adam: I think probably too. I think don’t overthink and dwell on the gaps. Greg kind of used the terminology with this. These are all improvement opportunities. And I think the risk is you always want to be judged well, and if people want more from you, it’s easy to feel a bit down about that. But look at the improvement opportunity. And I guess the other lesson which I learned, kind of afterwards is that probably over building on the gift analogy, but it’s the gift that keeps giving, because you leave the process with an analysis that prompts you and some coaching to where you want to look at but the value then in speaking to maybe your line manager or your colleagues about the feedback, you can take it to a whole new level, and I had a really rich conversation with my chair to talk about her feedback, and also she was relatively new to the organization, and how she may have answered things differently once she had understood and observed a bit more. So there was real richness coming out of that conversation, too.

Brenda: So Wendy, I’m curious with your experience on this if you’d want to talk a little bit about just what the results around the common language and the benefits of that that comes out for a team once they’ve gone through this process together.

Wendy: That’s a great question. Brenda, thank you for that. I think that you know, as we’ve been talking about the experience and the opportunity, and us having gone through the experience ourselves, as well as with our clients, this this, you know, gift, as we’ve been calling it, the LEIPA approach, really provides you with That framework to have that rich conversation, I think at the institute, we’ve always aspired to talk about what great leadership looks like, and we’ve talked about the importance of transcending from enlightened kind of command and control traditional leadership styles to those styles that are more empowering, that are engaging the people. And this tool really provides the depth. And as we’ve been talking about the you know, raters are your raters. They’re looking at what’s your observed and your desired. As Greg said, it’s your opportunity. It’s your tool. And so you can take it and make with it. What makes best sense for you. And I think having some of that common language about, as Adam was saying, with empathy. You know, the healthcare industry likes to believe that we are all high with empathy, because we are treating those most vulnerable who are putting themselves in our care. And yet there’s opportunities there to really dig deeper and understand, what are the behaviors that align with empathy, and how do we develop those behaviors? If there are any potential opportunities to get better, I think it aligns with our conversation today about better never stops, right? It’s there’s just such rich opportunities. So I think you know with going down this path, you’re getting the framework, you’re getting the rich data, you’re getting the nomenclature or the language that you can use to have those conversations with each other, and then looking at the team LEIPA opportunity, getting clarity around actionable insights, and what’s the path forward. So just a tremendous opportunity for that.

Brenda: Thank you. Wendy, so Adam, what do you wish you’d known before getting started?

Adam: Well, I guess I’ve shared probably throughout a number of those things, but it felt that we were probably quite early on in this process, in that I didn’t know other teams who had done leave, so it had probably been great to talk to some other people had been through it and picked their brain. And, you know, wouldn’t it have been great if someone had thought to do a podcast about the subject, which would have been a great learning exercise for us, but hopefully we can play some of that forward through this.

Brenda: Greg, do you have any advice for folks that are considering starting with LEIPA

Greg: Yes, I mean, Adam said it was quite difficult to get people invested in doing this to begin with. And a lot of that is driven around, you know, fear of doing a 360 what kind of feedback am I going to get? Is it going to be messages or that I don’t particularly want to hear. I think that you know you need not to be fearful. This is, you know, a great development tool by and large. You know, people are very positive about having how to help you in your leadership practice. After all, if you’re their leader, they want you to be a good leader, because they want to work for a good leader. So, you know, actually embrace it. Don’t be fearful of it. Get people on board. But then you know that richness of those conversations afterwards, and it’s really important that you go back to your raters and have those rich conversations, because in many respects, it’s evidence that you’ve listened and that you want to shift, and that, I think, makes not only yourself better, but it’s also a key indicator to those people that you asked to invest the time in rating. You know, is that great feedback that you’ve you’ve listened, and you want to improve? That’s very important.

Brenda: So I’m going to open this next question up to all three of you. So just chime in. Whoever has an has a response. Is there anything else you think folks should know about this experience?

Adam: So let me, let me jump in first. So I think if I was doing this again, I would maybe choose a few different people, and I avoid maybe some of those people that are my cheerleaders. So we all have those people that we know instinctively quite like us as a leader or we’re going to work, and we know those people that maybe we don’t connect with in quite the same way, and I think I would be a bit more hungry in finding those people. Because whilst you don’t want it all to be challenging, I think on balance, it’s better if you have more challenge than more maybe more reinforcement of of the things that you think. So that probably be my reflection if I was doing it again.

Greg: There is something else, I think that that folks might know about, about this experience, and I think it has much to do with the feedback, you know, especially the when you sit down or you get feedback with your facilitator, because it’s delivered in what I would call A coaching style. So it doesn’t just say, you know, this happened and this happened and this happened, you know, it asks you to look at the patterns and say, what might account for what might be going on here. And the great thing about LEIPA is that it looks at it’s data rich, I’d say. So, you can look from quite a high level, through the down the different layers, you know, to really quite granular levels of different individual behaviors within the emotional intelligence spectrum. And so the way that it’s fed back is in a way that that causes you to reflect, and causes you to have. Of what I would call aha moments about the way that things have gone on and the way that things have happened. And that’s those insights are far more powerful than getting a report back, which says you need to do X, Y or Z, because it actually comes from within. And that’s far more potent, I think, than anything else. The other thing you know there, there’s an I’ve already spoken about, the element talking about different leadership styles, and it’s interesting to see how you rate the different leadership styles in terms of priority against that that your that your line manager might assign a priority, or your or your peers might assign a priority, or your debt, or your direct reports might assign a priority. So sometimes it’s quite interesting to see that coming from your line manager, they’d like to see something like more pace setting going on, but from your direct reports, they’d like to see more visionary going on.

And so what your direct reports may be signaling to you is that they don’t feel aligned with the vision. And on the other hand, you know your line managers say we’ve got to crack on and get something done. So it really is a matter of how you balance those things. And that can come out from the conversations that you have with the with the with your raters.

Brenda: Wendy, anything from you?

Wendy: Well, I was going to be here a bit of what Greg said, but I think he said it better than I would have said. So I’ll put a pin in that. And the only other thing that I can think of at this point is just that notion of what I think Adam was talking about when we talk about readiness.

I know some of the teams that we’ve worked with, we want to make sure we pay special attention to kind of creating that readiness for this experience, especially if it’s a challenging team or a team that maybe has not a high level of trust. And so how do we really help them understand what this is, what this isn’t a bit of what Greg was saying earlier around this isn’t about performance. This is around development and opportunities and so really taking time, I think, to create that readiness for specific groups that would benefit most from that.

Brenda: Excellent thank you. I think the biggest things I’m taking away from this conversation is that LEIPA enables individuals and teams to create an accountable action plan to address the gaps between observed and desired behaviors, as well as the benefit of connecting emotional intelligence behaviors to leadership styles. And what about you all? What would you say your biggest takeaways are?

Greg: I think that the I think it was fantastic hearing from Adam, you know, it’s all well and good as the developers of this instrument, we know the benefits, and we know you know the benefits, not just for the individual, but also for the organization. And to hear Adam speak having been through the process and the impact that it’s had, I think, is far more powerful than anything I could say,

Adam: Well, that’s a that’s a nice build out for I guess my comment, which is to say, I think, as you’ve heard, hopefully we found this really useful in my organization, but we’re still only part way through, and I’m confident we’ll get more benefit. But in wanting to be a genuinely improving and learning organization, as well as learning new things, it’s really important to share. So a genuine offer from me, if anyone listening to this is keen to know a bit more and discuss it, by all means, through the Virginia Mason Institute, always happy to spend some time talking with colleagues about the possibilities.

Wendy: So for me, I would say, we know leadership’s essential. Now more than ever, there’s this path available, and it’s amazing path, and it’s a great opportunity, a tremendous opportunity, and the time is now. So I would say, as leaders and executives, let’s go, let’s lean in with curiosity, vulnerability and courage, and really take the opportunity to learn together, to make a difference and make an impact for those we serve.

Brenda: I think that’s about all the time we have. Thanks so much to Wendy, Greg and Adam for joining us on the podcast today.

Greg: Thank you. Brenda

Adam: Thanks. Brenda

Wendy: Thanks. Brenda,

Brenda: Thank you for listening to better never stops. What a great conversation with Wendy courthouse Smith, Greg young and Adam Sewell Jones about their work with the LEIPA program. You can stay up to date with our latest episodes by subscribing on Apple podcasts Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, you can also find us on social media or send us an email at info at virginiamasoninstitute.org. Thanks again for listening and remember, transforming healthcare is not just about a pursuit of perfection, but a mindset that we can always do better, because better never stops.