Strong programs that build strong leadership

Language of Caring® provides dynamic leadership development programs suited to your circumstances and needs. Our leadership programs engage the heart and head. They are hands-on, experiential, and invigorating, built on sound adult education, experiential learning, and culture change principles.

Build a Powerhouse Executive Team

• Strengthen your team and your leadership prowess.
• Become more focused, inspiring, high-performing, and cohesive
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Build Essential Leadership Competencies

• Engage your executives, managers and supervisors in sharpening and using high-impact competencies.
• Help all leaders practice what they preach, engage their teams, practice accountability, collaborate, and follow through—all to advance your organization’s objectives
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Develop Frontline Leaders and Peer Coaches

• Create an epidemic of commitment and improvement related to the patient experience
• Build, leverage and support teams of frontline champions, team facilitators and peer coaches
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Gain from our leadership expertise. Our comprehensive programs include keynotes, leadership retreats, half- or full-day workshops, briefings, live webinars, quarterly retreats, and a bimonthly series—all with appropriate follow-up options that reinforce learning and on-the-job performance improvement.

Valuable features that lead to immediate results.

• Count on us to tailor our programs so that they complement and integrate with your previous, current, and planned improvement initiatives
• Our dynamic facilitators and coaches are experienced in healthcare leadership and stimulate purposeful engagement and interaction
• You will see results the next day, because we provide hands-on development of concrete skills

1. Build a Powerhouse Executive Team

We help your Executive Team become a powerhouse, high-performing and cohesive team that embraces your goals and mobilizes them and their teams to do their part.

Typical strategy elements:

1. Groundwork interviews (with optional survey)
2. Sessions focused on team roles and expectations, team image, and more
3. One-to-one and triad executive coaching sessions for each member of the Executive Team (in person or web-based meetings)
4. Team coaching sessions focused on team dynamics and organizational performance

Sample Topics

• Walking Our Talk: The Path to Personal Power and Credibility
• Employee Engagement
• Caring Communicating
• Accountability
• Leading the Way to the Exceptional Patient and Family Experience
• Getting a Grip: Personal Coping Skills for Leaders Running Ragged
• How to Lead the Way from Good to Great
• Hiring for Excellence
• Coaching for Peak Performance
• Interdepartmental Relationships and Teamwork across Lines
• How to Build a High Performing Team
• And more

One Example
Topics—based on assessment, series of learning modules for all leaders, and a select group of emerging leaders (three times per year)

1. Upfront assessment
   • Document Review: Mission, vision, values, leader job descriptions, and performance review forms and process
   • Job descriptions
   • Patient survey data
   • Employee engagement/satisfaction data
2. Focus groups and interviews with:
   • Top-performing leaders
   • Mix of leaders at each level
   • Non-clinical and clinical employees
   • Physician leaders who interface with administrative leaders
3. Provide in-depth workshop on each of several selected leadership competencies
4. Engage leaders in learning and using the skills and tools that result in immediate behavior change.
5. Reinforce raising the bar to elevate expectations and strengthen accountability
   1. Eliminating gray behavior
   2. Caring Feedback Model
   3. Coaching conversations
6. Train-the-Trainer model to enhance internal capacity to sustain the gain
7. Built-in hardwiring options/solutions

2. Build Essential Leadership Competencies

We help leaders (executives, managers, and supervisors) sharpen these competencies and prompt them to employ them proactively with their own teams and their colleagues across lines.

• The Great Patient and Family Experience: Leading The Way to Breakthroughs
• Walking Our Talk: The Path to Personal Power and Credibility
• Accountability Essentials
• How to Hire Effective Communicators
• Getting a Grip – Personal Coping Strategies for Managers Running Ragged
• How Do You Say Thanks? Powerful Recognition for Individuals and Teams
• Fostering Engagement and Soulful Work
• Building Bridges: From Turf to Team

Competencies include:

• Role-modeling
• Employee engagement
• Hiring effective communicators
• Caring communication
• Key accountability skills
• Performance coaching
• Dealing with the marginal employee
• Team facilitation
• Coaching your team to handle difficult situations
• Change management and communication
• And more

3. Develop Frontline Leaders and Peer Coaches

We help you multiply internal leadership and capability and broaden the base of skilled people who champion your goals and employ nuts-and-bolts skills to helping peers (individually and in groups) to embrace your goals, apply skills learned to their own everyday situations, and make exceptional communication skills their habit.

In the terrific book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell shares evidence that significant culture changes reach a tipping point not as a result of a linear, planned change process, but because a critical mass of people with certain predilections all apply their energies, consciously and unconsciously, to bringing about the change. Their natural style, which they can’t resist because that’s who they are, pushes the change they want over its tipping point, causing it first to spread like an epidemic and then to stick.

Gladwell says that a critical mass of three kinds of people who may not even know or communicate with one another lead a culture change to its tipping point: connectors, information mavens, and promoters.

1. Connectors network with others constantly and greatly enjoy connecting people to each other.
2. Information mavens love know-how. They’re always engaged in learning something new, and they collect, savor, and share concrete tools for accomplishing what’s important to them.
3. Promoters can sell anybody on anything. Their contagious enthusiasm and ability to sell the benefits inspire others to join buy in.

The Language of Caring team combines Gladwell’s organic approach to change with a deliberate strategy to accelerate the adoption and spread of your priority on the patient experience.

Facilitator and Peer Coach Development

Building on the “tipping point” approach, the Language of Caring team helps clients identify connectors, information mavens and promoters from all levels of your organization. Then, we provide an intensive boot camp to build a team of champions who will accelerate your improvement strategy and strengthen your culture of caring.

• Do you want to prepare people to facilitate team sessions as part of our Language of Caring programs?
• Do you want them to become even stronger informal opinion leaders?
• Do you want them to serve as performance coaches with individuals and job-specific teams?
• Or all of the above?

We tailor our programs to focus on the specific roles you most want your Champion Team to fulfill.

Peer Coach Boot Camp: Example of 2-day program

Day 1

Goal: Prepare to be an exemplary role model, promoter, and advocate for a culture of caring

1. Introduction
2. Your style and strengths: A self-diagnosis
3. Goals and roles for peer coaches
4. Role modeling: From good to GREAT in your own performance (Activity: Bad-Good-GREAT skits)
5. YOU as coach for GREAT performance (Activity: Round Robin Coaching)
6. How to assist managers in performance coaching: Three service options
7. Scavenger hunt through peer coaching toolkit
8. Elevator speeches that articulate your commitment

Homework: Prepare to show GREAT greetings, handoffs, and goodbyes

Day 2

1. Revisiting you as role model: (Activity: GREAT performances in small groups with structured feedback and mutual coaching)
2. Revisiting your role as champion and advocate
3. Championing the Language of Caring: (Activity: Crystallize your talking points, try your statement on someone outside the room, debrief and commit)
4. Plan for reception with managers at day’s end
5. Characteristics of a helping/coaching relationship: (Absorbing bridge-building activity in pairs to gain insights into the optimal coaching relationship)
6. Coaching on application of Language of Caring skills: Round robin rehearsal with feedback
7. Revisit the models that peer coach team will offer to managers. What are we saying peer coaches can do? Walk through the associated tools
8. How to deal with inevitable resistance: (Activity: Resistance One-Liners and the Terrific Skill Trio)
9. Strengths bombardment: (Activity: Team-building affirmations)
10. Peer coach reception/presentation with managers:
    • Peer coaches share:
    • What we learned
    • What excited us
    • What we can do for you
    • What we’ll need from you to be successful