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Mary Shipley, Director of Supply Chain Management at Renown Health, understands trust is critical to leading well. She uses the combined power of assessments and rolling up her sleeves, and getting in the thick of things to understand her team’s personalities and identify their pain points. By doing this, Mary is able to create a trusting environment where people feel comfortable sharing their ideas, enabling them to achieve more as an organization.

Mary discussed how to individualize your leadership style to develop trust. Learn, below, about what tools, including data-driven approaches, you can use to motivate your people and uncover the power of meaningful connections in the workplace.

“To lead a person well requires trust. And I don’t think you can get to a point where an individual trusts you unless they really know that you can speak the same language that they understand from their perspective.”

Truth You Can Act On

1. Shadow Team Members

I’m a big fan of shadowing what is happening in your departments and with individuals. You need to be able to understand what their hindrances are. What are all their different processes? And instead of trying to dive in there and take it over, make notes of those situations. Then you can be the person who guides them and have them examine the pattern of their day. That kind of collaboration with an individual is important because they’re the ones who are defining what would be the best practice, so they should be the ones who are leading you to the next steps of what you can do to help them.

2. Leverage Discernment

I don’t necessarily think that you can get to a point where an individual trusts you unless they really know that you can speak the same language. It’s one thing to be a leader, come in and observe and then be like, “Okay, I know this person does contracts, this person does frontline logistics,” it’s another to understand their day-to-day entrapments. When you understand all those pieces, you can be prepared when they come up with reasons why they can’t complete a task. And you can go further into delegation and ask, “Why is it an important task? Should it be yours? Should it be someone else’s?” Understanding each individual thing builds trust with the individual.

3. Spending Time with People is Key

Building trust requires leaders to spend time with team members to find out what they do. And I mean a lot of time because it will take a good amount of time before they can give you all the pieces you need to see the big picture. When you first meet a person as a leader, they will be very high-level. They’re going to be very closed. They’re just going to give you information. It’s only after time, with you learning what they do and putting in some time doing what they do, where they’re going to think, “Oh, she’s for real here.”

4. Customize Your Communication

Every individual is different, and each responds differently to check-ins. There are some individuals that don’t need to be micromanaged. In fact, it really turns them off. So by understanding what they do every day, you start to learn what the best way of communication with them is. I have individuals on my team that I know will execute what I give them. And asking if it’s ready yet only causes anxiety in their world and causes deficiency in the execution. Then there are individuals who are learning and don’t know everything they should know or need reassurance to move forward. In those situations, you might have a regular set meeting, and you set specific tasks of what they can complete to see their growth levels.

Book Recommendation:

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

The Mountain is You by Brianna Wiest

Additional Resources:

• Connect with Renown Health on LinkedIn

Listen to the Full Episode: 194: We’re All Important, Prioritize Everyone You Lead with Mary Shipley

The most effective means of increasing engagement and retention, regardless of industry, is to bring people back to their why to help them fall back in love with their work.

Joyce Batcheller, an innovative healthcare leader and Executive Nurse Advisor, says there are key actions leaders can take to make their teams proud of their work so they can feel fulfilled. That, in turn, reminds them that the reason they got into the profession was a good one.

Joyce breaks down how to bring joy and pride back into the workplace through recognition and celebration.

Truth You Can Act On

1. Build Trust to Drive Engagement

We’ve got to rebuild trust with our staff, and we’ve also got to learn how to really listen to them. What I am finding is that they have a lot to say. They have been through a lot. They have had experiences at both work and at home. We have to listen and give them time and honor what they’ve been through, and really look at and appreciate what they’ve accomplished, and then really begin to look at how do we move forward? It’s really making almost like a formal transition from the craziness that we have been working under and how to now begin to create a new future. We have to get unstuck because if we don’t create the future we want for the nursing profession.

2. Build Positivity Around What Your People Do

To reignite people’s hearts, we need to really give them time to share something they’re proud of. To tell a patient’s story that really warms their heart. We need to practice appreciative inquiry, where you find out what they’re most proud of to show them where they made a big difference. We focus so much on what the data’s telling us about turnover, burnout, and all these other things and we’re not remembering that there’s a lot of great care being given every single day. We’re getting too stuck on some of the negatives. And we need to start really recognizing the amazing work that people are still doing and the transformational changes that they’re helping to create.

3. Lead with Data Insights

Other leaders and I were meeting to really look at the outcomes that we saw at every site when it came to patient safety, because we had a goal back in 2005 to get to zero preventable deaths and injuries by 2008. And I can tell you, those were some of the most fun years I had because of that alignment and the accountability that was heightened at each site. But it was also people understanding that it wasn’t to be punitive, it was to figure out what we needed to do as leaders to make the environments better, healthier, and safer so people were set up to be successful in the care that they were delivering. And I used to always say, ‘I want this to be so intuitive that when it’s 3:00 AM on a Saturday morning and the new grad came off of orientation yesterday, that that person knows what to do.’  If we don’t have that sort of thing set up, then we should not be satisfied because we’re going to have errors. And we got to zero on so many metrics and had work that was so stellar.

4. Standardize Your Systems

I did a lot of standardization in my prior role and it allowed us to move people around more readily. If things are the same, no matter where I show up, I can really hit the ground running and you’re more likely to be able to continue to do the right standards and be set up for success. If you’re trying to figure out all the variations as you go from place to place, you’re more likely to make a mistake. There are nurses who have floated in from other units, there’s a traveler, there’s a new grad who’s come off of orientation three days ago, and you sort of scratch your head and if everything is different in this organization versus the one they were just in, they’re going to make mistakes. And that’s part of the issue that we’ve got to figure out is how do you make those environments where you set people up to be successful?

Book Recommendation:

The Leadership Trajectory by Dr. Patricia S. Yoder-Wise, Karren Kowalski, and Susan Sportsman

Additional Resources:

• Find out more about the Texas Nurses Association
• Find out more about The Nurses Legacy Institute
• Take a listen to this Radio Show: All About Nursing

Listen to the Full Episode: 189:  Help Your People Love Their Work (Again) with Joyce Batcheller