Leadership culture adventure | Healthcare + Charity

 We work with leaders where a change in the organisational or leadership culture or strategy is required.  We create experiences to enable leaders to grow into new ways of being together, drawing on and honouring the ‘story so far’, renewing and revitalising strengths and courage, and refreshing old stories with new, more alive perspectives and companionship.

In Madagascar, Elizabeth worked with Mercy Ships, a charity medical ship, providing two specific leadership experiences.

 For the hospital leaders onboard the ship, she used Pierrette Fleutiaux’s novel ‘L’Expédition (extracts translated from the French), as the basis for a two-day leadership weekend retreat/conference, to help leaders reflect on and recontextualise their history and present experiences on and off the ship, to bring new order and hope to places of difficulty and discouragement, to allow space for silence and to honour sadness and loss, and to refresh and deepen the connections among the team in order to strengthen them for new adventures and expansion.  The workshop enabled leaders from many different cultures and areas to all experience something totally fresh and outside their existing frames of reference (French literature stories) also enabling those of different age and seniority to have a kinship of experience.  Leaders emerged with fresh vision, self-esteem and joy, reporting also increased connection and peace.

For the local hospital leaders in Tamatave, she collaborated with Dr Michelle White of Mercy Ships , to co-deliver a training introducing Atul Gawande’s work on checklists and collaboration, which has been able to deliver extraordinary health outcomes for no increase in cost (see here).  In a culture bearing the legacy of French colonial intervention, the existing cultural norms within the hospital were strongly hierarchical, with, for examples, nurses expected to accept without question a doctor’s decisions and behaviour, or being unwilling to take action unless directly instructed or specified within role.  Using Atul Gawande’s work in Better and Margaret Wheatley’s living system theory, alongside the GROW coaching model (John Whitmore), she developed two-day experience to value and honour the existing qualities of the leaders, and introduce new practices of information and insight sharing, collaboration, curiosity, questioning and listening, irrespective of seniority/qualification.  This training was conducted in French by Elizabeth with translators for other members of the team or where a participant wished to represent their view in Malagasy.