A Holistic Approach to Leadership Development
Everything within Wellstar Health System is connected to its three core values: Serve with Compassion, Honor Every Voice, and Pursue Excellence.
These values drive their mission to enhance the health and wellbeing of every person we serve, including our own team members. The System recognized that putting these values into action required an organizational-wide digital transformation. However, such a dramatic shift during a period already fraught with turbulent change — including a major acquisition and a global pandemic — would require additional support and resources for those tasked with leading the charge.
More than upskilling and traditional training, leadership coaching could provide a toolkit of capabilities that would empower them to navigate change while also infusing innovation into the organization’s culture.
“Some of the greatest leadership challenges are really at the front and midline levels. Over the course of the last couple of years, we’ve invested heavily in leadership development, putting a lot more emphasis on our front-line leaders and our mid-level leadership in terms of outcomes,” said Laura Dannels, Wellstar Chief Talent Officer. “We’re not an organization that believes in just investing in high performers. We, as an organization, believe you’ve got to invest in your entire workforce.”
Program Goals
Personalized Development at Scale
For an organization as large as Wellstar, investing in its entire workforce would require a scalable solution with a strategic partner — not just a vendor.
Wellstar Health System turned to Sounding Board for personalized, scalable leadership coaching programs. With Sounding Board, Wellstar Health System was able to create a unique program centered around its core values. Wellstar’s proprietary 360 assessment, designed around leader behaviors modeling its values, laid the foundation for every coaching engagement within the program.
“We really wanted to ground the coaching to a framework that matters to our organization,” said Garry Gross, Executive Director of Leadership Development at Wellstar Health System. “Helping our leaders to create an environment where our mission, vision, and values come to life was paramount.”
One-on-One Coaching
Wellstar Health System targeted custom leadership capabilities that aligned with its core values:
Value: Serve with Compassion
Capabilities: Develops Relationships
To serve with compassion, team members need to connect with purpose — not always easy in a high-paced environment.
Value: Pursue Excellence
Capabilities: Results Orientation, Leading Teams, Strategic Planning
The active pursuit of excellence requires leaders to hone their ability to develop others, manage change, and execute on strategic plans.
Value: Honor Every Voice
Capabilities: Respect for Differences
Wellstar serves a diverse population, and wants to celebrate that culture while also reflecting it.
Coachees and Managers See the Value:
In post-engagement surveys, 96% of the participants agreed that the investment in their coaching experience was worth it, 99% agreed they could immediately apply their learning to their daily work.
Managers of coachees shared similar results: 100% agreed that the investment in coaching for their employees was worth it and that it facilitated the development of those employees.
“The program has become far more successful than we could’ve imagined,” said Jason Hudgins, Senior Consultant of Leadership Development at Wellstar Health System. “As we have cascaded coaching through the organization, managers who have team members in the program are now asking for coaching for themselves.”
Measurable Improvement:
Wellstar Health System leveraged Sounding Board’s software to facilitate leadership coaching across the engagement. The Leadership Roadmap feature allowed visibility into the program, enabling coachees to record, share and track goals. Managers and coachees could also note actions, insights, and results.
Coachees rated their growth in the double digits across 4 out of 6 of Wellstar’s custom capabilities. Coachees reported an average of 11% growth across all 6 custom capabilities.
“With the Wellstar experience, we are looking at both patient experience and team member and caregiver experience,” Gross said. “Seeing a double-digit growth in capabilities like leading employees gives us confidence that our leaders are nurturing the Wellstar experience.”
When asked to rate themselves in Sounding Board’s standard capabilities, coachees rated even greater growth.
Results Beyond the Program
The impact of Wellstar Health System’s program reached far beyond coachees. The organization reports that 3% of coachees have been promoted or elevated into new positions within the organization, outpacing both the organization’s initial goals and industry standards. Further, in its annual internal survey, Wellstar Health System experienced a 1-point growth in workplace satisfaction for coachees.
Retention for coachees and the organization overall increased as well. For coachees, the 1-year retention rate was 90%. Year-over-year, the retention rate for coachees was 31% higher than their non-coached counterparts in 2022.
“These are numbers that are almost unheard of in our industry,” Hudgins said. “Being able to retain team members is vitally important.”
Bolstering Frontline Leaders and Beyond
Coaching participants and stakeholders have been thrilled with Sounding Board’s strategic partnership approach and the quality of Sounding Board coaching, according to Gross. What began as a pilot program targeting 150 leaders at the executive director and assistant vice president levels has expanded across the organization to frontline clinical leaders, including nurse managers.
“These are just the initial results,” Hudgins remarked. “I’m excited to see what next year’s data looks like as we have expanded the program down through the organization and what this could potentially look like over the coming years.”
