Cultivating New Leaders in Your Outpatient Surgery Facility

How Current Leaders Can Encourage Staff to Take On Leadership Roles and Learn How to Navigate the Challenges.

In a world where frontline healthcare workers are being challenged more than ever before, it can be tough to convince your nurses and techs to step up and fill leadership roles in the OR and throughout your outpatient surgery facility. 

But despite any challenges, it’s important to stay focused on developing new leaders from within. Not only can promoting internally boost retention rates and help keep your most promising nurses engaged, it can also improve the culture of your facility overall. And that’s a win-win for all involved. Here’s why: Your techs and nurses have unique behind-the-scenes knowledge of the inner workings of the OR that can help the rest of your leadership team make well-informed decisions that will have a positive impact on patients and staff. While stepping into a leadership role may be daunting for someone who’s used to taking a more hands-on approach to patient care, there are several ways your facility can encourage staff to become leaders. And this starts with the leaders you already have. 

Importance of developing relationships

Your existing leaders must be relationship builders, according to Kathy Williams Beydler, RN, MBA, CNOR, CASC, principal consultant at Whitman Partners in Tennessee, a consulting firm focused on matching facilities with directors of surgical services, and an experienced surgical leader.

“My philosophy about leadership is relationships,” said Beydler. “At the end of the day, leadership comes down to better relationships.”

Staff were butting heads and pointing fingers.

It is especially crucial for your leaders, both seasoned and new, to embrace forming relationships with staff. 
“You have to be … sincerely interested in your people, and see them as people rather than just staff,” said Beydler. “It’s important to find out about them, where they came from, how they know what they know, where they’ve worked before, what their interests are.”

That doesn’t mean leaders necessarily have to pry into staffers’ personal lives. But it’s important to find out about their work-related interests, as well as any concerns or issues they may have. That knowledge is the best way to make staff feel comfortable to branch out and explore the possibility of becoming leaders themselves.

Let staff take the lead with changes

For any new leaders, especially those being promoted from within, it’s vital for them to know what makes the staff tick -– and how they can help staff members perform better in their existing roles.

“When I go in as a leader to a new place, I always ask people what’s important to them and what I can do to support them,” Beydler said.

Taking this approach will encourage staff to have honest conversations with new leaders about areas that may need additional support or policies that may need to be updated. And that can lay the groundwork for a relationship focused on teamwork and collaboration – which will be crucial to new leaders’ success.

“If you engage your staff and let them lead the change, that’s going to go a long way,” Beydler said.

As an example, Beydler highlighted a situation in a facility where she worked. The OR and the surgical processing department weren’t getting along. Staff were butting heads and pointing fingers. Instead of forcing a solution on them, Beydler asked them to pick representatives from each area to work collaboratively on a team to resolve the issues.

“I helped facilitate the discussion,” said Beydler. “I told them from the beginning [that] I’m not the one in charge. I’m here to facilitate, not dictate.”

Beydler provided the team with guidance and resources, such as information about national benchmarks and CMS standards. Using that knowledge, the team defined the specific issues the two departments were having and came up with several policy changes designed to help them work together in harmony.

To implement the changes, the team developed educational materials and held in-services for their respective departments – and their initiative was successful.

“Truly, this was one of the best experiences I’ve had as a leader,” Beydler said. “I provided them with guidance and the information they needed to make decisions. And they did a phenomenal job.” 

In situations like this, it can be tempting for leaders to intervene and make decisions in their staff’s best interest. That’s not the best approach, though. People are often resistant to change, especially if they’ve been doing their work the same way for a long time. Trying to steamroll over them might make them dig their heels in even deeper.

“Sometimes, leaders feel like it’s easier just to do it themselves,” said Beydler. “But, at the end of the day, you’re not going to get the buy-in. What you need as a leader is to have champions for the change and have buy-in for the change.”
“If you force [staff] to do it, you’re not going to have the buy-in, and they’re going to become resentful,” Beydler continued. “They need to own the process, since the change is [designed] to make it better for them.”

Leadership styles that encourage new leaders

This anecdote shows how leaders must be aware of the impact their leadership style can have on nurses and staff. The best leaders play a significant role in boosting engagement and encouraging their staff to do great work on their own, free from intervention. And that lays an even stronger foundation for more staff to step up and become leaders themselves in the future. 

An empowering leadership style is directly correlated with positive outcomes in the OR. In fact, a recent article in the Journal of Healthcare Leadership discusses how this type of leadership style impacts facilities.

Research shows that nurses’ job satisfaction is directly related to their working conditions. While much attention has been given to unbalanced staffing ratios during the pandemic, leadership hasn’t been in the public eye. However, it is just as important for preventing burnout, improving retention and developing nurses into potential leaders.

The best leaders must give their nurses and staff:

• Agency so they feel in control of the work they do.
• Autonomy to make decisions in the scope of their role without asking permission.
• Empowerment that allows them to exercise control over their tasks.

Empowerment can be both structural, which is directly influenced by a healthcare organization and its culture, as well as psychological, which is instilled in staff by the decisions and behaviors of their leaders.

The most empowering leaders build relationships with their staff in both formal and informal ways. Formally, they recognize nurses and staff for the work they do and celebrate their successes among colleagues. They also trust staff’s judgment when it comes to patient care within their scope of practice. Informal relationship building extends outside of the duties directly related to staffers’ jobs. 

Along with encouraging teamwork among staff, informal relationship building often includes getting to know staff on a more personal level.

“People need to know you’re genuinely interested in them and their well-being,” said Beydler.

How regular training develops leaders

A key part of building relationships, establishing trust and promoting leadership among nurses and staff is giving them professional support and access to the resources they need to succeed, including ongoing training.

As a medical professional with a military background, Jason Goodwin, MS, MPH, RN, CNOR, a perioperative and procedural services consultant in California with an extensive leadership background, knows the importance of providing staff with ongoing training opportunities, especially when it comes to developing their skills and future leadership potential.

“The military is huge on training, so that was bred into me when I became a nurse,” Goodwin said. “I believe you have to have an environment a little bit like theirs, where everyone expects to be training all the time.”
Goodwin added that offering staff a variety of training opportunities can even help with reducing burnout and stress in the OR.

“Staff can get burned out doing the same thing every day,” said Goodwin. “I found that when I started sending people to training and conferences, they often came back energized. That shows that if you want to keep people engaged and have them do a good job, you should try to get them to do [training].”

How staff responds to training can also help you figure out who your next leaders are. 

How staff responds to training can also help you figure out who your next leaders are.

While some staffers may just say “thanks for the conference” and move on, others might be energized by the presentations they attended and want to share their takeaways with their colleagues.

“The next thing you know, succession planning is planning itself, and you start to see the people who show themselves as those leaders,” said Goodwin.

Too often, facilities decide who should be the next leader based on their outward confidence or simply who’s most willing to take on the role.

However, Goodwin explains that’s not always the most effective approach. Your best bet is to have a “regular rotating program for training and education – what comes out of that are people that express an excitement for that kind of work,” he says, which proves they have what it takes to step up and be a leader.

With that in mind, it is key to make sure outpatient facility budgets have the room to fund continuing education and training for staff at all levels, even in the current economic climate. OR leaders need to be ready at all times to defend the necessity of financially investing in training to the C-suite, positioning it as both a significant development and retention tool.

“[Leaders] need to be able to protect our training resources and ensure that we’re continually developing them,” Goodwin said. “In order to do so, senior leaders need to be able to effectively articulate the OR’s needs at any moment with an elevator speech, whenever it comes up and whenever it’s questioned.”

Mentoring and communication

Along with training, another element that’s essential for developing staff into future leaders is mentoring. Matching staffers together to learn from each other is beneficial to everyone across the board, and it’s an excellent way to build leadership skills.

“Mentorship has to be part of your culture,” said Goodwin. “And it should be expected of all leaders, even junior leaders. Everyone has to be developing talent all the time.” Leaders should be able to easily answer the question, “Who’s your replacement?” This is especially critical because, as Goodwin said, “if we do our jobs well, people move on.” 
That means you should have people in mind for those roles long before that happens.

As a way to make sure leaders can mentor staff effectively, Goodwin said it’s important to make time to communicate with staffers regularly.

“One of the most effective things I ever saw as a leader is committing to having lunch daily with your staff,” he added. “It’s a high pay-off situation where you can take 30 minutes of your day to really develop all the relationships you need [and] to hear about problems.”

Advice for new leaders

When your newest leaders first take on the added responsibility, it can be tough. That’s the case even if the leaders that came before them prepared them for the realities of the position.

Goodwin offers one piece of advice to newer leaders who hit this roadblock: Keep going.

“It can be a rough road since it’s a completely different set of skills,” he said. “But give yourself a lot of grace because after you’ve done it for a while and look back, you’ll never regret it.”

Ultimately, Beydler said, it’s important for leaders, new and experienced, not to lose sight of the overarching goal that should influence how they lead their staff and approach change – improving the experience for patients.

“We’re all here for the patient – and we cannot lose sight of that,” said Beydler. OSM