What I contribute: A toolkit built from research and tested in my own career, plus the specific process behind two of these frameworks.
Lead yourself
Know Where You Stand: Read three landscapes (terrain, team, and self) to build better situational awareness before making decisions.
Threshold Leaders: A practice for leading well under pressure, from awareness to motivation to action.
Lead your people
The Six Human Needs at Work: A framework for understanding the root causes of disengagement so you can build trust.
The Trust Playbook: A diagnostic for why trust is damaged and what to do about it, with tactics for repairing, maintaining, and extending trust.
Three-Lever Leadership: An in-the-moment framework for faster decisions and more effective influence using three levers to make a decision: change behavior, hold a boundary, or tweak the operating model.
Lead your organization
Alignment: A diagnostic built on the 4S model (strategy, structure, processes, and skills) that shows what's constraining performance.
Comprehensive Quality Planning: A healthcare planning framework that builds alignment and trust by putting quality at the center of every goal.
Read more on Substack.
Read the Need, Meet the Need
The Trust Playbook, in practice.
Trust problems stem from unmet needs, and unmet needs compromise financial and clinical performance.
When staff don't trust their leadership, they disengage, and eventually some leave. A physician vacancy takes 118 days to fill nationally. That vacancy means overtime, locum coverage, or missed care. Trust determines the size of that expense.
Two things build trust in health care workers. The first is reciprocity: when people feel their organization has their back, trust grows. It's the strongest predictor of trust. The second is anomie, a breakdown in norms that sets in when goals are unclear and change outpaces people's ability to adapt (Allgood, 2024). Confusion becomes disengagement. Disengagement erodes trust.
Building trust is a craft: read the need, meet the need through how you lead.
Read the need
Meet the need
Desk review
Financial statements, board documents, engagement data) builds a working hypothesis about the state of reciprocity and anomie.
Interviews using non-violent communication
Non-violent communication is Marshall Rosenberg's method for separating what someone observed, felt, and needed from judgment or blame. It tests hypotheses and reveals what people actually need, not what they're feeling. "I need more autonomy to approve clinical purchases" is an actionable need. "I'm frustrated with leadership" is a feeling, but not actionable.
I focus on needs because there's no conflict at the level of need. You can't deny what someone needs. Acknowledging it is a form of reciprocity, because it makes people feel seen.
Translate
A need points to what has to change: a leadership behavior or a decision in how you run the organization.
Prioritize
Acknowledging a need doesn't mean meeting it. Once needs are surfaced, we prioritize and decide together what to act on.