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Authors: Todd C. Williams
Keywords: patient experience, leadership, caregiver, healthcare management
Abstract: Leadership’s biggest test comes under extreme stress. Stress tries our emotions, logic, ethics, and core values. Extreme stress from both your personal and professional lives combines to push people to their breaking point. No one knows how they will perform; however, working through potential scenarios helps people face the inevitable. This presentation covers three extreme personal case studies in the healthcare and social services (near fatal hospitalization, death of a child, and grandchild neglect), to show how leadership techniques help manage stress and create positive outcomes. It relates these extreme circumstances to dealing with people at work by covering leadership strategies (directive, expert, consensus, engaged, coaching, and affiliative), leadership traits (ethics, accountability, honesty, decisiveness, focus, confidence, awareness, humility, and empathy ), and core leadership actions (conducting dialog and discussion, listening, eliminating blame, and selling a vision) to address stressful situations, what went right and wrong in the actual situation, and how to mitigate issues in the future.