ThirdRiver Partners Sees Success of Servant Leadership in Health Care

Dr. Ken Jennings says there has always been a lot of interest from health care professionals in servant leadership and the timing is right for an inaugural servant leadership conference focusing on the field.

Jennings is the founder and managing director of ThirdRiver Partners, a consultancy that specializes in helping leaders and their teams through aligning everyone in an organization to their greater goals.

“Servant leadership is a natural fit for health care,” says Jennings. “Most health care professionals at every level and every clinical type originally went into health care to be in service of others.”

ThirdRiver Partners has been working with the Cleveland Clinic for three years.

“(The Cleveland Clinic) saw a natural next step in their evolution to not just serve patients and families, but to have leaders that are prepared to unlock the potential of those who work with and for them by being serving leaders themselves,” Jennings tells Axiom News.

The Cleveland Clinic and ThirdRiver conducted a three-month trial with four of the busiest operating rooms at the hospital using team leader principles from a serving leader perspective. The trial was so successful the approach was rolled out to all 79 operating rooms.

“It was a combination of work design and flow design, but also the behaviours of the serving leader, so it’s a leadership and management system that clearly just fits very well with health care.”

Outcomes from applying servant leadership include aligning individuals to the greater purpose of health care, which increases employee engagement.

The Cleveland Clinic is known for its high-quality health care delivery and has been quite visible in the news, which has raised the awareness around serving leaders, notes Jennings.

The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership is presenting a conference called ‘Leading with a Servant’s Heart’ in co-operation with ThirdRiver Partners and the Cleveland Clinic, Oct. 26-27 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Jennings is presenting a keynote with Joseph Patrnchak, the chief human resources officer of the Cleveland Clinic, and will share the five actions of a serving leader — run to great purpose, upend the pyramid, raise the bar, blaze the trail and build on strengths.

He says he hopes conference attendees see servant leadership as the leadership approach for health care, as well as practical tools and examples of how to do it.

“I hope they walk away knowing that the Cleveland Clinic has committed to it and is having good success with it,” he adds.

Jennings says the time is right as there is a need to do “something different from a leadership perspective in health care.”

He points to the book he co-authored with Dr. John Stahl-Wert, The Serving Leader, which he says would have been expected to sell around 5,000 copies but has close to 100,000 sold. Jennings says the interest in how to lead differently has probably driven the book to be a best-seller.

“It’s pretty clear from what’s happened in the world of business in the last few years that much of the top-down leadership 1.0 hasn’t worked and there’s a real hunger and a search, especially by the new generation entering the workforce, for a new way of teaming and leading,” says Jennings.

“Servant leadership has a lot to offer in a world where you want to empower people and we want best ideas and new approaches, so the spotlight has suddenly swung to alternate approaches.”

To learn more about the conference, click here. For more information on ThirdRiver Partners, visit www.3rd-river.com.

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