Hospital Creates ‘Transformational’ Experiences

As mission educator and chaplain at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, Father Frank Corradi has been working with colleagues to support, develop and execute servant leadership programs.

Corradi joined the hospital in 2006, having spent more than 20 years as a religious and teaching brother, as well as a pastor. He says while he didn’t have any formal training in servant leadership, it flowed well from the gospels and he was naturally using the approach.

The hospital’s servant leadership program currently has three main components.

The first is a new colleague introduction to mission, which is a two-day program that every new hire goes through. The program explains the history of the hospital and the Hospital Sisters, teaching about the life and spirituality of St. Francis and St. Clare, as well the hospital’s Franciscan origins.

A general introduction to servant leadership and the ethical or religious directives which guide the hospital’s work is explored, providing everyone with the same terminology.

Colleagues take the Birkman self-assessment, and the results are interpreted. Corradi says the personal inventory is helpful for individual self-knowledge and in building teams.

“It's been a very valuable tool for us because it's important for people to know themselves in order to be good servants,” he says.

The second program colleagues go through is a three-year series of servant leader retreats.

The retreats are three-day experiences. On the first day of the first retreat, colleagues take a 360 that the hospital created, which is processed and provides information on a person’s skills. Colleagues then take 20 modules covering topics such as personal integration, corporate culture and environment.

The three-year program will finish in May 2012, with another starting in September of that year.

Corradi says he recently received a note from a colleague who shared how a retreat impacted her outlook. She had been feeling discouraged with health care and through having time to talk with colleagues across departments realized everyone was struggling with the same issues.

“She felt in solidarity and she felt that she was in an environment that was really supporting her and would help her then to be renewed, and she felt very much renewed by that experience and kind of back in the swing of things,” says Corradi, noting there has been “a tremendous amount of change in the hospital” over the past three years.

“These servant leader retreats help people I think to hear others, to get out their frustrations and then to move beyond the victim to positive action and I’ve seen that in many, many people (during) the retreats we’ve done over the last two years.”

The other program the hospital offers is called Helping Our People Excel (HOPE), geared towards the leadership team, managers and directors. It’s a one-day experience three times a year, covering topics such as work-life balance.

“We tried to identify something in the servant leader culture of our hospital that our managers need to know more about as they deal with the colleagues and as they grow themselves,” says Corradi.

The hospital is starting to develop a fourth program for physicians to be launched this May. The hospital doesn’t hire its own physicians, and is looking to bring some of the servant leadership values and insights to them, says Corradi.

When asked about his own most powerful servant leadership experience, Corradi recalls a retreat a few years ago that had six managers go to a remote location and go through thought-provoking questions on virtues such as love, trust and justice.

The managers spent an hour and a half on a question, and came back to an open floor for conversation.

He says it was among the most moving experiences he’s had, to have people open up and share how a virtue was used for healing.

“It was that sense of seeing people grapple with some of these very important virtues and finding meaning in all of this, so I thought to myself this is incredible,” says Corradi.

“I saw lots of people stimulated and lots of people moving in a positive direction because of it. Transformational I guess is the word, and then to hear them say what they were going to do when they came back and knowing that’s what they were going to do was a wonderful thing.”

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St. Joseph’s Hospital Shares Servant Leadership Journey

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