For this course, I read Ginni Rometty’s Good Power: Leading Positive Change in our Lives, Work, and World (2023). This book relates to my current and desired leadership style. Rometty talks about the importance of being in service of others, actively listening to your team, and being prepared. She discusses that a good leader should always treat their team with respect and be willing to emotionally connect and collaborate with them. She discusses that a good leader understands that listening to your team allows you to make better decisions on their behalf because you have taken the time to understand their needs and concerns. She discusses that a good leader should always do their homework and make sure they are prepared for upcoming meetings especially when they are meeting with people they don’t know much about. In doing so, a leader is of more help to their team and client and allows the leader to be more fully present in the meeting because you actually know what they are talking about so you can actively participate. The most influential statement that I read in the book was, “Listening breeds knowledge, knowledge breeds credibility, and credibility earns trusts that allows relationships to flourish”.
An experience in which I have failed forward in a collaborative project was a recent project that we did with another department at my organization. This project required us to work together to create an operating procedure for seamless, timely transfers of Prior Authorization requests. Initially, we thought it would be a good idea to communicate with each other about the transfers via Microsoft Teams with just a quick “hey, this is coming your way” but we repeatedly found ourselves still going out of compliance due to the untimely arrival of these transfers. We tried multiple avenues before I ended up looping in my director for assistance. With me not managing the team I was collaborating with; I couldn’t force them to do anything – I could only give my opinion and educate them on why it would work. Eventually, we can up with the idea to create a live excel document for both of our teams to use. If that department was sending us something they would log it on the document. My team was responsible for checking the document and making sure we received it. If we did not, we would reach back out to that team and alert them so they could investigate. This new process seemed to do the trick - we haven’t had any go out of compliance due untimely transfers since. Altogether, we had three failed ideas before we found success.
An experience in which I have not failed forward in a collaborative project was with one of my direct reports. She is an emotional person and doesn’t take feedback well (we are working on this – it is a work in progress). One of the states she supervisors has a nuance that requires her team to call and communicate the determination on each Prior Authorization we review. The state requires 100% compliance on these communications and no matter what I did or what conversations she had with her staff; we could not get them at 100% compliance. I found myself getting so frustrated with her and her team, that I begun digging my heels in and probably wasn’t the best manager I could be at the time. Looking back, had I taken the time to figure out where the disconnect was or how I could help them reach this compliance goal, it might have gone differently. I got hot headed and remember thinking “it is
not that hard – what’s the issue?”. From this experience, I learned that emotional intelligence is key. This is something that I have continued to work on every day that I have been in this role. I am more understanding of the need to be self-aware and regulate my emotions in situations like this one.
