Adaptive Leadership Featuring Ward VanWichen, CEO Philips County Hospital - Malta, MT by Advancing Health

While everyone in health care is trying to reach the same goal, and that goal is always to better care for our patients and communities – my observation as both a clinician and administrator is that timelines drive a lot of frustration. Clinically, things move pretty quickly, but administratively the necessary practices and processes make those timelines longer. Adaptive leadership skills helped our organization overcome some of the negativity tied to that frustration. It gave us the skills to shift perspective as a team and go beyond regular communications which hadn’t been enough. Fundamentally, we all approach challenges and concerns assuming positive intent, pausing to look at others’ perspective, be diagnostic to better assess, interpret and intervene and perhaps most important, take care of ourselves and help each other do that.