transformation

People want to know: How will needed social change come? By creating good-paying sustainable jobs for everyone? Through universal, affordable, high quality health care? Through education? A greener environment?

Myles Horton, the great educator and social theorist, lived and taught by the phrase, “You cannot achieve what you cannot imagine.”

Labor unions that are seeking to transform the role of frontline workers in health care organizations know that real change will take more than a high level of employee engagement. It will also take a different type of relationship between managers, physicians and workers.

“When you are dancing with a bear, remember, you can’t sit down until the bear gets tired.”

“I stopped opposing, and started proposing.”

“From despair to hope to change … Despair must be transformed into hope, but hope must transform into change; and when change becomes difficult, we mustn’t retreat to despair, but rather continue the struggle for change.”

“Change must be top-down, bottom-up and inside-out.”

At the 2011 Union Delegates Conference, LMP senior VP Barb Grimm caught up with Dawn Bading, Georgia’s vice president of Human Resources. The two talked about transformational leadership in Georgia and the innovative ways in which the region is improving service and growing membership.

The theme of this weekend’s Union Delegates Conference is transformational leadership--leadership that causes change in individuals or systems. LMP senior VP Barb Grimm says in her book, a transformative leader is someone who strengthens the capabilities, voices and visions of the people around him or her and helps create change. In this short video blog, Grimm reveals whom she sees as the leaders and transformers of Kaiser Permanente.

As we get  ready for the 2011 Union Delegate Conference scheduled for the end of March, I have been thinking  a great deal about definitions of transformational leadership, our theme for this year’s conference. My thinking has  not so much about leadership, but rather about the experience of everyday life, and how transformational leaders have the capacity to observe and internalize all the wondrous things that go on everyday--all the wondrous things that people do at work, at leisure, in caring for their families.

Senior VP Barb Grim, along with Marianne Giordano, president of OPEIU Local 30, recently participated in a forum hosted by U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis about workplace flexibility. The forum was sponsored by the Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau and focused on helping hourly workers gain some of the scheduling and other flexibility offered to professional women. It’s natural that KP was in the house, Grimm and Giordano say, given that 73 percent of KP’s workforce is women. Even more importantly, they say, our partnership goes way beyond scheduling to a real commitment to transforming the organization.

This past weekend, between 80,000-100,000 people gathered outside the State Capitol building in Madison, Wisconsin. I lived in Madison for 16 years and can tell you that for that many people to gather on the Capitol grounds for several winter days is remarkable: a sea of humans stood inside and outside the Capitol building and filled the streets that make up Capitol Square. This is an area of four four-lane streets that ring the Capitol grounds, measuring about one-half square mile. Close your eyes and imagine the scene.

Do their actions define how people should act in a democracy?

Today, I want to urge frontline union members, managers, executives and physicians to take a few minutes and browse through the new and improved LMPartnership.org.

In fact, I ask that you contact me and let me know what you think, how you use it and what might make it more useful for you.

All the innovation we need is already here:  how do we put it to best use?

We’ve all heard the term: “death by initiative.”  What does this mean?