This video addresses the pervasive presence of internal politics within hospitals and the significant challenges they pose to patient care, staff morale, and innovation. It argues that eliminating politics is unrealistic; instead, healthcare leaders must learn to navigate these dynamics while maintaining a focus on the hospital’s core mission: healing patients. When politics dominate decision-making, negative effects such as staff burnout, turnover, and a culture of cynicism become endemic. The solution lies in building a resilient culture grounded in two critical elements: Public Service Motivation (PSM) and psychological safety. Highlights 🏥 Hospital politics are inevitable but must not overshadow patient care. ❤️ Public Service Motivation (PSM) drives healthcare professionals beyond personal gain to meaningful patient impact. 🔐 Psychological safety enables open communication, trust, and innovation within teams. 🔄 The ENGAGE framework helps leaders combine purpose with safety to transform workplace culture. 🌟 Memorial Public Hospital’s case shows how ENGAGE fosters collaboration and improves outcomes. 🔄 Consistent leadership practices, like sharing patient stories, strengthen mission alignment. 🚀 Resilient, purpose-driven teams outperform in politically charged healthcare environments. Key Insights 💡 Inevitable Politics Require Navigation, Not Eradication: Hospitals operate in high-stake, resource-constrained environments where competing interests foster politics. Attempts to remove politics altogether are futile. Instead, leadership must focus on navigating these dynamics by emphasizing mission-driven work to keep patient care paramount. This insight reframes politics from a problem to be eliminated into a dynamic to manage strategically. ❤️ Public Service Motivation as a Counterbalance to Cynicism: The intrinsic motivation healthcare workers have to serve patients and communities provides a powerful antidote to the demoralizing effects of hospital politics. By intentionally connecting staff to this deeper purpose—through stories of patient recovery and recognition—leaders can sustain morale and resilience even in challenging environments. Embedding PSM into hiring and development ensures the mission remains central to everyday work. 🔐 Psychological Safety is Fundamental to Team Performance: Psychological safety fosters an environment of trust where team members freely share ideas, admit errors, and innovate without fear of reprisal. Its absence allows politics to thrive unnoticed, as people withhold critical information and feedback. Leaders who model vulnerability and create structured participation protocols transform abstract cultural ideals into concrete, day-to-day practices that safeguard both staff wellbeing and patient outcomes. 🎯 ENGAGE Framework Provides a Practical Roadmap for Leaders: The ENGAGE framework—Exposing impacts, Grounding in values, Acknowledging politics, Gathering input, and Empowering teams—is a holistic approach that simultaneously builds motivation and safety. This balanced method ensures politics do not dominate decision-making by redirecting focus towards collective goals and distributed leadership, fostering inclusiveness and active participation. 🏥 Institutional Case Study Validates Framework’s Effectiveness: At Memorial Public Hospital, the adoption of ENGAGE led to notable cultural transformation. Rather than eliminating politics, the hospital aligned team efforts on shared values and trust, resulting in higher staff engagement, decreased turnover, and better patient care. This real-world example underscores that culture change is achievable but requires sustained effort anchored in purposeful leadership. 🔄 Leadership Modeling is Crucial to Culture Change: Leaders who openly display vulnerability, invite dissent, and consistently connect teams to the hospital’s mission create an environment that minimizes the negative effects of political behavior. Small, regular practices such as sharing patient testimonials and inclusive feedback sessions reinforce psychological safety and strengthen organizational purpose, demonstrating that culture evolves through daily leader behaviors rather than one-time initiatives. 🚀 Purpose and Safety Fuel Innovation and Compassion in Complex Settings: Public Service Motivation provides direction and resolve, while psychological safety enables execution and innovation. Together, these elements transform politically charged environments into spaces of compassionate teamwork focused on patient healing. This synergy allows hospitals to maintain excellence even amid inevitable political complexities, ensuring that bureaucratic challenges do not hinder outstanding care delivery. OUTLINE: 00:00:00 - Politics in the Hospital Corridor 00:01:02 - Harnessing Public Service Motivation (PSM) 00:01:42 - The Power of Psychological Safety 00:02:39 - The ENGAGE Framework in Action 00:03:39 - A Practical Path Forward

Abstract: This research brief examines strategies for fostering work engagement in public-sector hospitals despite the presence of organizational politics. Drawing on empirical research and practical experience, we identify two critical factors that effectively counterbalance the negative impact of workplace politics on employee engagement: public service motivation (PSM) and psychological safety climate. PSM—the intrinsic desire to serve the public good—provides healthcare professionals with purpose that transcends organizational dynamics, while psychological safety creates environments where authentic contribution remains possible despite political pressures. The paper presents the ENGAGE framework (Expose impact, Nurture speaking up, Ground in values, Acknowledge politics, Gather diverse input, Empower proximal teams) for hospital administrators seeking to implement these countervailing forces. A case study demonstrates how one public hospital successfully maintained engagement despite significant political challenges, resulting in improved retention and patient satisfaction. This integrated approach offers healthcare leaders a practical pathway for building engagement resilience without the impossible task of eliminating organizational politics.

This video explores the profound importance of purpose in the workplace, challenging the common misconception that employees are motivated mainly by financial incentives or fear of consequences. Instead, it argues that the true driver of motivation is the need to contribute to something greater than oneself. Purpose is described as the organization’s fundamental “why,” the deeper reason behind its existence beyond merely offering products or services. Highlights 🌟 True motivation at work comes from contributing to a bigger purpose, not just paychecks or fear. 🔑 Leaders must focus on clarifying and embedding the organization’s “why” to inspire teams. 💪 Purpose-driven employees are more resilient, engaged, and loyal, beyond financial incentives. 🤝 Teams united by purpose foster collaboration, innovation, and higher productivity. 🏥 Real-world examples show how reconnecting to purpose transforms morale and outcomes. 🔄 Purpose is a dynamic, evolving strategy requiring ongoing commitment and open dialogue. 🌍 Hiring for belief in the mission strengthens culture and creates lasting organizational impact. Key Insights 🌟 Purpose as a Core Motivator: The video emphasizes that purpose is the foundational driver of human motivation in the workplace. Unlike extrinsic motivators such as salary or fear, purpose taps into intrinsic desires for meaning and contribution, which sustain long-term engagement and effort. This insight underscores the need for organizations to rethink motivation strategies beyond traditional transactional approaches. 🔑 Leadership’s Transformational Role: Leaders must evolve from task managers to purpose communicators. Their role is not merely to assign and monitor tasks but to continuously make the organization’s “why” visible and meaningful. This shift is crucial because purpose is not a slogan but a lived experience that requires consistent reinforcement through storytelling, openness, and connection to real impact. 💪 Purpose Drives Resilience and Well-being: Employees who find meaning in their work exhibit greater psychological resilience and lower burnout. This insight highlights how purpose contributes directly to employee health and sustainability, which benefits not only individuals but also reduces organizational costs related to absenteeism and turnover. 🤝 Purpose Fosters Collaboration and Innovation: When teams share a unified purpose, collaboration improves as individuals see beyond their roles to the collective success. This shared commitment enhances innovation and adaptability because employees are motivated to experiment and solve problems in service of the mission rather than personal gain. 🏥 Real-World Impact of Purpose: The examples of the nursing home and school vividly demonstrate that reconnecting staff with their core why can revitalize organizational culture and improve outcomes significantly. These case studies provide concrete evidence that purpose-driven leadership is not abstract but practical and transformative. 🔄 Purpose Requires Continuous Nurturing: Purpose is not a one-time declaration but a living strategy that evolves with the team and environment. Sustaining it means ongoing conversations, celebration of aligned behaviors, and empowerment of everyone to uphold the mission. This dynamic approach ensures purpose remains relevant and anchors the organization through challenges. 🌍 Hiring and Culture Alignment: Recruiting people who resonate with the organization’s purpose fosters cultural cohesion and resilience. This insight highlights the importance of values-based hiring and the idea that culture is co-created by every team member who owns the mission, not just dictated by leadership. It also links purpose to sustainable growth and positive societal impact. OUTLINE: 00:00:00 - Why Purpose Powers Everything 00:01:00 - The Tangible Benefits of Meaning 00:01:52 - Practical Steps to Uncover Purpose 00:02:40 - Stories from the Front Lines of Impact 00:03:33 - Sustaining a Culture of Meaning

This video transcript emphasizes the critical role of trust as the foundational element driving successful teams and organizations. Trust acts as an invisible, yet powerful current that influences how people collaborate, make decisions, and tackle challenges together. It fosters an environment where individuals feel valued, heard, and psychologically safe, which in turn accelerates decision-making, innovation, and adaptability. The presence of trust reduces bureaucracy and fosters open communication, while its absence leads to skepticism, sluggish progress, and stifled creativity. Highlights 🔑 Trust is the invisible but vital force behind every successful team and organization. ⚡ High trust accelerates decisions, reduces costs, and boosts innovation. 🛡️ Trust creates psychological safety, encouraging risk-taking and honest feedback. 🌍 Trust differs by industry but is critical in high-stakes fields like healthcare and tech. 🌪️ Crisis situations reveal the true strength of trust and leadership. 💬 Trust grows through daily small actions—not grand gestures. 🤝 Leaders build trust by consistently aligning character and competence. Key Insights 🔗 Trust as the glue holding teams together: Trust serves as the fundamental adhesive that binds individuals, enabling cohesion and collective achievement. Without it, teams become fragmented, leading to inefficiencies, slow progress, and guarded communication. High-trust teams exhibit faster collaboration and collectively surpass individual capabilities. ⚙️ Two pillars: character and competence: Trust requires both ethical integrity and the ability to deliver results. Character without competence leads to good intentions but poor execution, while competence without character risks unethical behavior or misaligned motives. Leaders must balance and develop both to be consistently trusted. 🏥 Industry-specific trust dynamics: Trust is contextual and varies by sector—especially in healthcare and technology, where stakes like patient safety or data security demand heightened standards. Trust here is intertwined with transparency, frontline empowerment, and ethical prioritization above short-term gains, showing that trust must adapt to unique operational challenges. 💡 Psychological safety fuels innovation: Trust fosters an environment where individuals feel safe taking calculated risks, experimenting, giving and receiving candid feedback, and learning openly from failure. This psychological safety is essential for creativity and continuous improvement within high-performing teams. ⛈️ Leadership trustworthiness tested in crises: Crisis situations amplify the significance of trust. Leaders who communicate honestly, show empathy, remain visible, and act decisively not only manage the crisis effectively but also deepen trust bonds. Such moments define reputations and long-term team resilience. 🎯 Trust is a continuous journey of consistent actions: Building trust is not a one-time effort but an ongoing process of fulfilling promises, engaging in active listening, and demonstrating reliability. Small, routine behaviors accumulate trust over time, proving more sustainable than sporadic grand displays of goodwill. 🚀 Empowerment and transparency unleash potential: Extending trust to others by delegating responsibility and sharing information openly motivates employees to rise to challenges. Transparency about mistakes and vulnerabilities makes leaders relatable and trustworthy, reinforcing a culture of accountability and mutual respect. OUTLINE: 00:00:00 - Why Trust is the Ultimate Performance Multiplier 00:02:16 - The Art of Character and the Science of Competence 00:02:56 - Industry-Specific Strategies for Healthcare and Technology 00:04:33 - Forging Stronger Trust When It Matters Most 00:05:15 - Simple, Actionable Steps to Build Trust Every Day

Abstract: This article explores the strategic importance of organizational culture as a critical driver of competitive advantage, drawing upon the author's extensive consulting experience across diverse industries. It presents a comprehensive framework for cultural transformation, highlighting key phases including assessing existing cultural dynamics, building internal consensus for change, developing structured transformation roadmaps, implementing strategic initiatives that reinforce desired behaviors, and sustaining momentum through continuous evolution. The author emphasizes that successful cultural transformations require deliberate leadership commitment, cross-functional engagement, and the integration of cultural objectives with business strategy. Through illustrative case examples and practical recommendations, the article demonstrates how intentionally shaped organizational cultures can empower employees, strengthen workplace relationships, and enhance performance outcomes. By positioning culture as a strategic asset deserving the same focused attention as traditional business functions, the author provides leaders with actionable insights to leverage culture's transformative potential within their unique organizational contexts.

In this HCI Webinar, Dr. Jonathan H. Westover talks with Jan Barlow about how today's and future leaders can integrate human sustainability practices. As Founder of Better Job Fit, Jan is driven by a passion for transforming lives and creating sustainable human, social, and economic impact in communities. At Better Job Fit, they believe in empowering individuals and businesses to grow with purpose. Through their programs, they foster conscious leadership, social impact education, and personal development, equipping people to thrive, inspire, and lead for the greater good. they also specialize in supporting transitioning business owners through the 10 Stages of Business Growth—a framework designed to guide owners at every step, whether preparing for an exit, scaling, or navigating complex M&A processes. Their goal is to ensure these transitions are seamless, strategic, and aligned with both personal and professional goals AND YOUR PEOPLE. By focusing on workforce awareness and behavior diversity, they foster shame-free environments where people and organizations can reach their full potential. Their work is about more than just business—it’s about tapping into unknown strengths, creating opportunities for conscious leaders, and making an impact that matters. 🎙️ New to streaming or looking to level up? Check out StreamYard and get $10 discount! 😍 https://streamyard.com/pal/d/5000388458315776

Abstract: This article explores comprehensive strategies for enhancing career readiness in higher education based on the author's extensive consulting experience with universities. It argues that despite today's rapidly evolving job market demanding strong practical skills, many institutions remain overly focused on traditional academic approaches that inadequately prepare graduates for professional success. The article presents four evidence-based strategies for universities to better empower career-ready students: implementing robust experiential learning programs (including internships, simulations, and service learning); cultivating career management skills through integrated curriculum modules and sustained advising; fostering meaningful employer partnerships that benefit both students and organizations; and effectively communicating career education outcomes to drive continued institutional investment. By implementing these interconnected approaches, the article contends that universities can develop graduates who possess both the practical skills and self-awareness needed to navigate successful career transitions in an increasingly dynamic workplace environment.

In this podcast episode, Dr. Jonathan H. Westover talks with Jan Barlow about how today's and future leaders can integrate human sustainability practices. As Founder of Better Job Fit, Jan is driven by a passion for transforming lives and creating sustainable human, social, and economic impact in communities. At Better Job Fit, they believe in empowering individuals and businesses to grow with purpose. Through their programs, they foster conscious leadership, social impact education, and personal development, equipping people to thrive, inspire, and lead for the greater good. they also specialize in supporting transitioning business owners through the 10 Stages of Business Growth—a framework designed to guide owners at every step, whether preparing for an exit, scaling, or navigating complex M&A processes. Their goal is to ensure these transitions are seamless, strategic, and aligned with both personal and professional goals AND YOUR PEOPLE. By focusing on workforce awareness and behavior diversity, they foster shame-free environments where people and organizations can reach their full potential. Their work is about more than just business—it’s about tapping into unknown strengths, creating opportunities for conscious leaders, and making an impact that matters. Check out all of the podcasts in the HCI Podcast Network (https://www.podbean.com/podcast-network/HCI) !