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Message from the ELAM® Director - March 2012 The Story of ELAM Alumnae—Building Community Through Professional Development

Diane Magrane, Director of Executive Leadership Programs

Diane Magrane
Director of Executive Leadership Programs

Part two in a three-part series about the December 2011 Alumnae Program

The story of the inaugural ELUM Professional Development program began with a celebration of Nets and Feasts on December 8, 2011. The story continues as we look at how we build a sustainable alumnae network, strengthened by biennial alumnae professional development programs (more about that later). The setting for this chapter is the ballroom of the Hutton Hotel. The main characters are 80 alumnae from across the United States and Canada, led by members of the Program and Community Building Committees. The plot focuses on how to bring diverse individuals together to sustain themselves as a leadership learning community. No small challenge, even for ELAM!

The challenge was addressed in the official opening on the morning of Friday, December 8. Alumnae were present from each of the prior 16 ELAM classes, many united over Ann Preston School of Medicine (the Osler School for those most senior) breakdowns, late night learning community conversations, and since then, small reunions, responses to distress calls, and celebrations of achievement. For this event, we were all one ELAM alumnae community, sitting in an opening circle to acknowledge our grand diversity. Debra Romberger (ELAM '01), co-chair of the ELUM Program Planning Committee, asked us to stand in response to these questions:

  • Who changed positions since graduation? (Many of us hold positions that did not exist when we entered ELAM years ago.)
  • Who finds herself in a position in which she wishes she knew the real job description? (I found myself wondering if it isn't often better that way—to make your own job description!)
  • How many paid "out of pocket" to attend? (Answer: many—professional development funds in our organizations are diminishing; we now put our money only where we anticipate value.)
  • How many have moved to take a new position? Declined a position because it required a move? Moved because a partner moved to a new position?

The term Liberating Structure refers to a structure of dialogue or activity that moves from the usual type of individual, hierarchical, deductive thinking to community-wide problem identification and creative problem solving based on shared wisdom. 25/10 is an approach that brings forth individual ideas, and then extends curiosity and possibilities around each idea while prioritizing them for the community. The name derives from the scoring and filtering.

By the time we finished these last three questions, almost all of us had risen from our chairs. After all, we are always weighing opportunities and challenges. This acknowledgement of diverse pathways paradoxically unites us as a community of leaders.

To enrich our networking and mine for common themes in issues opening our discussions of conflict and negotiation, we employed a Liberating Structure (LS) called 25/10. Debbie DeMarco (ELAM '10), co-chair of the ELUM Program Planning Comittee, introduced us to Liberating Structures, to this particular method, and ably guided us through the exercise.

Debbie invited each of us to identify a conflict or negotiation challenge and how we expected the program to help us address it. We wrote our responses on one side of an index card—no names identified. We then walked around the room, greeting each other, briefly reading the cards, and then exchanging them in an apparently random milling of the crowd. By the time she chimed us to a halt, we had scanned more than a dozen different ideas on the anonymously authored cards. She chimed us to a halt five times. At each pause we read the issue from the card we were holding, exchanged ideas with the person who most recently passed it to us, and scored the issue the degree to which it resonated with us on a scale of 1 to 5. (Now you have the first part of the structure's name—25 is the maximum score possible in the five rounds!) At the end of five rounds, Debbie asked for the issues with the ten highest scores, working backwards from 25. (And now you have the rationale for the second part of the name "25 gets you 10.") We ended up reading off more than ten, because the issues were so important. By using this LS as an opening tool for the meeting, we immediately entered together into thinking about leadership challenges, conflicts, and negotiations that achieve more than what either party thought possible.

Top 10 Challenges of ELUM Leadership

  1. Financial support for new position and/or program
  2. Unprofessional faculty member(s)
  3. Decreased team productivity and morale secondary to conflict between staff
  4. Below market compensation
  5. Engaging a "dictatorial" boss to listen to new ideas
  6. Bringing together the interest of individuals and organization (clinical division or research unit)
  7. Negotiating a package for a new job
  8. Encouraging staff to meet organizational productivity goals
  9. Determining next steps after a failed negotiation
  10. Longstanding conflict between senior staff members

Thus, we entered our lessons on conflict management and negotiation as a community curious as to how we would move each other forward and eager to learn new skills. For the next two days we lived on the ELAM Leadership Learning Edge, digging deeply into our challenges and new approaches for addressing conflict and negotiation. Catherine Morrison expertly guided us through essential concepts of expanding our options and finding resolution to our challenges (you can read more on these lessons in the next column, to be published in early April). We contributed to each other's resilience and expanded the possibilities for agreements between apparently disparate perspectives. And we enjoyed the hospitality of our colleagues in Nashville in the evenings. In her program closing remarks, Laura Schweitzer (ELAM '99) reflected, "Where else, during what other professional meeting, and in what other community, could the facilitator announce 'and tonight for your homework you will…' and not hear a moan? Of course after a nine hour workday and a planned dinner, there would be homework. This is ELAM after all."

Prior to closing the program, we returned to another Liberating Structure—the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, known by its Russian acronym TRIZ. Harriet Hopf (ELAM '09) and Pascale Lane (ELAM '03), co-chairs of the ELUM Community Building Committee, guided us through an exploration of how the ELAM community might commit to actions that will sustain it using this adaptation of a classic engineering systems failure activity.

TRIZ analysis requires considering how our actions preserve the status quo of any system, especially actions that contribute to negative outcomes and those that create essential barriers to system change. Once the components that reliably contribute to undesirable outcomes are identified, we can "flip the system" to a more positive one by removing or reversing these essential negative elements. In this way, small changes in individual and community actions can create and sustain larger, richer outcomes.

Our opening task in the final chapter of this Nashville program was to work in small groups to create a reliably failing system for ELUMs and then to identify small changes that would support continued success. Harriet and Pascale asked us to take on a very wicked question—How can we design a reliable system for an ELUM organization that will drive its members apart from each other and from the organization?

Our responses were equally wicked (remember that this assignment was to create a system that NO ONE would want so that we could dismantle it to create the opposite).

Elements in a Reliably Failing ELUM Network: Ideas from TRIZ brainstorming from some very creative ELUMS

  • Enable automatic enrollment in all social media tools so that ELUMs are continuously bombarded with Tweets, alerts, and links. Keep the annoyance level steady and high.
  • Place all pre-conference readings on the Drexel Blackboard system; send to the dean of the ELUM's current school so that s/he can access the postings.
  • Invite only tenured, full professor physicians who were born the United States to participate in alumnae activities.
  • Hold all alumnae meetings in the winter in the coldest, flattest, windiest state we can identify; make sure the conference center loses power at least once during the program.
  • Set dues at $10,000/year.
  • Turn away all alumnae email communications and telephone calls to the ELAM office with an automated "don't bother us" message.

It's pretty easy to see how we might alter these elements to sustain our community.

From Laura Schweitzer's closing remarks:
"This professional development activity was made possible because of the peer community in which we find ourselves. As ELUMs we started these three days with classmates reunited, and a previously-acquired core set of learning and vocabulary and experience thanks to ELAM. It was immediate kinship, even with ELUMs we do not know. We have been given a gift, the gift of ELAM, the gift of a sisterhood, and a set of tools to propel us forward. We now have a responsibility to pay back, to support ELAM, to help our sisters and use our tools. We are the future of women leadership in academic medicine. Be more effective in the role you are in, but also look for that new role. Do not dismiss division chief, department chair and dean. We know that is where the power is. We have been chosen. We have been given this gift. If not us, then who else?"

Elements for a Self-Sustaining ELUM Network (and the seeds for moving forward)

  • Invite all alumnae to participate in all activities, including program planning and attendance.
  • Post information, including readings and contacts, so that they are easily accessible.
  • Protect the confidentiality of ELUM information both submitted to the staff and shared during the program.
  • No dues; rely upon member gifts in recognition of value.
  • Maintain open and welcoming communication between staff and alumnae.

With this activity, we essentially conducted a systems analysis of how to prevent the dissolution of the ELAM alumnae community as we depart on our separate ways around the world. Of course, some other BIG ideas came from the discussion: ways to improve networking through regional alumnae activities, formal and informal approaches for alumnae who attended this inaugural program to let colleagues know what they missed by not attending, clarifying and communicating the purpose and mission of the alumnae network, and convening special interest groups to follow up on action projects and life transitions.

We closed the inaugural program with the satisfaction of having moved our leadership forward by weaving together the threads of our individual experiences and leaving us with a hunger for more of the same. What is important—essential even—to understand is that this story is about each of us. The ultimate outcome of the story depends upon the decisions we make to attend to each other, to engage with the larger community, and to hold ourselves accountable for the sequels.

Our next ELUM professional development program will follow the winter ELAM session two years from now. The setting will be San Antonio, Texas; the dates January 9-12, 2014. The plot will be determined by the program committee and all of the alumnae who respond to a forthcoming survey about leadership development needs and desires. The action to be taken now is to mark your calendar for San Antonio on January 9-12, 2014!

Acknowledgments: This community building would not have been possible without the active facilitation of Deborah DeMarco, Debra Romberger, Harriet Hopf, Pascale Lane, and Laura Schweitzer. We would have been wandering the halls, hungry and disengaged, without the talents of ELAM staff Rosalyn Richman, Olivia Lee, Kristan Stengel, Cari Dam, and Brian Pelowski.

 
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ELAM is a core program of the Institute for Women's Health and Leadership at Drexel University College of Medicine, Philadelphia, Pa. The Institute continues the legacy of advancing women in medicine that began in 1850 with the founding of the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, the nation's first women's medical school and a predecessor of today's Drexel University College of Medicine.