Speaker 1: 00:01 Hi everybody, this is Lois Sonstegard with Building Your Legacy. Welcome to our podcast today. I’m so excited to introduce you Dr. Karren Kowalski. Dr. Karren Kowalski has rich History and career and has put a lot into developing her legacy that she will be leaving for many of the next generation [inaudible] she began her career as an army nurse and was Vietnam and then came back to the US and headed up programs for women and children and really was one of the thought leaders at that time in developing high risk perinatal nursing. And from that she has gone on and has worked with nursing as today is a national thought leader in [inaudible] What is it that the need for credential, like for education as to really have Bobbi need for the future of health care? So I am so excited to have Karen with you and I’d like her to just introduce herself to you also now.

Speaker 1: 01:15 Okay. Well, Lois, thank you so much. I was excited about the possibility of spending some time with you and I really thought carefully about what it was that I wanted to share. And I think maybe I could start a little bit about my background. for example you talked about maternal child nursing and when I finished graduate school in the early seventies I went back as head nurse of labor and delivery because the truth is I think I grew up as the first born in the family thinking that I ought to be in charge. So consequently I went back as head nurse of labor delivery at the U, university of Colorado and , it was a phenomenal time because we spent a lot of time in innovation. Anything that peaks somebody had a really good idea about. We said, Oh, let’s try that.

Speaker 1: 02:13 And so we would try anything. And , some of some people may know that I started a system where the labor and delivery staff nurses started in the clinic, took care of patients and then we’re on call for those patients when they came into labor. So it was, it was a very, very interesting time. We get peer review, one of the first peer review projects in the country and of course now peer review is standard for all Megan hospital facilities. So it’s fascinating to think back on some of those crazy things that we, that we, and we did some crazy things that didn’t work. Also. I just want you to be clear about that. But I think at the same time it gave me some appreciation for leadership and leadership is what I’ve been focused on probably for the last 20 years. I think it started when I finished my doctoral work and I went back as the director of maternal child nursing and one of the large community hospitals here in the Denver metropolitan area.

Speaker 1: 03:12 And we did fun things there too. And that’s where I started the high risk perinatal nurse practitioner program, which unfortunately didn’t survive because we couldn’t ever get enough graduates to create an exam. You have to have a hundred people to a create an exam. And so that didn’t work so well. However, I modeled it after the neonatal nurse practitioner programs and it actually, I still have people out there who are functioning as high risk pregnant nurse practitioners. So that was a fun, fun time. I was recruited to rush Presbyterian st Luke’s in Chicago and rush university where I was the AVP and administrator of the women’s and children’s hospital and also the chair of the department of maternal child nursing in the college. And you know, it was it was a fun time because that’s Luther Christmas old unification model and it’s, so we were in, I was in charge of both service and education.

Speaker 1: 04:06 So just a moment, much of our audience won’t, will not know what Luther Chrismans model is of unification. So if you could just speak per box seats.

New Speaker: 04:18 Sure. Luther was, was the AVP for nursing at rush from its inception for about 25 years. And what he believed was that nursing service and nursing education needed to stop fighting with each other. And so, I mean, because education always pre prepares change agents because they think service does it work, right. And service thinks that educators are not preparing what they need in terms of the workplace. So it’s like this. So at any rate, Luther thought that that needed to stop. And so therefore he created an administrative position, which was over both nursing service and nursing education at the same time. And it’s pretty hard to fight with yourself. And so consequently it worked really, really well.

Speaker 1: 05:10 So that’s the reason I went to Chicago. I went by myself because my my sweet husband said he wasn’t moving to Chicago. And so I commuted every week for five years in that job and it was a terrific, terrific job. after that I returned to Denver and went the center for nursing excellence here in Colorado, which is the workforce center for the state of Colorado. And I was there for 16 years. I stepped down recently. I’m in retirement or as I like to think about it preferment now I get to do what I prefer to do rather than too do what people always ask me to do or want me to do. A part of that is that I am a professor at Texas tech and I teach part time down there. I’m with my colleague and cohort in crime, Dr Patricia Yodawise.

Speaker 1: 06:08 And we write together and we teach together and we do what people haven’t seen in a long time, at least in nursing, which is we do team teaching, which means we’re both in front of the room with the students on an ongoing basis. It’s not a trade off, its together. So that’s always fun for me. And I guess in addition to that I am a magnet appraiser for magnet hospitals and magnet hospitals are the ones in the country. There’s about 460 of them now that attract and retain nurses because of the quality of care for patients that they support. And so it [inaudible] I’ve been supportive of magnet and have been an appraiser since 2008. And the reason I continue to do it is because I do think that the magnet program has increased the quality of care across the United States. And so I want to continue to support that.

Speaker 1: 07:05 So now I am actively pursuing Kowalski and associates, which is my company and I focused on coaching and I focus on teaching and , spend a lot of time working with people in terms of supporting them to reach their goals and objectives.

New Speaker: 07:26 So Karren, you also have just completed a book legacy building what nursing leaders have done in terms of building legacy. Is that correct?

New Speaker: 07:37 It’s correct. So this book is called Legacy Leadership. And we are in copy editing right now if anybody has appreciation for the publishing business, which is a little, which is always unique and so this book should be out late spring next year. And I will be letting everybody know about that, but I think it’s gonna be a really interesting process because a Pat Yodawise who is my co author, the two of us sat down together and built a model for how we thought you progressed from novice leadership to leading a legacy.

Speaker 1: 08:17 And that isn’t, yeah, that’s in fact what the whole book is about. And we have particular aspects of how you can assess where you are and then how you can improve school sets, skill sets in various aspects of the model. So we have a well, a personal side of the model and we have an environmental side of the model. So on both sides I think it makes sense if you’re going to create a legacy that you need to pay attention to both places, both pieces. Could you share with us a little bit about that process? How do you move from novice to legacy builder? What are the steps, the processes? Well, we put it on a trajectory and we started with self assessment because we think the most important thing that a leader can do is to understand themselves and what they bring, whether it’s their strengths or whether it’s those things that they’re working on or growing in.

Speaker 1: 09:13 But it’s important to understand the total picture of what it is you as a person bring to a situation. Most of the time, all we have is us. And so we have to be clear about how we utilize that skillset in terms of what we bring. So we start with the soul self assessment process. We move on to reflecting and framing, influencing, advocating, coaching, mentoring visioning, creating a vision. Leaders do that very well. And moving into as a wisdom kind of perspective before we look at how you create a legacy and we can talk more about any of those that you would like, but it’s, it is absolutely a process and everybody is at a different in terms of that trajectory and the process itself.

New Speaker: 10:06 Speak a little bit about the wisdom building cause I think that’s the piece that we don’t speak about much.

Speaker 1: 10:14 So if in fact you understand yourself, you spend time reflecting and I want to talk a little more about that. You, influence folks, you advocate, you coach, you mentor and you are able to successfully build a vision for what you believe ought to happen in your organization. You’ve, collected all of these aspects of leadership and by that time you probably are fairly wise about how, what it takes and how one moves forward. And then it’s, there is a process of do you share what you’ve learned with your people? And that’s, that is the key right there. Because if you’re going to leave a legacy and it’s going to survive rather than to die when you leave, you have to be sure that you have people, your people who have learned, who have grown because of what you’ve been able to provide for them. And you’ve built relationships with your people and they admire and respect what it is that you are about and what it is that you’ve given to them and helped them in terms of their growing. I don’t believe in my heart of hearts that one can be an effective leader and leave a legacy if you are what we call a queen bee.

Speaker 1: 11:45 Okay. And that is why, okay. So did you ask me what it was? I asked why, why a queen bee explain what to, cause. Some people may not be sure about what a queen bee is, but what I’ve noticed is that sometimes when you move into a leadership position, you forget that you are there at the behest of your people and you think that you know everything and that you are the boss and that everyone should do everything that you say. And my experience is it doesn’t work very well. if there’s a lot of self-importance, if you will, tied to that whole thing. And that’s what I’m talking about. When I referenced the queen bee, it doesn’t work, I don’t believe. And so people have to look at it what it is that they do in terms of creating relationships and how they begin to grow their people rather than to focus on , what’s going on in terms of a crisis situation in the organization, etc.

Speaker 1: 12:55 So can we go back to, you said you wanted to speak a little bit more about reflective. Yeah, speak about that.

New Speaker: 13:02 One of the things I think that leaders do, successful leaders do is there are able, they have an active reflective practice. In other words, and that can look a whole different bunch of ways. Maybe it could be that you spend 20 minutes in the evening going over your day and what worked and what didn’t work. A lot of people that I know actually write that down. In other words, they have a journal or something and you can write it by hand or you can put it on the computer, whatever it is, but you actually reflect on what happened, what you thought worked really well and what didn’t work the way you wanted it to. And then you get to look at how do I learn from those things that didn’t work the way that I wanted them to.

Speaker 1: 13:50 It’s not about making yourself wrong or bad or any of those kinds of things. It’s all about what did I learn in the situation? Whatever it happens to be. And once you do that and you write some of that down, you then can six months later go back and say, well, I think I had that experience before. Let me go back and look and see. And you then have an a real understanding of what actually you learned in those situations. And you can use that information and that knowledge in new instances and new and new situations. So Karen, as people go through this process, what are some of the challenges that people face and that they need to overcome?

Speaker 1: 14:36 I think I’ve noticed several things. One, I think in, in today’s healthcare chaos, I don’t know how I could describe it otherwise. we get stuck in the day to day and all of the issues that people have to deal with. And we don’t actually structure time to reflect or actually time to really think. So for example, one of the people that I certainly appreciate it very, very much in my career was Dr Leland Kaiser now Leland Kaiser was a healthcare futurist and lived here in Denver. And so I was able, because of logistics, I was able to have more time with them than what I would’ve been. And I had been another part of it, another part of the country. But Leland structured his day so that he started it early in the morning, I’d say six o’clock and that first hour, six to seven in the morning. It was his thinking time and nothing interfered with his thinking time so that he actually scheduled that so that he never missed it.

Speaker 1: 15:49 And he could reflect. He could think, he could hypothesize, he could consider what he’s read recently and what the impact of that might be in terms of health care. , another thing I would say is I think an obstacle is we get so busy that in the leadership position, I don’t think we read very much. Oh. And I believe that in fact, reading particularly outside of healthcare, for me, that would be a healthcare reading. Outside of that, reading the business literature, reading the psychology literature, reading those things that are outside you learn things you could bring to health care and exercise in a way that that really supports your people to learn and grow and supports problem solving in really tough situations. I always say that healthcare is about five years behind the business community and so I’ve looked particularly brilliant when I’ve taken business solutions and brought them to healthcare. that’s the kind of thing. Yeah.

New Speaker: 16:58 So Karen, you have taught about like a, see you’ve written about legacy for you as you move forward now in this part of your life, what is the legacy you are working to build and how are you going about it?

Speaker 1: 17:18 Okay, well I’m sure that for one thing, that’s why I still teach at Texas tech because interaction with the students who are for the most part, the leaders of tomorrow. Yes. And supporting them to think and grow and learn and figure out solutions to problems and how they use their strengths to actually begin to make a difference in their work setting. And being able to talk about those issues of coach them through difficult situations. That’s one of the things that I think I love about education and it’s one of the things that I’ve spent a lot of time on. I think the same thing is true in any kind of a leadership position that you hold. It’s that you spent, some of the literature says leaders ought to spend 40% of their time with their direct reports, 40% now what that means is you as the leader are always mentoring and coaching and checking in and figuring out what’s working and what isn’t.

Speaker 1: 18:25 You’re supporting your people. You ask a lot of questions. I mean it’s the most important thing leaders do is ask questions because it stimulates those folks who they’re relating to or they work with to think about what it is because you know that the leader’s always going to ask you about that. So people then learn that pretty quickly and they start preparing, they think through things before they ever have a conversation with the leader, which I think is wonderful in terms of teaching people how to address situations. Let me see. I’m just trying to think what else. What I’m doing today is I hope to share a lot of the material and the information that’s in the book about leading a legacy and how one begins to work on leaving a legacy. You do it not as an individual, you do it through your people, those that you work with.

Speaker 1: 19:28 And so consequently it’s important to spend time with your people. And I think leaders often get caught up in C-suite activities and meetings that they think are really important and they don’t necessarily consider that in fact, they ought to be for the most part, with those folks who are actually doing the work that are getting the job done. And so a part of it then is how do you relate to them on an ongoing basis? How do you build relationships with your people? How do you hold them to account? How do you influence them? How do you stimulate them to be innovative and creative? You don’t have to have as a leader all the ideas. You have to develop an environment that supports people to have innovative and creative thoughts so that you can apply those in specific situations.

New Speaker: 20:27 Right. So Karren, part of what you’re saying to me is that building a legacy starts early on. Cause if you can’t, you you, those relationships are what you’re carrying with you. And the interesting thing as I think [inaudible] so you’re a CEO and then you decide the next phase is to build a legacy. And what you’re really saying is if you want a meaningful legacy, you have to start early on. You have to choose early on that you’re going to be a leader, right?

New Speaker: 21:10 Yes. And not only choose early on that you’re going to be a leader, but being able to assess, for example, where are you on the trajectory, what are the skill sets you need to acquire, fine tune, hone, whatever it happens to be. How do you actually spend time doing that and figuring out how do you increase your contacts? How do you increase the, and make and build wonderful relationships with those people in your work setting and in your professional career. So do you belong to organizations that support what goes on in terms of your values and how you see moving your organization forward, whether it’s healthcare or whatever it happens to be. Did that make sense?

New Speaker: 22:04 It makes a tremendous amount of sense. And I think, you know, part of what you’re saying, Karen, is there’s a whole discussion that we need with our leaders as they begin to develop pembro. what is that’s going to be important for them 10 years, 20 years down the road? I think much of what we talk about is that they’re going to need yet disease, right? Because that is in a sense what we think of as being the ultimate leader. And , but the C suite, if that’s what defines us, we don’t have the last, no, you’re right. You’re absolutely right. And so what happens in those situations I think is that leaders get disconnected from their people. And then I have to ask the question, how do you know what gets done? What’s happening at the bottom level of the organization?

Speaker 1: 23:03 I’ve always felt that, for example, in health care, the frontline leaders, which would be nurse managers, charge nurses, that group, that’s the most important group in the organization. And it’s the group we spend the least amount of time preparing for their job and we do the least amount of support and helping them in terms of how they go about doing what it is they need to do and how they learn the skill set. We often choose the best clinician and pro promote them to a leadership position and have no clue that in fact the skill sets are totally different, right? And we don’t support these youngsters in terms of learning the skill set that they need to be successful as a leader.

Speaker 1: 23:50 So part of what I’m hearing you say is though that foundation at the beginning of our first broad and given a level position, there are some foundational work that is essential if you’re going to really be able to develop people and your concern, part of it is there’s a concern that it isn’t happening. We don’t know. We don’t have the time or the energy to devote at that level. So where I see that kind of thing happening, for example in health care is in magnet facilities because some of the properties that one has to address in order to receive a magnet designation has to do with how do you develop your people, whether it’s new graduates coming into the organization or whether it’s frontline leaders. What they’re saying is you have to have educational opportunities for those groups of people so that they learn what it is that they’re supposed to be doing.

Speaker 1: 24:57 And see, I think we don’t spend a lot of time with that. , we did some work at the center a couple of years ago with an organization here in town that had 100% turnover at the nurse manager level in 15 months. Wow. Well, I don’t know how anybody, you know, had any made any semblance of organization around the quality of care that was provided if you’re changing leaders that fast. And so they ask us to come in and help prepare the new group that they had on board. And what we noticed was that in fact, not only did they use the skill sets because we didn’t just teach them something, we did follow up coaching with every single one of them. And so we helped them through when what they learned in class didn’t seem to work. And so how do they figure that whole thing out?

Speaker 1: 25:47 And how you’re able to do that if you want people to shift behavior is you have to have follow up. You have to have some kind of orchestrated problem solving situation where you help this person figure out what worked, what didn’t work and why was that. So, so I think we’ve got to spend much more time and many more resources on those bottom lines because those are the people when they’re really successful that go up the organizational hierarchy and become the leaders of tomorrow in terms of various aspects of what goes on in organizations. So I really think that it’s going to be very, very important that we spend more time and resources on the youngsters. It fits with millennials because they want a lot of feedback from their bosses and they want a lot of learning. And so think about that too.

New Speaker: 26:43 And they want career development. They’re pushing us to provide career development. And interestingly, that is one of the areas that we’re struggling more and more to provide in organisations because but it’s for which are often more flat than people would like or we, we have so many virtual people as well right now. And it’s hard to do offsite training, especially as you have to learn how to go back to said Karen with, and that coaching, how key coaching was for behavior change. And I think also could change so much a part of that legacy building because there’s pain. Yeah. Did he do that next?

Speaker 1: 27:34 So tell me about that and I’m using that work and how you do that.

New Speaker: 27:44 Yes, coaching is a very interesting process right now. And the reason I say that is because you know, there was no certification. I mean there is certification for coaching, but there’s no real educational preparation. You can hang out a shingle and you know, call yourself a coach and do whatever the reality is. , I think having formal preparation as a coach is critical. And so there are several different ways that you could do that, most of which are recognized by the international coaching Federation. And so that would be how I would suggest people find a coach if they want a coach, is to go through that process and also to look at what someones preparation and credentials happened to be in terms of coaching. If you’re looking for a coach.

Speaker 1: 28:27 Now I went through the CTI program, which is which is actually, that’s a group that helps, starts in an international coaching Federation. And I can assure you that it is very rigorous. It’s called, it’s 15, eight hour days over a 10 month period. And so I feel as though I got very grounded in this whole process. And coaching really is not about what I want somebody to do. It’s about how you support someone to accomplish the goals that they say they would like to accomplish. It’s not telling them what it is they need to do. It’s, it’s helping them understand that they in fact have most of the answers inside of them. And we just need to help bring those to the surface so that they can figure out, okay, what is the plan of, what do they need to do? And I think that’s particularly true when we’re working with our own people is to be able to say to them, you know what?

Speaker 1: 29:23 Tell me what it is that you want to accomplish this year. How can I support you to do that? I will never forget, I had a wonderful chief nursing officer. here in town at the community hospital that I was in. And , she introduced us to somebody from the psych department at university of Colorado Boulder and he had what he called a personal management interview. And it was a format for how you meet with your people every two weeks and what the discussion items are, one of which was are there any issues between the two of us that need to be addressed? That’s important. You know, sometimes people get their feelings hurt or they, you know, you have to deal with those things instead of people being able to nurse them if you will, and let them grow and exaggerate. So that was one thing.

Speaker 1: 30:19 The other thing I loved about that structure was that he always wanted to know at the end identify one thing you succeeded in, that you felt very successful about since the last time we met. Interesting. Yeah. People are stunned. They think because so many people are so focused on problems, they don’t take time to acknowledge and appreciate the fact that they actually solved some of them. They really worked through several very interesting issues. And so feeling acknowledged and acknowledging yourself for what it was that you did accomplish in whatever that period of time was, is critically important, I believe. And so it’s a matter of helping people figure out where it is that they need to learn and grow and how they move forward. People sometimes confuse coaching and mentoring, but I think of mentoring more as someone who is in a respected position who can help me figure out professionally what are some of the next steps that I need to take.

Speaker 1: 31:32 And I have to say I was, I’ve been very fortunate in my career. I’ve had two or three incredible mentors as I’ve moved professionally through my career. And that’s what they did is they said, okay, now Karen, this is, I think this is what you should consider in terms of professionally, what are you ready for next? What is it you should grow in? You know, what are you contributing to the professional organization? All of those kinds of things that they really helped me look at. Where were the next steps in? What was it that I really needed to do to grow? Right. You know, that it’s so phenomenally important. And Karen, we have had such a wonderful discussion that our time was running out. Before we leave, I just want to know if there’s one last thought that you would like to leave with our leaders. , thinking about legacy, their legacy, building a legacy or with other people in that process. Thoughts that you would like to last minute thought.

New Speaker: 32:37 I would say focus on relationships. Okay. Really focused on how do you grow them. , how do you understand yourself and what you bring to any situation? Sort of an emotional intelligence kind of perspective and figuring out how, what are your values in terms of what do you give to your people? Do you give of your time? Do you support them? Do you care about them? can you demonstrate how committed you are to them, to their growth? I think it’s about those kinds of things when you begin to look at how are you going to move forward and develop your own legacy. Right. Karen, thank you so much. And , as your book is completed and it’s coming out for a purchase so people can purchase that a lot of snow and we will let our audience know how they can purchase that.

New Speaker: 33:39 that’d be great.

New Speaker: 33:40 So much for sharing your wisdom and what you’ve learned. , you’ve been such an incredible leader in the healthcare arena and I appreciate your taking the time today. So thank you very much everybody for listening to our podcasts. If you have questions or would like to get in contact with the time for Karren, just let me know. I’ll be glad to make that available to you, the wish your day. And thank you for being a part of us.