Improving the human experience in healthcare and prioritizing relationship building and management with staff, patients, families, and students has been a central focus of my work. For me, relationships are the cornerstone of personal and professional success and fulfillment, and I am eager to share ideas and insights about improving the human experience and the power of relationships. I hope to spur meaningful discussions about its place in the future workplace.
Building Trusting Relationships
Trust is foundational to resiliency, innovation, and commitment, the strengths we need as we face the unknown and the unpredictable. We start building trust by actively listening to and learning from the people we work with and those we serve. Our trust grows by keeping promises and relentlessly pursuing improvement, enhancing relationships and performance. As technology continues to shape our environments, trust becomes more crucial than ever.
Engaging and Innovating Together
The healthcare principle of “Nothing about me, without me” underlines the importance of including patients in all aspects of care/service and can be extended beyond healthcare. In today’s world, true inclusion means respecting people, and so not using jargon like “stakeholders” is essential. Inclusion ensures we work as partners and co-creators of policies and processes in creating the new workplace. This level of engagement shows care, understanding, and compassion, leading to deep, significant, and lasting change and relegating terms like “buy-in” as past concepts.
Improving the Human Experience
Enhancing the human experience requires everyone—staff and patients/customers alike—to evolve, grow, and change to meet today’s demands and tomorrow’s challenges. With strong relationships built on trust and strengthened by a commitment to life-long learning, we can summon the courage to innovate and relentlessly improve the human experience. The more tech-enabled and tech-strong we become, the more important it becomes to focus on the characteristics and qualities that define us as kind, compassionate, caring, knowledgeable people who honor, respect, and understand the importance and value of the human experience.
Through my teaching and leadership experiences, I have learned that each of us has the capability, and I suggest the need to lead and improve human experience. By creating a supportive and safe environment, we can bring out the leader in everyone. This belief has guided my work at a major healthcare institution, where I collaborated with caring leaders and experienced the transformative power of strong relationships.
I invite you to read more about this work and remain grateful to all of those involved in it (especially Dr. Wallach and Paula Wilson). I hope that you will share your own perspective on the human experience and offer insights, too.