Quoteworthy
Here's the thing: Doing is about you, leading is about your team. It’s about helping them recognize their contribution and value in the organization.
Allyson Tanner

Most Recent
Are Leaders Still Readers?

Reading is an essential leadership skill. But with so many distractions—Netflix, social media—reading may be on the decline. James Neider, clinical operations manager, shares strategies for adopting a reading habit that will make you a better leader.

What It’s Really Like To Teach Something New Every Day

COVID-19 has brought a new challenge to the work of continuous learning in health care: how to teach new information when it is constantly changing and emotions run high. As nurse educators for the emergency department, the pulmonary and palliative care unit, and outpatient clinics, Emma Gauci, Paige Wilson, and Sarah Smith have been thrown into an educator’s quandary: how to help staff feel as knowledgeable and supported as possible.

Communicating in the Time of Coronavirus

Effective Communicator: Redux. Communication lessons for the here and now, from setting boundaries to running a meeting.

The Best Advice I’ve Been Given

We asked seven members of the Accelerate editorial team to share the best professional advice they had ever received—practical or profound. And now we’re passing it on to you.

How Clinician Educators Can Give Effective Feedback

Feedback is often an area that breaks down under the rigors and pressure of clinical activity. Clinician educators Pete Hannon and Kathleen Timme introduce a methodology that can provide insight, inspire goal setting, and help improve clinical performance.

How to Serve Others and Still Lead

Alison Flynn Gaffney defines herself as a servant leader. As U of U Health’s Executive Director of Service Lines, Ancillary and Support Services, she brings more than two decades of experience in strategic, operations, and consulting roles at academic medical centers and community hospitals. Here are Alison’s expert tips for effective servant leadership.

Practicing (Episode 5): Cathy Gray and Cynthia McComber

Real teams are the antidote to the chaos of modern medicine. “Real teams know each other, feel loyalty to one another, trust one another, and would not want to disappoint one another” (Tom Lee, NEJM Catalyst 2016). Practicing are conversations between real team members about why the work matters. Our goal is to preserve and share the stories of the teams at University of Utah Health.

The Effective Communicator: How to Run a Meeting

The Effective Communicator returns this week to remedy the bane of our existences: endless, often pointless, meetings. Yes, you can run them better.

The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Accelerate frequently chronicles the hard work of building and nurturing teams because we believe that real teams are the antidote to the chaos of modern medicine (in the words of Dr. Tom Lee). Here, we highlight a necessary ingredient of high-performing teams: motivation.

The Elephant, The Rider, and the Path to Change in Health Care

Drawing from psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s Elephant and the Rider metaphor, Utah's Chief Medical Quality Officer Bob Pendleton explains why emotions are critical to motivating change in health care. Behavioral economics, it appears, may provide the direction we need.

Invest In Your Team: Listening and Storytelling

University of Utah Health was an early adopter of bundled payments. Accelerate’s Mari Ransco sat down with Ryan VanderWerff, one of the first in our health system to participate in payment innovation, to learn firsthand what it takes to lead a team in turbulent times.

Why Rounding Demonstrates Respect for Patients and Teams

Rounding–the act of connecting with patients and staff–is a leadership best practice. While few find rounding easy to start, those who master it are hooked. It is a daily habit that improves patient care, experience and engages the team. Susan Clark and her medical director, Dr. Dana DeWitt, have taken the practice one step further by rounding together as a leadership dyad, resulting in a more connected and authentic team.