Home  Current Events Gardening with seeds of spirituality
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Gardening with seeds of spirituality |
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By Margaret Benefiel
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How a health service director brings spiritual principles into his organization.
Like a gardener, Joe Clubb seeks fertile ground for planting seeds of spirituality in his workplace. At HealthEast, a healthcare system in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, he found what he was seeking.
Joe Clubb came to HealthEast in 1995 as one of three service line directors of social work and soon became head of social work services for the entire four-hospital system. HealthEast's commitment to spiritually based values drew Joe initially and kept him there as he discovered the depth of that commitment.
Early on, Joe noticed employees' comfort with prayer at all levels of the organization and realized that his gift for nurturing prayer in meetings and one-to-one relationships would be welcomed. At the same time, he noticed the willingness of staff to call on social workers for spiritual care of patients in addition to their specified task of discharge planning, thus acknowledging the possibility of integrating social work and spirituality, an integration he had heard espoused in other contexts but had never before seen practiced.
These as well as other observations let Joe know early on that he could bring his whole self, spirituality and all, into the workplace at HealthEast, and he began to dream about how he could fully practice the kind of leadership he had always wanted to try.
What does Joe's leadership at HealthEast look like? Like a gardener, Joe envisions the big picture and at the same time plants seeds and tends shoots. For example, three years into his job, Joe heard a presentation by Bonnie Wesorick about her Interdisciplinary Clinical Practice program, a method of integrating spirituality into patient care, and he, along with a number of others, immediately recognized it as a tool that could help HealthEast put its principles more fully into practice.
Joe and others received ICP training, and Joe saw the potential for ICP, originally conceived as a model for nurses, to be extended beyond nursing teams. With this vision for the big picture, and working jointly with Pattie Keefer, RN, Joe assumed primary responsibility for bringing ICP into widening circles of patient care at HealthEast.
ICP helped employees "walk the talk," bringing HealthEast's spiritual principles more fully into patient interactions and employee meetings. Now, with more than 10 years' experience with ICP, Joe has helped HealthEast live its mission in all aspects of its life.
Like a gardener, Joe Clubb has sown seeds of spirituality and seen them sprout into new life in his organization.
Margaret Benefiel, Ph.D., author of "Soul at Work: Spiritual Leadership in Organizations" (from which this column is drawn), works with leaders in business, healthcare, government and non-profits, to help them develop spiritual leadership. Visit her website at www.ExecutiveSoul.com .
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