Hi, I'm Drew Weilage, and I work in healthcare, too.
I'm open to getting together for 🍹 margaritas or ☕ coffee, in Denver (most of the time), New York (occassionally), or virtually (all the time). Say hello.
I got into healthcare to be part of the change. And fifteen-plus years into a career dedicated to transformation, I've learned that to change healthcare for everyone (i.e., patients, clinicians, and employees), we must change how we work first.
It's a realization that arrived by happenstance at the start: through a miserable, mostly failed project; later with much more purpose through roles in org dev, org design, and work design; and then most clearly through a career of conversations with healthcare pros like you about a concept I've come to call job suck.
We don't talk about job suck much at work—and the reason is because the prevailing perspective on job satisfaction has become the org-centric concept of employee engagement. Employee engagement is a good thing, it's just that employee engagement doesn't do a very good job of helping individuals deal with their very personal experiences of job suck.
The reason we experience job suck is a result of our "system of work"—how we conceptualize, organize, manage, and perform the work.
How we work is a relic from a bygone era.
Seth Godin said it. Niels Pflaeging wrote it. Brave New Work, documented it too. And: Cynefin helps make sense of it. Those are pretty good places to start.
In healthcare, the evidence is everywhere:
- physicians,
- nurses,
- administrators,
- the healthcare workforce generally,
- and chances are pretty good your own career, too.
All is not lost. Change is possible. We can work in ways more suitable for The Transforming. I'll offer Toyota as the most well known example. Burtzoorg shows it's possible in healthcare. Even the US military, perhaps the ideal model of successful command and control management, has matched how it works to the realities of its operating environment.
But we also don't have to wait for our organizations to change. There are things you can do to design how you work to improve your work days that also nudge the system in a better direction.
And that's why Worthy Work is: to help you design worthy work using lessons from the experts, the innovators, and those we work alongside—so you, too, can do work worthy of your care amidst the swirl of The Transforming.