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Now here's the episode. This is Scott Becker with the
Becker's Healthcare Podcast. We're thrilled today to be
joined by Janelle Bann Janelle's, the founder and c e o
of Foot Lamp Consulting. She's an executive coach and brilliant. We're gonna talk to her about executive
coaching, about what she does, the founding of her company
and a lot more. Janelle, can you take a moment to introduce
yourself and tell us about foot Lamp consulting? Yeah, you bet. Thank you
for having me, Scott. Um, after working with Kaiser Permanente
for about 24 years in many roles, from direct patient care to training
and development to an operations process consultant, and then a medical
office director of five clinics, where I spent a lot of time coaching
my physician leader counterparts to be more involved in leadership and to
get in there and help us out because I needed them, I needed their
expertise and their their knowledge. I was then invited to join the Permanente
Medical Group side of the company as an advisor and executive
coach for them. At that point, I developed an internal evidence-based
coaching program that was rooted in neuroscience research. That was a, a
pretty big success, which surprised me. Um, we had demonstrated outcomes
and a lot of people asking for more. And about five years ago, I started my company Footline Consulting
so that I could bring our leadership effectiveness and stress lowering
outcomes through professional coaching to several Kaiser Permanented
regions across the country, as well as folks like
Cedar-Sinai and many others. So now I'm no longer limited to
providing these types of services to just one company, and that has helped
me, um, really serve the mission. I have to lighten the loads of physicians. So I now have a team of over 40
fabulous executive leadership coaches who are all aligned with my mission, um, to help physicians and help
lower their stress levels. They know that I have a business
model that's very directly focused on providing high quality
coaching at affordable rates. So we actually are about 75 to 80%
less than our competitors because my goal is to get the support in front
of as many physicians as possible and help lower burnout while really intending
to help get more physicians and that expertise into the C-suites and mid-level
leadership roles where they're so desperately needed in my opinion. We've expanded our services now to offer
one-on-one coaching to leaders in a few different ways as well as frontline docs. And we have several group
coaching options as well. We also offer C M E for all of
our coaching engagements. Um, just this last year we decided to invest
in that as well 'cause we think it's the right thing to do. Thank you so much. And tell us a little bit about
what does the coaching look like? Are there certain leaders
and people that are more, that take coaching better than
others? How does that look? How does that look and how, if
you're gonna use an executive coach, what's the best way to go about it if
you're looking to use an executive coach? Oh, that's a good question. So I would say that there are folks
who have told me, oh, good luck. This leader's gonna be really tough. Maybe because they have a reputation
for being difficult or, um, they may show their triggers
a little bit more publicly, which makes people end up
making things up about them. I have a very open mind with all of
my clients, all of our coaches do. I train them and vet them
personally. So they're all very open. We all know that the way people present
sometimes is not truly who they are and at their, at their best, the best
version of themselves. So we, when we work with them, we find
that I, i I have yet to find a, a position that was not open to coaching
and didn't do well with it if they were open to doing the work. So that is really where
the secret sauce is. I do a lot of pre-work with folks to make
sure that they're offering the service to physicians as an option to help
them in a professional development. It's not seen as something that, you know, you are on your way out the door or
you are really needing performance management, but we're
gonna get you a coach. That has actually given
us a pretty bad rap. And when we first went
into a large medical group, I spent a lot of my time in the first
session or two working with physicians trying to help them understand that
they were not being fired , they were actually being invested in
this is a different type of support. Um, they're just not used to that. They're used to HR coming in and sort of
doing things like this to get them out the door. So if they're open to doing it and they
want to grow and learn and they want to work through their triggers, they want to expand their leadership
abilities and capabilities and increase their competence and
competence, they're great. They, they're very open to it and tend to
build quick rapport with their coach. So yeah, as far as your second question
going about getting an executive coach, um, I, there's a lot of executive
coaches out there. It really, the barriers to entry in this
field, Scott, are quite low. Um, I am really picky about
the coaches I hire. They all have leadership
experience themselves, even though we're coaches and
not consultants to point out, we don't tell people what to do. We help
them figure out what they need to do. But having been in the trenches and kind
of been in the arena, if you will, um, it does help us, I believe, ask better questions because we understand
a little bit about where these folks are coming from. So I
would recommend, you know, you can definitely get ahold
of us@footlampconsulting.com. We have some forms that you can fill
out to get, uh, the ball rolling in, helping us understand
what you're looking for. And a big part of my role is to help
organizations figure out what might be a good program to invest in for their
people strategies to be able to offer this to their physicians across the board. And thank you. And what,
when you look at leadership, what trends are you following today? And
in the old days, if you asked a leader, is it more important to be respected or
liked? Almost the universal answer was, it's more important to be respected. How has the world changed and what trends
are you watching in leadership today? Oh, that's a great question. I mean, the trends I'm watching in leadership
are really specifically when it comes to physicians, both the
research and anecdotally, I'm watching a lot of physicians leave
the field and do completely other things, largely due to their impression or
feeling that they cannot manage the myriad of external
stressors coming their way, both in leadership and indirect
patient care on the front line. That's a trend I'm watching that's
pretty concerning. Um, as far as, you know, once they start working with us, we can actually get them to a place
where they feel a lot more peace and calm. They get in touch with their values
and their why around why they actually wanted to work in the healthcare field. What about the company they're working
with might be causing undue stress? What about that is actually
due to their own behaviors? And some of the things that they actually
have a high amount of influence over within their sphere of control that
they maybe weren't looking at before. It helps to put them into a better
place. They also, as an aside, feel like their employer. They, they've had a much higher
appreciation for their employee, for investing in them
with the support service. As far as being respected or liked, I think it's important for leaders to
be able to command respect by having the ability to follow up with
people, set good expectations, and actually hold folks accountable.
I think that in its own way, provides respect. I think a lot
of people also appreciate that, but I don't believe as a leader who's
going to make an impact, that you're, you should expect to be liked by
everyone. That is, I think, a, a false indicator of comfort that
oftentimes folks have when they're seeking harmony in places. So you
have to be really clear, is your goal to have
harmonious relationships with
everyone or to make an impact as a leader and make
things better for patients? And that clarity alone can help people
better understand what they're doing. We've also had folks who are
very, uh, conflict avoidance. That's a big theme in
medicine and leadership, have them really sort of shift their
focus once they realize that addressing folks and their poor
performance is actually a way
of supporting them instead of just allowing them to blindly keep walking
into spaces where they're not being effective and no one's letting
them know, no one's helping them. So that kind of conversation has also
been able to help people shift their focus away from the fear of not being liked, but also not doing a great
job of being respected. Thank you very much. And Janelle, talk a little bit about what are you
most focused on and excited about currently? What are you most
focused on and excited about? Oh, much to be excited
about in this space. Um, having a really good time with this
business, probably to be honest, although a hundred percent of our clients
feel their coach is helping them be more effective in the leadership roles
in addition to sustaining behavior changes they choose to make, 90% and up of our clients find
their stress level has improved since working with us, even while their stressors are usually
only increasing in environment around 'em. That was also really
surprising to me, Scott, I, I set out to start this business to
give physicians the opportunity to build their confidence and
competence and get out there. I did not realize the stress lowering
capability of this kind of work, especially as we are helping
them focus on their triggers, helping them manage their emotions better
and regulate a lot of the reactions they have and learn how to interact
with their stressors differently. A lot of physician leaders understand
that things will stress them out and trigger them. They understand what the
amygdala does and how that behaves, but the research that we really are
rooted in helps 'em actually identify it and calm it down and then do
something different with it. So they're really able to act upon their
stressors more than they were before. Um, which we watch them just completely
change in front of us over the weeks and months that we get to work with
them. So that's a pretty heavy, um, load for me to carry around because not
many people know about this work or that we even exist or that there's a company
like us that specializes in physicians and coaching. Um, Dr. Kate Shanafelt put out some really great
research around the effectiveness of, of coaching for physicians
back in August of 2019. Um, but it directly lowers burnout
rates for doctors. But most people, most people don't understand that that's
out there and they don't even know that coaching is a tool. So I am really focused this year on
getting the word out to leaders of additional medical groups that we don't
currently partner with and healthcare systems who don't know we exist. Any of these folks who are looking for
a viable solution for their physicians and wanna actually take action
on providing evidence-based
support that produces outcomes. A lot of healthcare leaders
I hear talking, they, they're, I think it's like, I don't know if it's just being on the
leading edge or it's just not something that's nearly as common as a lot of
other things that are offered, but it's, it's definitely important to start taking
action with some tools that are going to help people. And, um, the amount of funding that we
actually require is quite low with organizations. We always do a pilot first just to
ensure it's a good fit for their culture. So you can oftentimes get started with
this kind of a program by just shifting funds from one place that you're currently
not getting a lot of value from to another. Yeah, that's what
I'm focused on this year. Thank you. And just
fantastic. And you know, how do people learn more about your
organization, about Foot Lamp consulting? Probably the best place you can go to is
our website, foot lamp consulting.com. I actually have some links to
another podcast I've done with, um, folks at a medical school who are asking
about our role and my calling to help really additionally lower
physician suicide to be honest. But we've got a lot of information
there about our programs. If you wanted to peruse the different
offerings we have and just reaching out, I'm happy to talk with any and all
leaders of medical groups in the US and Canada. We have coaches actually coast to coast
as well as a few in Canada and, uh, one currently in Costa Rica. So, um, we, we have great coaches available
for any type of leader everywhere. That's the best way to get ahold of us. Janelle, I want to thank you for joining us today
on the Becker's Healthcare podcast. Again, Janelle Bann, c e o,
founder Foot Lamp Consulting. Thank you so much for joining
us today. Thank you very much. Thank you, Scott. Appreciate it. It's so important for leaders at the
top of organizations to keep learning, stay sharp, grow their networks, help our audience better do this
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