Kathleen contributed to the development of the evaluation framework for the SBNH-L Training Program, focusing on defining the behaviours of a Strengths-Based Nursing and Healthcare Leader and determining how these can be taught and measured. She co-chairs the Evaluation Committee. Our Project Administrator Anna Adjemian spoke with Kathleen about her involvement in the project, and her perspective on leadership and its connections with a Strengths-Based approach.
听
Anna Adjemian: Please give us a short background/summary of who you are and what you do professionally.
Kathleen Boies:听I am a professor in the Department of Management at Concordia University, I hold the Concordia University Research Chair in Leadership Development, and I am the Associate Dean responsible for research and research programs at the John Molson School of Business. I have a PhD in Industrial and Organizational Psychology. The broad focus of my work is human behaviour at work, and the more specific focus is around leadership. I鈥檓 interested in understanding what it means to be an effective leader, what leadership means philosophically, and how to develop it in people. I see leadership as a lifelong journey. It鈥檚 not an either/or, it鈥檚 something that you develop over the life course.
听
Why did you get involved with this project?
I don鈥檛 know the back end of that story, but one day Laurie [Gottlieb] showed up at my office, basically. She had been referred to me by Steven High, who is a colleague of mine. Laurie came completely out of the blue, and she explained the project with all of her enthusiasm, dedication, and lovely personality 鈥� and I thought 鈥渢hat sounds like something I absolutely have no time for, but that I really want to do!鈥� I wanted to work with her. I was just coming back from sabbatical and had had time to reflect on what I wanted to do, and the project fit with the orientation I wanted to take with my research, to focus on positive behaviours in leadership and leadership development. This was for stage 2 of the project 鈥� they wanted to build up leadership expertise outside of healthcare and bring in more cross-disciplinary expertise. Healthcare is something I really care about on a personal level; I have a son who has a lot of health issues, so I鈥檝e dealt with healthcare a lot. Laurie came at a good time with the right attitude 鈥� she鈥檚 very positive; I thought I could probably use some of that positivity in my life.
The largest part of my role has been working on the Evaluation team. We need to know what we鈥檙e evaluating, and in order to measure it we need to dig down. There was a lot of interaction with the team developing the training program. I asked a lot of questions. What is the construct? What is it that we are supposed to be changing? What does this mean? How do you define this? If I see this, how do I recognize it? What is the behaviour associated with it? These things took time to define. For nurses, healthcare is at the centre. My role was to bring the leadership perspective to the centre. What does it mean to be a leader? What do leaders do? When we talk about training leaders, what does it mean? Is it about them creating an environment in which nurses can practice SBNH, or is it for the leaders themselves to practice SBNH? Is it about working on the environment, or is it about how you treat your nurses? Is it about all of it? These translate into different behaviours. We have to understand what we鈥檙e trying to measure and how we know that we鈥檝e been successful. In the end, we want for this wonderful model to be adopted more broadly. For it to be adopted, hospital administrators need to be convinced, and they will be convinced with evidence. We need to demonstrate that this is working and that there are concrete reasons for using it, besides the philosophical reasons.
听
What does SBNH mean to you?
Obviously this was a new term for me, because I鈥檓 not from nursing 鈥� although I had been involved with nurse researchers in my PhD and I always had good experiences in that field. I was happy to re-enter it, but from a leadership perspective this time. I relate it to some of the language of organizational psychology 鈥� to me it means positive psychology, working towards improvement rather than working towards gaps and failures. It means values-based leadership, and though there are many theories that claim to bring up values in leadership, often when you dig in the values are not present. In SBNH leadership, they are front and center. As a patient myself, and as the mother of a patient, the fact that it鈥檚 working toward strengths 鈥� it鈥檚 personal, also.
听
What does this project mean to you/what you hope to see come out of your work on this project?
I hope that we can show that this can be trained. That would be very powerful. My overall vision is to see this philosophy of leadership spread. I think it鈥檚 very positive and has a lot of potential. Immediate supervisors have the most importance in someone鈥檚 working life 鈥� they can make it hell, or they can make it really good. If the immediate supervisors of nurses 鈥� who are amazing people 鈥� can shape their environment to be less strained and more positive, nurses who enter the profession can work the way that they were envisioning it at the very beginning. Working with patients, working with families, working on strengths. I see this project as a first step to demonstrate that SBNH Leadership can be trained, it can be learned. Some of these behaviours can be learned from the nurse managers, and hopefully in a later project we can show that this actually modifies the environment in a way that has a trickle-down effect to the nurses and to the patients.
I鈥檝e been in this job for nearly 20 years and I鈥檝e rarely seen so much commitment from so many people. I鈥檝e often seen a lot of commitment from researchers, but the partners鈥� involvement is so incredible and so inspiring. I think it speaks to the necessity of this construct. If they think it鈥檚 irrelevant, then it鈥檚 irrelevant 鈥� because they鈥檙e the experts. They think it鈥檚 going to be relevant, so it is worth putting effort into. They鈥檙e giving so many hours to this project, and they鈥檙e extraordinarily busy people. That speaks to the importance of the project. It gets me going. As a researcher, you never know if what you鈥檙e doing is going to be relevant. But if we can in any way improve our health system, that鈥檚 unbelievable.
听
Learn more about Kathleen's work: