During the Partnership Development Grant, Pam Hubley oversaw the development and implementation of the Strengths-Based Leadership & Management Pilot Program at SickKids. On the Partnership Grant, Pam is a co-investigator, the co-chair of the Training Program Committee, and the site lead at SickKids. She is a founding member of the International Institute of Strengths-Based Nursing and Healthcare. Our Project Administrator Anna Adjemian spoke with Pam about her involvement in the project and her passion for SBNH.
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Anna Adjemian: Please give us a short background and summary of who you are and what you do professionally.
Pam Hubley: I am a registered nurse, currently in the role of Vice President for Education and Academic Practice and Chief of International Nursing at SickKids. I’ve been in nursing for over 30 years. I previously held the positions of Chief Executive Nurse, Associate Chief of Nursing and Professional Practice, and Clinical Nurse Specialist. I’ve been a Nurse Practitioner, and held a variety of responsibilities and leadership roles in academia and in the Nurse Practitioner program at the University of Toronto, and I’ve also done policy work with the Ministry of Health in Ontario. Each experience has built on the previous, giving me opportunities to learn, grow, and develop my own skill set and leadership capabilities. I have focused on developing others; supporting teams to be effective, efficient, generative, and innovative, and use the emerging evidence to apply leading practices in whatever area of focus we’re working with. It’s been a wonderful career. I love learning and improving, so I love leading change, thinking through the challenges and opportunities, seeing the growth and development in colleagues. I love the energy of co-creation, and the ability to make improvements to a system or a process using the brainpower of the multiple perspectives, skill sets, and strengths that different people bring to a team.
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Why did you get involved with this project?
In 2012 Judith Shamian, my former boss and colleague, brought Laurie [Gottlieb] to Toronto to meet with a number of nurse executives for a round table discussion about SBNH and its applicability to our settings. I really resonated with the book; I loved that it was based in a relational context of care. I left thinking: how do we bring these ideas and concepts into our practice environments, and support our nurses to understand Strengths-Based Nursing? I’m interested in how we can take big ideas and concepts and translate them into day-to-day action and interaction, make them grounded in practice. Laurie and I clicked along the lines of these ideas and started thinking about how could we work together to develop a practical, practice-based, leadership-based approach to Strengths-Based Care.
In 2013 I started running a book club and giving presentations here at SickKids. We co-hosted the second Strengths-Based Symposium (the first was in Montreal) in collaboration with Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital. We started building a common language and thinking through the structural ways we could introduce the approach to our nursing team. My team in Education incorporated SBNH into our nursing orientation, and used the ideas in practice as they were coaching nurses – both novice nurses and those at the point of care engaging in difficult conversations with families. We were bringing a Strengths-Based lens to try to find solutions to challenging situations.
I worked with Laurie and others to launch the International Institute of Strengths-Based Nursing and Health Care in 2014. We started thinking about education: how could we design a program that was relevant, applicable, activity-based – a really strong pedagogical footing for individuals to learn about SBNH? The opportunity came up for the Partnership Development Grant and we put forth the concept of developing a leadership program. We had real success with the pilot program. We then had the opportunity to apply for the Partnership Grant that we’re currently in, to extend the program and build it out with more time, energy, and partners.
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What does SBNH mean to you?
Strengths-Based healthcare and leadership is a foundation for approaching situations and finding generative solutions. The Strengths-Based orientation helps build individual and team resilience it helps people to be nimble and agile in their response to challenges, and it really encourages all of us to think about how we work together to maintain a positive, realistic, solution-oriented focus when we’re dealing with multiple challenges and perspectives. This program builds peoples’ confidence to bring forward leadership from whatever role they are in. In short, it helps people speak up and bring forward ideas: some work and some don’t, but it’s important that we work together to test and try solutions so we are constantly improving. We need healthcare leaders to bring forward thoughts, challenges, and different perspectives in order to collectively solve some of these big challenges, like COVID-19.
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What does this project mean to you/what do you hope to see come out of your work on this project?
I love this project because it is about creating opportunities for people to tap in and realize their own potential. They develop and strengthen their skill set in a way that positions them to be successful, strengths-based, solution-oriented leaders; engaging their colleagues, respecting their teams, and bringing the best out in everyone to create that healthy, thriving environment that is so professionally satisfying. It’s a contribution to developing people more fully, positioning the health providers of the future to be oriented toward supporting others with a deep understanding and appreciation for diverse values, cultures, understandings, and meanings of health practices.
Coming out of this project, I hope that we have a successful leadership education program that integrates the key concepts of SBNH and facilitates education in an active, engaged way. Since it incorporates and values the importance of story-sharing, I hope it helps people to understand and deepen their appreciation for how sharing stories is mutually beneficial and helps us see the world through the eyes of the other. I hope that the program will create influential mentoring opportunities for the next generation of emerging leaders who resonate with these ideas and have the energy to go forward in a health system that is constantly changing, that is under pressure, and that requires amazing leaders who are committed and dedicated to improving the health of our patients, families, and communities.