Providence St. Joseph institute helps ‘culture bearers’ deepen their inner lives

Formative experiences guide participants in self-renewal, spiritual growth and community building

By JULIE MINDA

An institute that Providence St. Joseph Health launched in November 2021 is guiding leaders across the system in developing a richer spirituality and inner life so that they can better engage in carrying out Providence’s mission.

The Mission Leadership Institute includes an academy that provides hundreds of Providence leaders at a time with experiential learning, presentations from experts on mission-based leadership and team building with colleagues across the system. Another institute program helps aspiring and new mission leaders to discern their calling. And a third offering promotes the spiritual growth and well-being of established mission leaders.

Martin Schreiber is vice president of the Mission Leadership Institute. He says the institute focuses on forming leaders at every level of the organization — at facilities throughout Providence — for centering their work around mission. “We’re responding to a need for a new type of leadership — for leaders who are more richly developed.”

He says the institute is guiding participants in self-development, self-renewal and community building. “We want them to be able to bring their whole self” to their work, he says.

Search for meaning

Schreiber, who has a doctorate in education and a master’s in divinity, has been working in mission leadership roles in Catholic health care for a decade — first at what was Presence Health and then at Chesterfield, Missouri-based Mercy before joining Renton, Washington-based Providence in June 2020. (In 2018 Ascension acquired Presence Health, which was an Illinois health system.)

In addition to Schreiber, the institute’s full-time staff includes Crystal Hasan and Nancy Jordan. Hasan is senior program manager and leads the institute’s operations and program implementation. Jordan is associate vice president of the institute and directs curriculum and instruction.

Schreiber, Jordan and Hasan were creating the institute during the height of the pandemic when Schreiber says so many health care staff and leaders were burning out and pondering questions of life’s meaning — and this brought to the fore the need to help Providence staff nurture their well-being and growth.

Schreiber met with mission leaders at Providence and at other health care facilities across the U.S. to generate ideas for the institute’s programming.

The institute’s offerings complement Providence system and facility formation programming, says Schreiber.

Culture bearers

The institute recruited participants by asking nearly 1,000 executives across Providence’s seven-state network to nominate leaders on their teams who those executives view as “culture bearers,” people who influence and guide the culture in their facilities. The nominees could be from any department in any of Providence’s facilities. The institute selected its first cohort of about 300 associates last year, aiming for diversity, including when it came to participants’ geographic locations, backgrounds and job roles.

Cohort members have been meeting every other month, and will do so for 15 months. Each meeting lasts two days. The institute’s staff has broken the cohort into geographically determined pods that range in size from about 20 to 60 people each.

Members meet in-person at locations central to their pod group.

Each academy session includes reflections, presentations, discussions and sensory experiences. The presentations on mission topics are delivered in live broadcast format by people the institute calls luminaries. Speakers have included Chris Lowney, CommonSpirit Health board chair; Maureen Bisognano, president emerita and senior fellow of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement; Carolyn Woo, past president and chief executive of Catholic Relief Services and now fellow for global development at Purdue University; Sr. Mary Haddad, RSM, CHA president and chief executive officer; and Dr. Ira Byock, founder and senior vice president for strategic innovation for the Institute for Human Caring at Providence.

The topics the presenters explore have to do with key Catholic health care principles including human dignity, care that addresses people’s needs holistically, empowerment of the vulnerable, the pursuit of the common good, the desire for justice, the importance of stewardship and the essentiality of the Catholic Church’s health care ministry. Questions and discussions are encouraged.

Interspersed with the presentations are interactive learning labs that engage the senses — and the intuition — of academy participants to make them more astute observers and more attentive listeners. Drawing on sensory experiences while cooking, “forest bathing” or listening to