Relational Power

Backlit by their PowerPoint slide deck, internist Sarah Smithson 08MPH/MD, vice president of partnerships at Intend Health Strategies, and Matt Lewis 18PHD, are giving a presentation to the Emory infectious diseases team, led by Professor of Medicine Igho Ofotokun, on leadership development.

The setting is the scenic Klamon Room at the Rollins School of Public Health, and coffee and snacks are abundant. Emory is familiar grounds for Smithson and Lewis, who got their advanced degrees here. In fact, Ofotokun was Smithson's mentor at Emory. After leaving Emory, Smithson completed her internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and became involved with Primary Care Progress (now Intend Health Strategies), a grassroots effort launched in 2010 at Harvard Medical School. She stayed involved with the effort even after leaving Boston and becoming assistant dean for clinical education and associate professor of medicine at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

"The organization transformed from an alliance of medical school-based teams promoting primary care into a national movement — a learning collaborative of health care professionals from across disciplines," she says. "We were looking at how to teach our interprofessional members and evolved a curriculum and training program based on authentic connection in health care spaces. When you connect, there are improvements in wellness. And it becomes a better environment for patients because you are strengthening the teams providing care."

Matt Lewis 18PHD, Sarah Smithson 08MPH/MD, and their colleague, Sherice Stewart, taken on the balcony outside the Klamon Room at Emory’s Rollins School of Public Health.

A doctoral graduate of the Institute for the Liberal Arts, Lewis has taught on topics including public narrative, culture, and identity at Emory and Harvard universities. At Emory, his research focused on veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the complex relationship between narrative and trauma — "meaning making through storytelling," as he describes it.

Through Intend Health Strategies, Smithson and Lewis combined forces and started consulting with health care teams and leaders searching to increase their group's effectiveness. They found their work could improve elements from workplace satisfaction to safety, and from efficiency to trust among groups.

Smithson says, "That is the power of what we do. We engage with individuals to enhance their sense of self-awareness and ultimately to allow their teams to work together more effectively. Within these big health care systems, one employee can feel powerless. We help people see that the foundational unit of empowerment is a one-on-one relationship with another person. Relational power can lead to exponential growth."

"Sometimes, in the hierarchy of health care, people think it's all about the ‘Big L' leadership roles," she adds. "The reality is, it's incumbent upon every one of us to show up in intentional ways. Authentic, natural ways to connect are sometimes ‘taught out of us' in health care."

They have seen great success in re-introducing this skill set through modeling, teaching, and practice, as well as sharing their own stories. "We teach people how to lead from where they are," Lewis adds. "That way the team can start moving differently as a whole."