Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital staff members complete leadership training

ALBANY — More than 120 Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital employees recently celebrated the completion of the inaugural Phoebe Leader Development program.

The yearlong program was designed to provide leaders throughout the organization with skills they could immediately put to use to improve their departments.

“The goal is to invest in our leaders by equipping them with the best leadership principals and models to ensure that Phoebe is the world-class health system that our community needs,” Gabe Lord, organization development and learning manager at Phoebe, said.

Employees in three tiers – frontline leaders, managers and directors, and senior leadership – attended sessions throughout the year.

“We partnered with the Leadership Institute at Columbus State University and developed specific leader development sessions that were designed with our organization and our leaders’ development in mind,” Lord said. “This was just for us.”

Jennifer Heleski, nurse navigator for Phoebe women’s and children’s services, said the program taught her a great deal about herself and how to be a better communicator.

“The care given to patients can be at its best when leaders are being effective with their frontline staff, helping them to learn and grow, and being productive and efficient with their time and resources,” Heleski said. “This course has taught us a lot about how to be better ourselves, so that we can make improvements with the staff that we serve and the patients we serve. I am already implementing things that I’ve learned in my everyday practice.”

Marquetta Harvey, pre-cert team leader for Phoebe’s patient contact center, said her favorite class was one entitled “Conducting Effective Meetings.”

“I learned presentation skills and how to prepare an agenda with a purpose,” she said. “I learned how to gather data, create objectives and how to close the meeting with all objectives reviewed. This was a great class and will be very helpful for future leaders.”

The graduates wrapped up their final session by partnering with The Helping Hands Project, which has donated, built and delivered more than 29,000 prosthetic hands to amputees in more than 75 developing countries. The Phoebe graduates broke into small groups and assembled 42 hands for children and adults with disabilities around the world.

Each person completed the work with one hand covered to gain greater perspective on the difficulty the hand recipients endure in their daily lives. They also decorated hand carrying cases, wrote personal letters to the recipients and took team photos that will be sent along with the hands.

Lord said it was a fitting end to a successful and beneficial first year.

“We’re already moving into our second year,” Lord said. “We’re excited to start with three new classes in January, and we know those leaders will get as much out of the program as our first group of graduates did.”

Jennifer Parks