There are indications in many industries that positive manager-employee relationships are essential to employee engagement, well-being, productivity, and desire to stay in an organization (Better Works; Dennibis, Doug, 2023) Yet, in one large study across US and UK, the authors found 49% of employees feel their own manager lacks skill in providing important feedback to the employee.
Since over 70% of America’s Physicians are now employed by an organization—rather than serving as independent operatives—their collective well-being, engagement and alignment are likely to be well served by increasing their supervisors and managers skills in coaching. Physician alignment and engagement remains a top-tier priority across America’s healthcare sector. Team-coaching and self-coaching teams may just be the right pathway to achieve that crucial physician engagement and alignment.
Leader as Coach: From Drama to Empowerment and Emergence
We turn now to a closely related matter. Not only should physicians and other health care leaders receive coaching services these leaders should also be coach-like in their own leadership role—a perspective that is gaining traction more broadly in the domain of leadership strategies (Bergquist, Sandstrom and Mura, 2024).
Transforming Drama Triangle to Empowerment Triangle
One of the great challenges of working in human systems, particularly complex adaptive human systems in the often-dysfunctional ways we humans attempt to address conflict. The Drama Triangle was first described by Stephen Karpman in the 1960s [Karpman, 1968].
It is a model of dysfunctional social interactions and illustrates a power game that involves three roles: Victim, Rescuer, and Persecutor, each role represents a common and ineffective response to conflict. We might call the Drama Triangle a cognitive-rut, a pattern we humans use to explain when things aren’t going our way—a fundamental attribution error common within the context of teams.
Simply put, when things don’t go our way, most of us first seek out someone else to blame “our persecutor” and then turn to someone we hope will save us from the bad place we find ourselves in, the “rescuer” to save the day. While such dramas sell well in the media and make for wonderful novels, most of us seldom benefit from its daily use in our home and work lives. You’ll notice the lack of any sort of “coach” or “mentor” role in the Drama Triangle.
Thankfully, David Emerald (Emerald and Zazonc, 2013) re-imagined the Drama-Triangle into The Empowerment Dynamic (TED*):
