Emerald’s model describes clear role shifts for each player in the drama:
Victim to Creator (Some also use Learner)
Villain/Persecutor to Challenger
Hero/Rescuer to Coach
Emerald (Emerald and Zazonc, 2013) also describes very specific ways to begin to learn to shift out of whatever role we find ourselves in under new conditions: We turn to Emerald for guidance given our focus on increasing the use of coaching among health care leaders. Emerald recommends the following shifts from “telling to asking” to achieve this important transformation (adapted from above link):
This shift from Rescuer to Coach role is one that likely requires some level of outside or internal coaching as it requires internal work and reflection to understand the temptations and satisfaction gained through rescuer role that must be let go of in order to grasp the healthier and likely more successful role of coach.
We suspect that healthcare would undergo a profound transformation into high-performance teamwork if every manager, supervisor, and leader in healthcare took steps to move from rescuer toward coach over the next decade. Such a shift would take enormous combinations of courage, curiosity, and resilience—for the world of health care is filled with what we identified in a previous essay (Fish and Bergquist, 2024a) as anxiety-provoking conditions of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, turbulence and contradiction (VUCA-Plus).
