The Business Meeting Room

Will administrative meeting rooms become a sacred place for your physicians? Even if an important transformation occurs there, few will come to regard the room as a touchstone or a sacred space. In contrast a retreat center promotes reverence for place. You can probably rent a suitable center close to your hospital. You can acquire and convert an adjacent home into a retreat center. Finally, you can build a center. Acquisition and building are more easily justified if the retreat center is also available for the use of hospital employees. Few hospital budgets can fund the purchase of a retreat center, but other funding sources include a hospital foundation grant and interested benefactors.

Programs vs. Place

The place for educational programs is simply an auditorium or conference room with appropriate audiovisual equipment. The more spiritual the program, the more self-revealing physicians are asked to be, the more the chosen place needs to be insulated from clinical activities, including the electronic intrusions of portable communications gear. Program participants can be asked to silence their cell phones and pagers as they would in a concert or theater. A meeting room in a non-clinical area works well for spiritual, self-revealing programs. Often hospital administration offices include a suitable meeting room. It should have minimal hallway traffic, a table, chairs that can be moved, comfortable air handling, and good lighting, preferably with a dimmer switch. Projection equipment, a sound system and a window to the outside are optional but useful.

Looking for significance

Physicians have daily spiritual experiences at work but may not recognize their importance. You will have opportunities to be their rear-view mirror and help them find importance. People first experience events then put them into some context. Many times you will encourage colleagues to tell their stories and help them discover a greater context. The greater context is the one that helps the physician find meaning and purpose. When you work with a physician’s story there are two places to consider. The first place is where the event happened, because that place shapes the physician’s context. The second place is where you hear the story. You have little control over either venue but ask about the place. Questions like: “Why did that happen here?” Or: “What did it mean to you that it happened here?” For instance, an anesthesiologist who just had a dust-up with a surgeon may have a different context for the event if it occurred in the operating room, the recovery room, or the family consultation room. Ask: “Are you comfortable talking about that here in the nurse’s station? Would you prefer to grab a coffee or find an empty conference room?” The value of storytelling is far greater when the raconteur is comfortable with the surroundings.

Sacred places

We regard some places as sacred. Ground zero is one such place. An operating room, a patient’s bedside, the family consultation room can all be sacred. Our lives reside somehow in those places. They are places of significant personal transformation and commemoration. Events can make a place sacred to us, but there are places that invite an awareness of the sacred. As a physician champion begin to look for the places of invitation.

Crucial for a protege

If you have a formal spiritual formation process for your team, invite the protégé to participate as early as you can. The protégé may be eager to participate, but they may resist. Do not be discouraged. Resistance does not necessarily reflect a problem with the candidacy. Gentle inquiry into the points of resistance will help you deal with them. People nearly always will give a reason that they decline your invitation, but probe deeper. You might ask if other things about the spiritual formation process concern them. Even those with no particular points of resistance simply will require repeated, gentle invitations before they invest their time. Remember to pray for the protégés, especially at this crucial time.

Proteges Roles

Protégés can also help you recruit physicians to programs. Recruiting is a public statement that they value these programs. Such public affirmations reinforce their personal commitment to the mission. As their activity becomes public, they will be introduced to the spiritual side of many of their physician colleagues for the first time, and they will develop recognition as spiritual leaders in the medical staff. As the protégé begins to recruit, you will need to teach how to manage a database. Find one approach to database management in the chapter by that title. The database is an important tool for recruiting. It helps identify groups of physicians for targeted, personal invitations based on their expressed interest, referrals from other physicians, and other previous exposures to your programs.

The Move to Greater Involvement

The protégé will have participated in some of the programs and activities already, but now is the time to invite participation in all of the programs. Time constraints prevent physician protégés from participating in every iteration of the program, but at least one experience of each of the programs should be encouraged. After experiencing a program as a participant, the next step is to co-facilitate that program. Co-facilitating gives the protégé a chance to develop skills, learn specific programs, and build confidence as you supply modeling, encouragement, guidance and feedback.