Sound struggles with homogeneity both in gender and in race within our leadership ranks (most notably in our central services).  Our goal to make intentional change in this area so that we can ultimately benefit from diversity of thought and foster greater innovation. We desire a culture that embraces all voices, perspectives, contributions of all team members. We also strive to create an environment that propels colleagues to reach their full potential. Given this, we wanted to educate our leaders on ways to:

• Find common ground to help people feel that they belong
• Lift people up to make them feel valued and respected
• Help create clarity by sharing information

Sound’s approach to our D&I program leverages the collective collaboration of internal leaders and those passionate about seeing change but lacks internal expertise.  In absence of that expertise, we engaged with a third party expert that offered a scalable, off-the-shelf but proven solution for Sound in the areas of unconscious bias training.

After reviewing multiple proposals from third party firms, the council recommended retaining the NeuroLeadership Institute (NLI), a global organization that brings a concrete, brain-based approach to diversity and inclusion.  This approach resonated with our business leaders (who are largely scientists at the core).  

Sound embarked on a distributed learning solution leveraging the Neuroleadership Institute, where over 758 clinical, business and nursing colleagues engaged with the SCARF (status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness) model content to learn the science of smarter teams. The material was delivered by way of diversity champions within business units through micro-learning workshops.

After the module, an impact survey was conducted with 102 people manager respondents:

• 71% indicated they talked about SCARF with other colleagues at least once during that week
• 78% reported they applied positive SCARF rewards to be more inclusive

Other outcomes/metrics:

• The leadership team codified IF/THEN statements
• Participants report applying INCLUDE habits most often in decisions while delivering patient care and in team meetings
• Participants site the greatest opportunity to support their learning and application is to see more role-modeling from leaders (42.2%)