Back for its 10th edition, the summit will feature two keynote addresses shaped to inspire women in the workplace. Christie McMullen, Ed.D., and Katharine Manning, will each share their insights and expertise in elevating your influence to better support yourself and others.
Year after year, The RISE Women in Health Care Leadership Summit connects professionals across the health care ecosystem with industry leading executives, leadership coaches, and motivational speakers to cultivate female leadership in health care. The next summit, held Dec. 12-13 in San Diego, will focus on influence, negotiation, transformation, and advocacy.
Ahead of the conference, RISE spoke with the headlining keynote speakers for an inside look at what they have planned.
Christie McMullen on elevating your influence
As an adult learning expert and author of Learning Can Stick and Make Work Fun, Christie McMullen, Ed.D., specializes in teaching professionals across industries how to make their interactions safe, logical, fun, and memorable to ensure they have a lasting impact.
“I help you make work fun, so people don’t quit,” said McMullen, noting the deeper meaning to the word ‘fun.’ “Fun means that you feel valued and appreciated, that you have a voice, and you’re contributing to the greater good. So, it’s not just happy hour or laughter in the breakroom kind of stuff.”
A key component to that safe, fun space is an increased awareness of diversity in the workplace, both diversity of thought and diversity of human rights, said McMullen. “We need to honor what people bring to the table instead of trying to get everybody to fit in a box.”
It’s something that can be intimidating for professionals. Self-doubt, imposter syndrome, and fear of vulnerability are interfering with professionals rising to their fullest potential. But that’s where McMullen comes in, helping teams build the psychological safety needed so they can voice their opinions without concern of being shut down. “We work to help everybody involved, the leaders and the employees, to understand what their superpowers are and how to best leverage them,” she explained.
To help make work fun, McMullen starts with her four-step AIM…Analyze, Improve, Move framework, which she’ll break down further in her keynote presentation. The framework focuses on making sure each workplace is:
- Safe: Your interactions encompass psychological safety, meaning everyone on the team knows they can ask questions and make mistakes without judgement.
- Logical: You have a plan that you stick to, and you have clear, open communication around the plan.
- Fun: Everyone on the team feels valued and appreciated. The environment fosters laughter and friendly interactions.
- Memorable: Rather than flooding people with information, you share it in ‘drips’ to make it easily memorable.
While she plans on sharing a variety of actionable strategies, her keynote will also be an interactive one, allowing attendees an opportunity to apply what they’ve learned alongside like-minded professionals.
“We’re going to work on seeing the bigger picture using this framework to figure out how to analyze, improve, and move in this space,” said McMullen. “I want to help everyone walk away with a replicable way to turn this into something they can use with their own teams.”
McMullen will deliver her keynote address, “Elevate Your Influence: Strategies for Impact and Consensus” at 9:10 a.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 12, the first day of the conference.
Katharine Manning on supporting yourself as you support others
The second day of the conference will feature a keynote address from Katharine Manning, author of The Empathetic Workplace.
Having started her career as a legal professional and advising U.S. attorneys in their work with crime victims, Manning witnessed first-hand the value in leading from a place of empathy and the power in providing active listening and acknowledgement when a person is going through a challenging time.
“I started to become aware of these things that were showing up in our cases again and again,” said Manning. "When people were going through victimization, everybody craved information, and it seemed, to me, to stem from a lack of control. And they also needed their privacy. They needed to know they could trust the people they were working with.
And then I started to see that these things were not just happening in our cases; it was happening with my colleagues, whether they were working on a hard case that brought up emotions, or they were getting divorced, or their parent was dying—they needed that active listening and acknowledgement. It made it clear how much these issues are affecting us at work all the time,” she said.
Manning’s keynote presentation will focus on the severe impact the COVID-19 pandemic has had and continues to have on health care professionals at all levels, causing trauma, burnout, and mental health struggles.
“What health care has been through the last few years is just staggering and appalling,” said Manning. “I think we’re definitely seeing the ramifications of that now in the turnover at all levels in health care and the levels of trauma.”
Using her expertise on implementing empathy in the workplace, she’ll share practical, tangible ways to support yourself as you support those around you. It’s about starting small at the micro level and working your way up to bigger, macro-level changes, said Manning.
From squeezing in a gratitude practice while brewing coffee to holding yourself accountable in boundary-setting, Manning will help attendees discover how they can change the trajectory of their life one degree at a time.
“I haven’t discovered some new key to burnout. These are things people know, but it’s about how we build these things into our daily lives so that we actually practice them,” she said.
Manning will deliver her keynote address, “Burnout and Resilience: Supporting Yourself as You Support Others” at 9:25 a.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 13, the second day of The RISE Women in Health Care Leadership Summit, which will be held Dec. 13-14 in San Diego. Click here to see the full agenda and list of speakers.