A 5-part series celebrating nurse leaders who have claimed their place as a strategic partner in their organization's leadership.
Editor’s note: Hospitals and health systems have seen a steady evolution of chief nursing officers taking a seat at the executive strategy table, guiding and participating in operations and policies. HealthLeaders is featuring five of those nurse executives to discuss their experience as a strategic partner in their organization’s leadership.
Part 2 of a 5-part series.
Carolyn Booker, DNP, RN, NEA-BC, chief nursing officer of Northside Hospital Forsyth, in Cumming, Georgia, created a culture change within the Northside Hospital system when she developed The Kindness Initiative, which has reached into all of Northside’s campuses.
Booker hasn’t always wielded such influence. She became a nurse leader more than two decades ago, at about the same time nurse leaders were first getting invited to the executive table. For those pioneering nurse leaders, the learning curve was steep.
Booker spoke to HealthLeaders about her journey to the C-suite.
This transcript has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Carolyn Booker, CNO, Northside Hospital Forsyth / Photo courtesy of Northside Hospital
HealthLeaders: When did you first become part of a hospital's operational leadership team, and what was that experience like for you?
Carolyn Booker: I’ve been a nurse 42 years this year, with 34 of them in nursing leadership, and 21 of those years with Northside Hospital Forsyth. Before Northside, I was with another healthcare system and that was in more of the earlier days of nursing leaders being a part of operations. When I graduated from nursing school, nurse leaders were more clinically inclined and by the time I became a nurse leader, it was just at the beginning of nurse leaders being incorporated into the operational aspect. And for me at that time, it was trial by fire.
I was basically promoted to become a nurse manager based on my clinical acumen because I did not have formalized leadership training. I did not know what I did not know, and therefore I had a tremendous number of very painful experiences that took me from being an individual who did not know to one who “got it,” but typically in those years, the experiences were ones that you were dipped into the pool of fire, and you learned through your mistakes.
When I became a leader with Northside, that was absolutely a much better experience. By that time, I’d had formalized leadership training by returning to school and getting more education and got to be part of an organization that is very forward thinking. That experience has been phenomenal.
HL: Nursing schools are adapting their curriculum to prepare nurse leaders to lead organizationally. But it hasn’t always been that way. How did you accumulate the skills to step into an operational leadership role?
Booker: Northside provides a level of education prior to our budgeting processes, prior to any type of innovative computer systems—any of the systems that we add, we are all receiving education on those at the local level. You also gain a level of perspective and knowledge through networking with colleagues.
And then, Northside has been a huge part of my formalized education because the organization offers, as a part of our benefit, tuition reimbursement so, since I've been a part of this organization, I've returned to the university setting to achieve a master's degree and a doctorate in executive nursing administration. I'm also certified as a nurse executive as well. There’s been a phenomenal level of investment that organizations—definitely Northside—have put into nurse leaders to ensure that we are all able to operate at the top of our ability.
HL: What do you as a CNO uniquely bring to your organization's leadership team?
Booker: I try to bring the concept of experience and serve as a champion for that as it relates to the patients’ experience, but also to the staff’s experience here at the hospital. Every hospital has bricks and mortar, but what differentiates an organization, really and truly, is the people.
So, from the perspective of being a nurse, and coming from that caring component, I definitely bring to the C-suite that focus on ensuring that we keep our fingers on the pulse of how people experience working in our organization, and then how our patients and families experienced the receipt of care.
HL: Nurses tend to be creative and innovative. How has this served you as an operational leader?
Booker: Well, I've got to hit you with some kindness now. That started as just a heartfelt desire—and it still is—to change culture within an organization and I have been given a phenomenal amount of support. I shared with you in our last conversation that this initiative around kindness started as a grassroots effort here at the Northside Forsyth campus. However, it is now infused throughout our system.
I am on a kindness-through-communications committee, and we do these 30-minute power meetings weekly, where we talk about implementing all sorts of ideas to make kindness the norm within the organization, and I have to tell you about something that happened just yesterday.
I was talking to the chief operating officer (COO) and she had just spoken at our auxiliary volunteer Appreciation Week luncheon. After the meeting, as she was preparing to leave, she was stopped by one of the volunteers who was a new volunteer with us and wanted to share some of her story.
Her husband had been a patient in our critical care unit about 15 years ago where he had lived for 12 days, and she shared some of her experiences during that time. Then she asked, “Tell me, who started the initiative around kindness?” and the COO shared our journey with the Kindness Initiative.
She told the COO that she had recently been a patient in the hospital and had also come back as an outpatient for several other levels of treatment and she felt that the culture within the organization had changed dramatically. And she could see how the imperative around being kind had just changed, for her, everything and as a result of that, she decided to become a volunteer to be able to share in that.
I was just blown away. That just happened yesterday. So, to me, creativity and innovation are sometimes those things that are tangible—that you can touch and feel—and sometimes they are the things that are just life-changing, but that you can't touch and feel. They're the intangibles.
HL: How does your health system prepare CNOs to be strategic partners within their own organization’s leadership team?
Booker: Northside does succession planning, so they are always looking for the next nursing leaders in our hospitals—folks who really want to make a difference. There’s the promotion of academic completion in going back to school and taking courses that can assist leaders in honing that leadership muscle.
We also have formalized leadership training to help us to grow in our knowledge and skills. These leadership training programs are based on structured education. We also have assigned preceptors and mentors. One of the things that works across our system is that we are truly interdisciplinary. There's a phenomenal amount of collaboration, and then there's also a level of inclusiveness that is very, very refreshing.
“I definitely bring to the C-suite that focus on ensuring that we keep our fingers on the pulse of how people experience working in our organization, and then how our patients and families experienced the receipt of care.”
— Carolyn Booker, DNP, RN, NEA-BC, chief nursing officer, Northside Hospital Forsyth
Carol Davis is the Nursing Editor at HealthLeaders, an HCPro brand.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
In Carolyn Booker’s early career at a previous health system, leadership positions did not come with leadership training.
After joining Northside Hospital Forsyth, she obtained several advanced degrees.
Northside offers formalized leadership training to emerging leaders.