MHA 560 Week 2 Personal Legacy and Mentorship Example

A Legacy Measured in People: How a Retiring Chief Executive Uses Mentoring and Sponsorship to Leave Leaders Behind

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

MHA/560: Creating a Sustainable Legacy: Healthy Communities

Week 2 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The hospital, its leaders, the mentees and the program are composites written for a model paper; research findings come from the sources cited.

Thirty years ago, a nurse executive at a Milwaukee hospital told a young charge nurse that she should apply to be a nurse manager, then called the hiring director to recommend her. That charge nurse now runs the composite north side hospital described earlier, three years from retirement. Reflecting on her board chair's question about what she wanted to leave behind, she realized that the most important thing anyone had done for her career was a single phone call. This paper examines what that means for her own legacy.

Legacy Defined

A leader's legacy is what continues because of her after she leaves. Buildings and programs can be changed by successors. People she developed, systems she built and relationships she strengthened continue to shape the organization. The chief executive defined her legacy as leaders ready to carry the hospital forward.

Three Different Relationships

She distinguished three ways leaders develop others. Mentoring is an ongoing relationship of advice, support and guidance. Sponsorship uses a leader's influence and networks to open specific opportunities for someone, such as recommending them for a role. Coaching is structured development focused on specific skills or goals, often by a trained professional. Each has a place.

What the Research Says About Mentoring

Mentoring is widely valued, but the evidence is less strong than its reputation. A systematic review of mentoring in academic medicine found that people credited mentors with shaping their growth, their career decisions and how much they published, but that most studies were cross-sectional self-report surveys and the evidence supporting mentoring's perceived importance was not strong. Access was patchy too: most medical students lacked a mentor, faculty in some specialties almost never had one and women reported more trouble finding mentors than men did (Sambunjak et al., 2006).

Reading the Evidence Honestly

The chief executive noted two lessons. First, mentoring should be designed and evaluated rather than assumed to work. Second, mentoring is unevenly available, which means informal mentoring can reinforce existing patterns of who advances.

What Sponsorship Adds

Her own career turned on sponsorship, not only mentoring. Interviews with sponsors and protégés in academic medicine found that sponsorship is distinct from mentorship, episodic and focused on specific opportunities; that effective sponsors are well-connected talent scouts who promote protégés with unequivocal support; that sponsorship is critical to advancing to high-level leadership roles; and that women are perceived as less likely to seek sponsorship (Ayyala et al., 2019). A mentor gives advice about the door; a sponsor opens it.

Who Gets Sponsored

The chief executive reviewed who had been promoted into director and executive roles at the hospital over ten years. Most had been recommended informally by senior leaders, and they were less diverse than the hospital's managers. Informal sponsorship had favored people who resembled current leaders.

What Structured Development Achieves

Structured programs can produce more reliable results. In one hospital's program for grooming future nurse managers, graduates rated their own leadership skills markedly higher afterward; twelve months on, not one had left the organization, and nearly three quarters already held leadership posts (Titzer et al., 2014).

Her Reflection as a Mentee

Looking back, she recognized that her sponsor had taken a risk by recommending an untested charge nurse, and that the sponsor had followed up with advice during her difficult first year as a manager. The sponsorship opened the door; the mentoring helped her stay.

Her Reflection as a Mentor

She also recognized that her own mentoring had been informal and uneven. She had mentored people who approached her, most of them from clinical and operational backgrounds similar to hers, and rarely sought out people who did not.

What Mentees Need at Different Stages

The chief executive recognized that emerging leaders need different things at different points. A new manager needs practical advice on staffing, budgets and difficult conversations. A director needs help seeing the whole organization and managing peers. A potential chief executive needs exposure to the board, community leaders and the financial strategy of the institution. Her mentoring would adapt to each stage rather than follow a single script.

Mentoring Is Reciprocal

She also expected to learn. Younger leaders understood digital tools, social media and the expectations of newer staff better than she did, and a mentee from finance could teach her things about the hospital's revenue cycle she had never fully understood. Two-way mentoring keeps experienced leaders current.

Time as the Real Cost

Mentoring takes time a chief executive rarely has. She blocked two hours every other week on her calendar for mentoring and protected them as she would a board meeting, knowing that without scheduled time, good intentions would fade.

Commitment One: Mentor Four Leaders

For her remaining three years, she will mentor four emerging leaders, chosen through an open process, meeting monthly with each and focusing on their goals rather than hers.

Commitment Two: Sponsor Two Successors

She will actively sponsor two internal candidates who could succeed her, one from nursing and one from finance or operations, by giving them visible assignments, introducing them to board members and community leaders and recommending them for opportunities.

Commitment Three: Build a Mentoring Program

Her most lasting contribution may be a structure: a hospital-wide mentoring program for managers and emerging leaders, with trained mentors, matching by goals, a defined length and evaluation. The program will continue after she leaves.

Designing for Equity

The program will match mentors and mentees across departments and backgrounds, invite applications from all managers and track participation and promotions by gender, race and ethnicity. Senior leaders will be expected to sponsor at least one person outside their own professional background each year.

Coaching Where It Fits

For her two potential successors, she will also fund an executive coach, since coaching focuses on specific skills such as board relations and financial strategy that mentoring may not address.

Measuring the Legacy

Measures include the number of people mentored and sponsored, promotions of mentees, retention of emerging leaders, diversity of the leadership pipeline and, eventually, whether an internal candidate is ready to succeed her.

Preparing the Board

Sponsorship of successors requires the board's understanding. The chief executive discussed her plan with the board chair, who agreed that the board would meet both internal candidates in structured settings over the next two years and that any eventual search would consider them alongside external candidates on equal terms.

Asking for Feedback

She asked her mentees to tell her each year whether the mentoring was useful and what should change, applying to herself the evaluation that the research suggests mentoring needs.

Conclusion

A single phone call shaped the chief executive's career, and it shaped her definition of legacy: leaders ready to carry the hospital forward. Research shows mentoring is valued but unevenly available and weakly evidenced, sponsorship is critical for reaching senior roles and structured programs produce measurable results. Four mentees, two sponsored successors and a mentoring program built to last are the legacy she chose.

References

Ayyala, M. S., Skarupski, K., Bodurtha, J. N., González-Fernández, M., Ishii, L. E., Fivush, B., & Levine, R. B. (2019). Mentorship is not enough: Exploring sponsorship and its role in career advancement in academic medicine. Academic Medicine, 94(1), 94-100. https://doi.org/10.1097/ACM.0000000000002398

Sambunjak, D., Straus, S. E., & Marušić, A. (2006). Mentoring in academic medicine: A systematic review. JAMA, 296(9), 1103-1115. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.296.9.1103

Titzer, J. L., Shirey, M. R., & Hauck, S. (2014). A nurse manager succession planning model with associated empirical outcomes. The Journal of Nursing Administration, 44(1), 37-46. https://doi.org/10.1097/NNA.0000000000000019