Thank you, Dr. Shutter, Dr. Sorra, nice to follow you, Dr. Bennett, I'm going to set you up. So, good afternoon, everyone. I'm from the South, or my family's from the South, so I have to wait until you say something. Good afternoon. There we go. It's called call and response. That's good. All right. Welcome. So, I'm going to talk about broadening local connections. I have a few key takeaways for you, but the one big, big takeaway, I think, from the whole session is network. How many of you like networking? Okay. How many of you hate networking? Oh, good. All right. Great. I think I've got something for both of you. So, I'm based at the University of Pennsylvania. I'm also the vice president of the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation. I am telling you about myself because I think it's useful for you to hear who is talking to you so that you can kind of figure out what perspective they have on the world. So, I'm a practicing physician. Most of my clinical time is spent in a trauma surgery ICU, but I also practice operative anesthesia. I'm an implementation scientist who focuses on patient safety and now increasingly on equity. I direct an implementation science center, and I'm a vice chair of inclusion, diversity, and equity, and then I serve on a couple of boards. So, the perspective I bring about talking to folks and building coalitions, both locally and externally, and Dr. Bennett's going to cover external, is informed by these perspectives. I have a lot of disclosures. We actually all have disclosures, and this is much more extensive than I would normally plan, but I just put it there to highlight that we all have relationships. I have research funding. I am on a few editorial boards, SCCM societies, and then some boards I told you about, and then I have a couple of side hustles I'm happy to tell you about, so, yeah. So, I'm primarily a scientist. My lab uses implementation science to improve patient care, so we're concerned with how to make sure that we don't harm patients in the process of providing care to them. You will see that my lab is big. So, in any given time, it's three to 15 people. Right now, it's about 10 folks in the lab, a mix of undergraduate students, graduate students, professional students, postdocs. I've mentored nurses. I've mentored physicians. I've mentored all sorts of other folks as well, because it takes a lot of perspectives to do the kind of work that we do. I collaborate widely. I am an inveterate networker, so I'm a big booster for networking. I can't do the work that I do, and I would argue that none of you can do the work that you do without help from a lot of people, so every time I get a chance to talk about the people I work with, I do, because it takes a lot of us to do the kind of work that we do. So, let's talk briefly about networking. I'm going to focus on local, because that's what I'm supposed to do, but I just want to highlight that there are lots of reasons that you want to build up networks and teams. There are reasons for external networking, and I'll leave that to Dr. Bennett, but I want to focus primarily on building up local coalitions, local teams, local networks. Why does this matter? So, you can be a little Machiavellian about it. You can be a little bit transactional about it. If you are a faculty member and you want to get promoted, you will have to depend on other people to advocate for you. Those people need to know who you are and what you're about, so you need to build networks just to be advanced within the local institution. If you want to take on a leadership position, again, the people that are making those decisions are going to have to know about you, what skills you bring to the table, what your capabilities are, what your weaknesses are, and networking helps you with that. It actually helps you achieve organizational change, so even if you don't aspire to leadership and you just want to get things done, and those of us who work in the intensive care unit want to get things done, whether it's for a particular patient or you're trying to advance a quality initiative, if you're trying to change behavior, then you need to be able to build teams who are reliable and trustworthy, who have influence, who can help you affect that change. And then if you want to do research, especially in critical care, you're going to need teams and networks as well. So lots of reasons, even for those of you that don't like networking, I hope I can convince you that at least it's something you ought to know how to do. So three key takeaways for you, because you're eating, you're not taking notes, people can only remember three to seven things, so I'm just going to give you three things, three takeaways for me. Number one is building on what Dr. Tesoro said, figure out who you are, and it's really important because the types of networks that you build depend on what you're trying to do. And sometimes we don't serve ourselves or our trainees when we say, oh, you need a this, a this, a that, you need this kind of mentor, this kind of sponsor, go talk to this person. But if they give you that advice without understanding what you're trying to achieve, what drives you, what kind of career you're trying to build, then the advice may not serve you. So I'd say the very first thing you need to figure out is who you are. The second thing is to assemble a personal board of directors, and I'll walk you through what that means. And then the third is to live the SCCM way. You know, we're a multi-professional society. You should have a network and a team of folks that are multi-professional, again, especially if you're in critical care, because we know how important everyone is to patient care, to outcomes, and to our ability to thrive as professionals. So the first question is, who are you? Figure yourself out. So you can be an administrator, you can be an advocate, you can be a clinician or an improver or a researcher. You might hold multiple of these identities. But the way that you get to success with these particular identities is building up a team or a network. And so depending on what your objective is, your network may look very different. So I work with folks who are primarily administrators. So their network needs to be other administrators, right? They need to know exactly what the org chart looks like. They need to know who the people whose behavior they're trying to change are reporting to, right? So I teach a course on implementation science. And one of the things we talk about is organizational power and organizational hierarchies. And most health care organizations are highly matrixed, meaning that lots of people report, they report up, they report down, they report across the organizational hierarchy. If you were to ask me who my boss is, I would tell you, on the one hand, my boss is my chair and the dean of the School of Medicine because I'm a physician faculty member. But on the other hand, my boss is the CEO of the hospital because I'm a practicing physician. So if you're an administrator trying to change my behavior, you need to understand what's driving my behavior. And so your network as an administrator is going to consist of people across that matrix. And so you need to be strategic about who knows you, who you know, who you reach out to so that when you do try to affect that change, you can do it in a meaningful way. On the other hand, if you're a researcher, you might need to have a nurse on board. If you're a physician, you might need a respiratory therapist, you might need a pharmacist if you're trying to do a clinical study in the ICU because you want to make sure that you have all of those perspectives at the table. So it's really key to figure out what you're about, what you're trying to do, and then use that to inform your networking efforts and your team building efforts. I will note that this should change over time, right? None of us are static. Our objectives will change over time, our careers will change over time. And so as Dr. Tesoro mentioned, it's useful to revisit that. What you are about now is going to change in three to five years, might change tomorrow, who knows. But it's useful to have a practice of going back and revisiting. I try to do it about once a quarter. Once a year is probably the least often I would recommend that you do it, but to really think about where you're going, what you want to do. The second concept I want you to take away is the personal board of directors. So what is this? You can think of it as your village, right? It takes a village to raise a successful whatever it is you want to be. This is your village. It's just an idea. So they're not actually going to meet in the same room. So don't worry about that. You don't have to coordinate a massive meeting. But the idea of a personal board of directors is that it's a sounding board for you. It's a group of people that you can tap to help you with specific issues. And so I'll walk you through what that might look like. These are the people that might be on your personal board of directors. So, you know, maybe there's an expert, someone who's the expert in the thing that you want to do. So if I'm an implementation scientist, I want another more senior implementation scientist on my board. The role model is someone who you want to be. So who do you talk to that has a career like what you want to achieve or maybe close to what you want to achieve? A cheerleader. I'm not going to walk through all of them. I'm just going to show a couple or talk about a couple. But the cheerleader is the person who is always your booster, right? No matter how bad things are, no matter how many times your grant gets rejected or your paper gets rejected, they're the ones that are like, this is great. This is awesome. You definitely need one of those, probably a couple of those. And then I'll point out a couple others. The elder and the youngster. So we right now work in workplaces where there are, depending on where you are, five generations in the workplace. There is a lot to learn from folks that are very much older than you are. And there's a lot to learn from folks that are much younger than you are. So as you think about your personal board of directors and the people that you tap for counsel, for advice, think about having people across that age spectrum because they will give you very different advice. And then I love the idea of having people from a previous life to keep you kind of on track and keep you oriented to ask you those questions about, well, do you really want to do that thing? And the longer and the tooth you get, the more opportunities you have and you may decide to do something because it sounds good. And those people from a previous life can sometimes reorient you and say, yeah, that sounds good, but do you actually want to do that thing? And sometimes the answer is yes and sometimes the answer is, nah, I want to want to do that thing. And that's a very different situation. So I have a big personal board of directors. You don't have to tell people that they're on your personal board of directors, it might freak them out a little bit, but you can, in your mind, like I have a document, a master document where I keep all of my things. And so I have a list of my personal board of directors. And so older, younger, different discipline, there's lots of different folks that I reach out to, that I think of, and that I go to when I need help with something. So think about who your family, your board is. And then the third point is to live the SECM way. I think that SECM got it right, being deliberately a multi-professional society in everything that we do, each profession adds value, no matter what your perspective is. What I would encourage you to do is first develop an understanding of what the different professions do. We have all become super specialized. Our training has become more defined. And if you are not, so I'm a physician, right? What do I know about how nurses train? Not much, unless I actually go out and seek that information. Same for pharmacists, respiratory therapists, physical therapists. Take some time to understand what the other members of the team do. And then once you have that understanding, build up a network that includes people from those different professions, because they will help you in all of the different roles that you have. So I would say seek out friends and mentors that come from those different professional backgrounds. So for parting thoughts, I'm sorry, you have to build a network. I mean, you don't have to, but you really ought to. It's really important. But if you're here, you probably know that already. So you know you have to work with people. I will tell you that working with people is useful because it amplifies your impact and it gets you to where you want to get faster. So you can do it alone, maybe. It'll be much more effective and much more efficient if you work with folks. And then there's a new concept that's coming out sort of in business circles called an equity pause, which is this concept that at the beginning of a meeting, you stop and you think, well, who is not here? Whose perspective is not represented? And I would say as you consider your career, think about what perspectives you have and what perspectives you're missing. And if you're missing a key perspective, then go out and seek it. Go talk to somebody. Go find that perspective. A little bit of advice for introverts and ambiverts. Extroverts probably don't need this advice. You like talking to people. I think of myself as an ambivert. It's not that big a deal to network. So you can find ways to break down those walls to make it a little bit easier. Just be curious about folks. My favorite question there at the bottom is to ask people what they're most excited about these days. If I'm sitting next to someone I've never met before, I can ask anyone that question. And sometimes they'll say something professional, and sometimes they'll say, I got a new dog. And I'm like, okay, great. Let's talk about your dog. But it always starts a conversation. And so that's my favorite go-to. Feel free to steal it. I would also say try to figure out how to remember people. It's very easy for some people. It's very difficult for others. There are lots of tricks that you can look at. You can Google this online, whether it's tricks to remember names or remember faces. But it helps you quite a lot if once you meet someone and then you meet them again, you can say, ah, yes, I remember you. Or you can say, you look really familiar. Have we met? And that's okay. It doesn't tell you. So that's it. Looking forward to the discussion. Thank you, everybody.

networking

building local connections

advancing within an institution

leadership positions

conducting research