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Disch, speaking at AARP event

Through a wider lens

Joanne Disch, AARP’s new board chair, shares her thoughts about leadership.

by Leslie Flowers

Joanne Disch, RN, PhD, FAAN, got off to a bad start in her interview to become an AARP board member.

“I thought she was pushy and arrogant. I didn’t like her demeanor, and I didn’t like the way she answered questions,” recalls Charles Leven, AARP board chair emeritus and retired chief of operations for Saks Fifth Avenue. “Boy, was I wrong.”

Leven interviewed Disch for a board position at AARP, formerly the American Association of Retired Persons. Disch got the appointment, over more than 400 other candidates for six spots. How did she turn Leven’s first impression around?

“I acted like a nurse with an angry patient,” Disch says. “I approached him therapeutically to help him understand my role and how I could help.”

Leven says his first take on Disch was incorrect. “She is an absolutely wonderful human being—warm, smart, intelligent about everything she approaches,” says Leven, who is Disch’s mentor and friend.

Disch had another challenge in getting the AARP board position—she had absolutely no experience with AARP. “I’d been an AARP member and read the journal, but that was it,” she says. “I decided to make that an asset. I said to the nominating committee, ‘It could be an asset that I don’t have previous experience with AARP. All organizations benefit from the perspective of people on the outside, and I won’t be burdened by historical traditions.’”

Why AARP? Disch has been a board member for a number of nursing organizations. “In my 50s, my friends suggested I serve on AARP to be a voice that influences how our future unfolds,” she says.

Indeed, colleagues and friends say she has a special talent for getting people to see issues from a wider, holistic perspective—through what Disch calls her nursing lens.

The nursing perspective
“Nurses care for the whole being, and that translates into looking at the whole issue,” Disch says. To illustrate, she uses the example of a man recovering from a heart attack.

“The physician is interested in fixing the targeted injury. The nurse, on the other hand, is thinking about how the heart attack will affect the patient’s entire life—can he walk up a flight of stairs, go dancing, have sex with his wife?”

She illustrates nursing’s holistic approach by recalling a TV interview of a male nurse at a New York City hospital on Sept. 11, 2001. The recollection still chokes her up. “A male physician was interviewed first,” she relates. “He said he was frustrated because few patients were arriving, and he couldn’t help anyone. Then a male nurse was interviewed. He said, ‘I have patients. The families will be coming, and they’re the people we need to care for now.’”

Disch has developed her wide-angle nursing lens from the varied places she has lived and worked. Today, she is professor and director of the Katharine J. Densford International Center for Nursing Leadership at the University of Minnesota; board member of Allina Health System, Minnesota’s largest health care delivery network; and board chair of AARP.

Previously, she served as vice president for patient-family services at Fairview-University Medical Center in Minneapolis, clinical director and associate professor at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, and assistant chairperson of Rush University School of Nursing at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago.

Among professional organizations, she has served in leadership positions for the American Organization of Nurse Executives, American Academy of Nursing, American Association of Critical-Care Nurses and American Nurses Association.

Disch says her wide-ranging job locations and experiences broaden her leadership. “Living and working in extremely different parts of the country have taught me how to relate to all types of people,” she says. “I can bring a viewpoint to a board that goes beyond the financial model; it’s a relational, communicative, feminist and grounded viewpoint that has been shaped by my nursing career.”

Honor society a constant
Disch began her nursing career in high school as a nursing assistant at a Madison, Wis., hospital. Her house-painter father and homemaker mother made her feel anything she did was special and great, she says.

“Even in high school, I loved nursing—the work we were doing, the camaraderie of the team,” she recalls.

She was the first in her family to graduate from college—the University of Wisconsin School of Nursing. After college, she worked her way up the clinical ladder as a cardiovascular ICU nurse at University Hospitals in Madison, then moved to Birmingham, Ala., to get her master’s degree in cardiovascular nursing at the University of Alabama (UAB).

Disch was turned down by the first graduate school she applied to and was accepted on probation by UAB.

“Let’s just say I took full advantage of the social opportunities offered at Wisconsin as an undergraduate,” she says, laughing.

While at the University of Alabama in the mid-1970s, Disch began her long-term membership with the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International. “I was so proud to progress from academic probation to induction into Sigma Theta Tau,” she says. “It was an affirmation of my commitment to the profession.”

Over many years and moves, one constant for Disch has been her involvement in the honor society. “Sigma Theta Tau has been a steady, professional connection throughout my career,” she says. “I’ve been an active member in every chapter where I’ve gone to school or worked.”

In 2009, the University of Minnesota School of Nursing and Zeta Chapter, the honor society’s U of M affiliate, will co-celebrate significant milestones—the 100th anniversary of the nursing school and the 75th anniversary of the chapter.

“The honor society is a powerful source of professional enrichment,” says Disch, who received the honor society’s Dorothy Garrigus Adams Award for Excellence in Fostering Professional Standards. “The organization is stable and foundational, yet branches out and takes nontraditional approaches to research and continuing education.”

Disch and Daniel J. Pesut, PhD, APRN, BC, FAAN, associate dean for graduate programs at Indiana University School of Nursing and immediate past president of the honor society, were doctoral students and fellow members of Rho Chapter at the University of Michigan in the 1980s. He has high regard for the strengths his friend and former colleague brings to nursing and the boardroom.

“Joanne actively engages people with her quick wit and personality,” he says. “I especially admire her ability to span boundaries. Bringing nursing knowledge, voice and visibility to an organization like AARP is a tremendous gift to AARP and the nursing profession. She role models excellence in leadership.”

Every nurse must lead
Disch honed her leadership skills in the school of trial and error over her nearly 40-year nursing career. “I have painful examples of how I was not effective early on in my career, but I kept getting better.”

She tells nursing undergraduates they all must be leaders—some with a small “l,” others with a big “L.”

“Leadership is influencing others to take action to meet specific goals,” she teaches. “To be an effective leader, you need a vision and the ability to connect with people—that’s what we nurses do. Every nurse has the capacity and responsibility to convey a preferred course of action to patients, colleagues and physicians.”

Recent Minnesota graduate Tom Bofferding, RN, BSN, mentored by Disch while he served during nursing school as president of the Nursing College Board, is a leader—small “l”—on his way to a big “L.”

“Joanne was always available to offer words of advice or suggest different conferences or organizations I could investigate to further my leadership abilities,” Bofferding says. “She presented such a professional attitude every day I interacted with her. My thanks will never be enough. What will show my appreciation, however, is an outstanding leadership career.”

The big “L” leaders—nursing administrators, board members, deans and executives—comprise many of Disch’s closest friends and mentors.

“We have phenomenal leaders among us with a big ‘L,’” she says. “One of the reasons I love to travel around the country for my board work is to see my nursing friends. I am so blessed to sit with colleagues who are such good thinkers and can bat around and implement important ideas.”

Linda Cronenwett, RN, PhD, FAAN, dean of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Nursing, is one of those friends. “Joanne and I shared a nursing and politics assignment as doctoral students, and it’s been nursing and politics together ever since,” Cronenwett says. “She’s a gift to nursing, patients and to her family and friends. I live in awe of her energy, her sense of humor, her insights about the important things in life and her commitment to leadership.”

At the University of Minnesota in 2004, Disch convened nursing leaders from around the country in a Summit of Sages to share their wisdom. Participants included Claire Fagin, RN, PhD, FAAN, and Vernice Ferguson, MA, FAAN, FRCN, University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing; Gretta Styles, RN, EdD, late dean emerita, and Patricia Benner, RN, PhD, FAAN, professor and Thelma Shobe Endowed Chair in Ethics and Spirituality, University of California, San Francisco School of Nursing; Angela Barron McBride, RN, PhD, FAAN, university dean emerita, Indiana University School of Nursing; and Marie Manthey, MNA, FAAN, FRCN, president emeritus, Creative Health Care Management. The next Summit of Sages in 2007 will focus on social justice.

Disch’s mentors include Claire Fagin, who taught her to serve on a board not as “the nurse,” but with her nursing lens. Among many pieces of sage advice, Fagin counseled that nurses serving on boards should make comments at board meetings about nursing only after making comments about other issues. Another piece of advice: At fund-raising events, a nurse leader’s job is to connect with new people, not old friends.

One person Disch wishes she had met is Katharine J. Densford, RN, for whom the University of Minnesota School of Nursing building and the leadership center Disch directs are named.

“Meeting colleagues, students and friends of ‘KJ’ puts me in awe of this phenomenal nursing leader and advocate for innovation and social justice,” Disch says. “She tackled the issues of her time with a blend of creativity, data, collaboration and tenacity. We could certainly use her gifts today.”

It is this blend—compassion combined with evidence-based decision-making—that Disch believes distinguishes nursing from other professions and creates a waiting list at nursing schools around the country.

“We have people applying to us from so many different professions,” she says. “I feel affirmed every day that we are in the very best field. It’s a good life we nurses have carved out for ourselves. I’d choose it again tomorrow.” RNL

Leslie Flowers is a public relations specialist for the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International.