Cartoon – Communication Clarity
Tag Archives: Communication
Cartoon – Communication Today
Cartoon – Conditioned Responses
THREE BASIC TRUTHS ABOUT PEOPLE THAT BUSY LEADERS SHOULD NOT IGNORE
Three Basic Truths About People That Busy Leaders Should Not Ignore
Lately, I’ve been working with a company that’s about to make a big leap. They have a potentially world-changing product and are on the cusp of scaling up in a big way. It’s very exciting stuff.
Everyone from the CEO on down is super busy. There is a lot of work to do both internally and externally. With all the demands, time and attention is a scarcer resource than money.
That’s true for many of the leaders I work with. It can be really exciting when you’re running at a hundred miles per hour to get big things done. The challenge is that, in that kind of situation, it’s easy to lose sight of some basic truths about people that you just intuitively get when you’re not so absorbed by everything else you have to do.
Here, then, are three basic truths about people that busy leaders should not ignore:
People care about where you are and what you’re doing. – When you’re running hard, you’re likely to be in a lot of meetings and, possibly, on a lot of airplanes. You’re getting stuff done but it can feel to your team like you’re missing in action. Keep doing what you need to do but let them know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Set the context and tell the story. Nature abhors a vacuum. In the absence of solid information, people make stuff up. That’s hardly ever helpful. Avoid that by letting your people know where you are, what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
People want predictability. – To do their best work, most people need some amount of predictability. They need to know what’s expected of them, what others are working on and how it all hangs together. This is especially true for leadership teams. They need an operating rhythm that ensures that they can stay well informed and in sync with each other. That requires regular and consistent communications. It can be hard to stick with the rhythm of that when you’re running flat out, but it needs to be a priority. Without the predictability of that kind of communication, your team will likely lose their way.
People will hardly ever speak up if you ask, “Are there any questions?” – How many times have you been in a town hall meeting (or, worse, leading one) when, after all the presentations, someone asks, “Are there any questions?” and the response is crickets. That’s because most people are never going to step up and ask the first question in front of a room. Again, that’s especially true when there is a lot going on and a lot of change. If you really want to know what people think (and you should), don’t ask, “Are there any questions?” Instead, ask “What are we missing?” or “What’s going on that we need to pay more attention to?” If you really want to grease the skids, pose one of those questions and then give people ten minutes to talk about it in small groups and then ask for some spokespeople from each group. You’ll almost certainly get better information that way.
So, be busy and get big stuff done. Just don’t ignore the basic truths about what people need while you’re doing it. Your team will be a lot more engaged and productive if you tend to what they need.
The Biggest Communication Problem Today
Importance of Being Understood
Cartoon – How do we say “Unmitigated Disaster”
Leaders can’t write a memo to change culture
When Chris Van Gorder joined San Diego-based Scripps Health as COO in 1999, the health system had 55 days cash on hand, and there was no trust between the administration and clinical staff.
His first day on the job, Mr. Van Gorder attended a meeting at Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla (Calif.) with another Scripps executive to resolve a miscommunication surrounding contract renegotiations. Rising tensions between physicians and administrators boiled over at the meeting, which cumulated with the Scripps executive quitting his job on the spot so he could sue the hospital’s chief of staff for slander.
“The physician sitting next to me tapped my shoulder and said, ‘Welcome to Scripps, you’re on,'” says Mr. Van Gorder. “That was the end of my first day.”
Flash forward 18 years and Mr. Van Gorder — promoted to CEO six months after joining Scripps — now runs a $3.1 billion health system that’s been named to Fortune’s top 100 employers in the country 10 years in a row.
Mr. Van Gorder discussed Scripps’ transformation — and the leadership strategies he used to drive these improvements — at the Becker’s Hospital Review 8th Annual Meeting in Chicago.
Earn employees’ trust
Shortly after he took over the CEO role, Mr. Van Gorder met with every board member one-on-one.
“Everyone wanted me to fix everything all at once,” he says. “But I knew I needed to prioritize and first find a way to work with our physicians.”
Mr. Van Gorder says it’s crucial for leaders to ensure proper communication with employees to establish trust and set the groundwork for a culture change. To mend relationships with Scripps’ physicians, he called a meeting with the health system’s elected physician leaders entire to acknowledge the lack of transparency between administrators and staff.
“They had all these demands and expectations they wanted us to meet,” he says. “But they didn’t know we were on the verge of bankruptcy.”
Mr. Van Gorder developed a physician advisory body called the “Physician Leadership Cabinet” to serve as a liaison between the clinical and administrative teams and weigh in on decision-making. Giving physicians more responsibility to manage the health system’s limited resources helped them understand the institution’s financial constraints, thus breaking down the communication wall between them and leadership.
“It’s really easy to say, ‘I want, I want, I want’ when you’re on the outside,” says Mr. Van Gorder. “But when you’re on the inside, you realize how difficult it is to manage scarce resources.”
The Physician Leadership Cabinet has proven successful. Health system leadership has accepted every recommendation from the board in the last 18 years, and every vote except one has been unanimous, according to Mr. Van Gorder.
Drive culture change from the middle up
Once leaders earn staff members’ trust, they should shift their attention to changing the organization’s culture, says Mr. Van Gorder. He believes managers have the most influence on culture, as they manage a majority of the organization’s employees.
“Leaders can’t write a memo to change culture,” he says. “But our frontline employees and middle management can influence culture.”
To develop an umbrella culture for the organization from the middle, Mr. Van Gorder launched the Scripps Leadership Academy — a year-long behind-the-scenes program for managers at the health system. Every program starts with a two-hour Q&A session where Scripps executives talk about how they got to where they are today.
“I was a cop. I worked at Arby’s,” says Mr. Van Gorder. “Most people look at executives and just see the suits. But as soon as you remove the veil of the title away from the individual, they become a human being.”
The leadership academy strives to show managers how the organization operates and how decisions are made. Each graduating class also works on a change project to improve a specific aspect of the organization. After the academy ends, Mr. Van Gorder challenges the managers — his “agents of culture change” — to take what they learned and demand more from the people they work with.
Maintain regular communication
Leaders must maintain a positive relationship with staff members to sustain the improvements in trust and culture, says Mr. Van Gorder.
He sends out a daily newsletter to Scripps managers and employees who request it, highlighting major news in the healthcare industry, along with organization updates and photos.
“Even if they just read the titles, they’ll start to understand the external factors impacting our organization,” Mr. Van Gorder says. “The more they understand this, the more they’ll accept the changes we’re trying to make in our organization. They’ll see it’s not something forced on them from management — it stems from the changes in healthcare.”
As email is the one way he can connect with Scripps’ 15,000 employees, Mr. Van Gorder freely invites employees and physicians to reach out to him directly if they are not getting the support they need to do their jobs, or even if they want to say hello. He responds the same day to every email he receives — a feat he sees as a basic level of respect.
“One of our values is respect,” he says. “If I’m not responsive to them, I’m not being very respectful.”
Recipe for Successful Health System M&A: Ensure Focus on Execution of Transaction Does Not Undermine Key Long-Term Strategic Imperatives
The evolving U.S. healthcare landscape, perhaps more now than ever before, requires that health system executives possess varied and deep skill sets. Not only must executives navigate the changing political and macroeconomic landscape, including the repeal-and-replace uncertainty, but in execution of their well-intentioned strategic transactions, health system leaders must remain focused on the original strategic imperatives and objectives to help ensure long-term, sustainable success. Of 140 surveyed participants, 61% believe their organization’s merger, acquisition or partnership activity will increase within the next three years.
Commonly, a decision is made to move forward on an appropriate strategic transaction and then senior leadership assigns a multidisciplinary deal team to consummate such. The majority (74%) of surveyed participants cite both financial/operational and clinical/care delivery equally as the primary objective when deciding to transact. Prior to commencement, successful healthcare organizations will have gone through a lengthy strategic planning process, developed a list of strategic imperatives and had such approved by their board of trustees. Some of these strategic imperatives may include: the Triple Aim, relevance/attractiveness with employers and payers, alignment of incentives, ability to manage the resulting organization as a system versus a loose federation, and the stickiness and sustainability of the resulting system.
A breakdown in the deal consummation process that results in the strategic imperatives not maintaining primacy but being subordinated or ignored may result in a nice press release or closing ceremony but when measured by the test of time, the transaction may not deliver expected and necessary sustaining strategic benefits. This is exacerbated in complex M&A transactions and strategic partnerships. Such complex transactions cannot be managed in a manner similar to important but more routine operational or capital initiatives (e.g., construction of a new bed tower or implementation of a staff reduction initiative) facing healthcare organizations. Senior leadership must help ensure that the strategic benefits of a transaction do not become deemphasized due to deal fatigue, completion of task bias, arbitrary deadlines, and other pressures that work against the deal team obtaining optimal outcomes.
Healthcare leaders must help ensure that the strategic imperatives are effective guardrails of the deal team’s efforts and not lost in the difficult and dynamic transaction negotiation and consummation process. A successful approach focuses less on arbitrary timelines or goals and embraces an accountability process that monitors the deal progress and documentation to help ensure a true north heading. Effective leaders must remain laser-focused on the strategic imperatives and not allow completion and execution of the deal to subordinate the foundation of the original strategic mandate.
Cartoon – Leadership Meeting
HENRY KOTULA 