Tag Archives: Leadership

The Six Letter Word Healthcare Solutions Providers are Coveting & How to Get It

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If you’re like most people, you’re looking ahead to the New Year and thinking about what you would like to accomplish. With innovation being on the brink in healthcare the last several years, one thing has surely taken place: restricted access to the right people in order to talk about your solution.
It may sound very simple on the surface; however, navigating the murky waters of healthcare successfully towards gaining access to the decision maker is difficult. And if it’s your goal to gain “Access” in the New Year, it’s a highly coveted and ambitious one.

When the healthcare world was less commoditized, conveying trust was enough to make the sale. Today, there’s simply too much noise in the market place and erodes the ability to gain traction or trust. This leads to many solutions providers ending up swimming in the dreaded sea of similar.

3 Ways Trust Can Be Ruined In an Instant
Gaining access to a decision maker has a lot to do with compatibility and reputation. If you have a great reputation, they’re more likely to listen to what you have to say. Compatibility is not just about how well your personalities mesh. It has more to do with how the healthcare solutions provider sees you and whether or not they trust you.

Trust is vital in any relationship; especially, a sales relationship. It’s been said that trust is the foundation upon which salespeople will achieve success. It will keep your customers coming back and choosing you over your competitors. Unfortunately, trust can be lost in an instant. Here are three ways you can lose the trust of a healthcare solutions provider.

1. Having a Hidden Agenda
A lot of salespeople are focused solely on sales. While sales are important—after all, sales are the lifeline of any organization looking to survive and thrive—it shouldn’t be the only focus. A salesperson doesn’t necessarily have to blatantly show or tell the client that they’re focused solely on themselves. Subconsciously, clients can pick up on even the subtlest of signs. When they feel like they’re not as important as the sale, trust goes right out the window.
Here’s the cool thing, you can eliminate rejection forever simply by giving up the hidden agenda of hoping to make a sale. Instead, be sure that everything you say and do aligns with basic mindset that you’re there to help identify and solve their issues.

2. Moving Too Quickly
Customers, especially one’s in healthcare, don’t like to be forced to do anything. In many situations, customers feel like they’re almost being bullied by a salesperson. Trying to move the relationship too quickly is detrimental to the trusted relationship between the customer and salesperson. Relationships are complex and multi-dimensional, which means that pressure leads to resistance and road blocks in your trust equity building efforts.
Contemplate letting go of trying to close the sale or get the appointment. What you’ll discover is that you don’t have to take responsibility for moving the sales process forward.

Simply focus your conversation on the problems that you can help prospects solve. By not jumping the gun and trying to move the sales process forward, you’ll learn that your potential customers will give you the direction you need.

3. Having No Understanding or Empathy for the Customer
Everyone wants to feel understood; it’s a basic human essential. At the very least, they want those around them to feel some empathy for what they’re going through, even if they can’t completely understand the situation. Your Potential clients & customers feel the same way. They have bad days, they may be dealing with difficult life circumstances, or they may be overwhelmed by all of their responsibilities at work.
Trust will be lost if you or anyone on your sales team fails to acknowledge the challenges that your customers are going through. In essence, the customer will feel like their feelings, even their existence, have been belittled. And, when they feel this way there is no way they’re going to trust the person who is contributing to them feel this way.

How to Build Trust and Gain Continual Access to Potential Customers
What will it take for healthcare solutions provider to start gaining access to the decision makers during the New Year? There are three steps they can take.

1. Tell the Truth
There’s no better way to earn a client’s trust than with honesty. Clients want to know what you can and can’t provide for them. Stretching the truth to gain the sale will only lead to disappointment, both for them and for your wallet.

2. Embrace Transparency
This goes hand-in-hand with honesty. Keep your promises for sure, however, don’t start making promises that you can’t keep. A lack of honesty and authenticity will definitely have an adverse effect on your reputation with the decision-makers.

3. Replace “Selling” With “Caring”
Those in the healthcare field enter the field because they want to help other people. They’re constantly caring for others. They need to be cared for, too. This is where you come in. If you make your customers feel well cared for, they’re sure to become loyal customers.
Instead of burning a lead by asking “probing” questions to qualify a potential client, you might want to consider how you can add value through concrete insights and build trust beforehand.

Moving Ahead, Access Will Be Predicated Upon Building “Trust Equity”
In the world of quotas and benchmarks things have become watered down and sales conversations have somehow become surface level and NOT authentic.
The currency of the new economy is trust. And you need TRUST beforehand to even get ACCESS.

Building “trust equity” is a long-term, never-ending effort of communicating, listening, building trust and establishing credibility. My belief is that you’ll be more likely to win over customers’ trust over time and tap into a well of abundance that’ll never dry out.

Learn How You Measure Up on the “Trusted-Access” Scale
Like any business strategy, determine what measurements need to be in place to determine effectiveness. Have a strong grip on what those KPI’s are and manage towards those goals each month.

 

Cartoon – Best Informed Extinct Species on the Planet

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The urgency of change

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With patient demographics shifting nationwide and new technologies transforming how care is delivered, medical education has yet to receive the thorough review required to keep pace with the dramatic changes affecting our industry.

Physicians of the future need to embrace a more interdisciplinary approach to delivering care than the purely clinical focus our medical schools have cultivated for decades. Thanks to the new wave of medical schools that offer joint medical degrees and other changes in the way we train doctors, new physicians entering our hospitals and other facilities are much more diverse and well rounded than we’ve seen in the past.

Medical schools offering a mix of programs that include business, law, molecular medicine and other advanced degrees in conjunction with medical degrees will continue to become more appealing and diverse in the coming years, as physicians of the future seek more options for professional growth. Of course, diversity not only relates to a physician’s course of study but to the increasingly diverse patient populations served by providers.

It is difficult to deliver effective care if you are not attuned to patients’ cultural differences, and medical schools must teach physicians how different cultures approach care and perceive physicians. If they do not understand that their patients may react differently to care options as a result of cultural nuances, physicians struggle to form the genuine bond that is at the heart of every clinical interaction. It is imperative medical schools offer this kind of complementary education in conjunction with their clinical curriculum.

Perhaps the most dramatic mindset shift medical schools must embrace to adapt to a changing industry is to acknowledge that memorization is outmoded. It is unbelievable how much time medical students spend memorizing facts and figures, only to forget many of them when it comes time to learn new material for their next exam. Memorization does not imply understanding, and in an age when Dr. Google holds all the answers in a single click of the mouse, it is a waste of time.

When education focuses solely on the diagnostic or treatment aspects of medicine, physicians are ill-equipped to reconcile that medical care is only one component of health. There are many other factors that contribute to a patient’s overall health, including social determinants, geography, diet and a multitude of other lifestyle choices. To create a well-rounded care plan that keeps patients healthy and out of the hospital, it is imperative for physicians to truly understand how to engage patients and learn about all of the factors that impact the health and wellness of each individual. While technology continues to advance at a dramatic pace, it should never provide a substitute for human contact.

At Northwell, we partnered with Hempstead, N.Y.-based Hofstra University to form the Zucker School of Medicine, which welcomed its first class in 2011. In creating a pass-fail curriculum, we identified aspects of traditional medical education that we thought should be retained and modified it to create an entirely new experience for physicians in training.  It began with the concept that students don’t have to sit down in a classroom and be lectured at all day by professors. At our medical school, students meet in small groups and engage in facilitated discussions guided by faculty members. However, we did not simply update the way medical students engage with academic material, but changed the very academic structure of medical education.

Usually, medical students sit through two years of classroom instruction before they engage in clinical work. We found this model counterproductive to the ultimate goal of preparing physicians for the unpredictable and challenging job of delivering care. To give them more hands-on experience, students begin training as emergency medical technicians within the first nine weeks of school. They ride in ambulances and travel to patients’ homes, helping them to better understand that the patient’s personal circumstances have an undeniable effect on their health. Students then follow up with these patients along the entire continuum of care to help develop a holistic understanding of how people interact with our health care system.

Understanding that the majority of care in the future will take place outside the walls of the hospital, our students gain experience in many different care sites, including ambulatory practices and community health centers, giving them practical experience starting on day one of their education. Instead of multiple-choice exams, students utilize small-group assessments to present cases on an individual basis, then test their skills every 12 weeks at our simulation training center.

Though physicians are some of the most highly educated professionals in the world, even after medical school, residency and fellowship training, the most important lessons of their career come from day-to-day experience. Even if providers are not associated with a formal medical school, hospitals and health systems are in the business of education. Organizational leaders should be mindful of the educational nature of their work and provide opportunities for their clinical teams that foster a sense of continued learning throughout their careers.

Long-established medical schools, some of which have been in existence for more than 200 years, may be hesitant to adopt changes that shake their foundations. Some have become slaves to history and tradition within organizations that move at the lethargic pace of bureaucracy. However, during an era when consumerism is spreading into all areas of healthcare, traditional medical schools must be mindful of the outside players that are disrupting so many facets of healthcare. As we have seen with hospitals over the past 15-20 years, if they do not evolve and embrace change, they risk extinction.

 

Mice Don’t Know When to Let It Go, Either

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Animals, like humans, are reluctant to give up on pursuits they’ve invested in, psychologists report.

Suppose that, seeking a fun evening out, you pay $175 for a ticket to a new Broadway musical. Seated in the balcony, you quickly realize that the acting is bad, the sets are ugly and no one, you suspect, will go home humming the melodies.

Do you head out the door at the intermission, or stick it out for the duration?

Studies of human decision-making suggest that most people will stay put, even though money spent in the past logically should have no bearing on the choice.

This “sunk cost fallacy,” as economists call it, is one of many ways that humans allow emotions to affect their choices, sometimes to their own detriment. But the tendency to factor past investments into decision-making is apparently not limited to Homo sapiens.

In a study published on Thursday in the journal Science, investigators at the University of Minnesota reported that mice and rats were just as likely as humans to be influenced by sunk costs.

The more time they invested in waiting for a reward — in the case of the rodents, flavored pellets; in the case of the humans, entertaining videos — the less likely they were to quit the pursuit before the delay ended.

“Whatever is going on in the humans is also going on in the nonhuman animals,” said A. David Redish, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Minnesota and an author of the study.

This cross-species consistency, he and others said, suggested that in some decision-making situations, taking account of how much has already been invested might pay off.

“Evolution by natural selection would not promote any behavior unless it had some — perhaps obscure — net overall benefit,” said Alex Kacelnik, a professor of behavioral ecology at Oxford, who praised the new study as “rigorous” in its methodology and “well designed.”

“If everybody does it, the reasoning goes, there must be a reason,” Dr. Kacelnik said.

Even more important than the similarity among species was the study’s finding that sunk cost effects appeared only after the subjects had decided to pursue a reward, Dr. Redish noted, not while they were still deliberating whether to do so.

In effect, the animals seemed to consider the deliberation time not to be part of their investment — an indication, Dr. Redish said, that different brain processes might be at work in different aspects of decision-making.

The idea runs counter to the notion that “time is time, and you’re wasting it either way,” he said.

Shelly Flagel, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan who was not involved in the study, said the research had “far-reaching implications across fields including education, economics, psychology, neuroscience and psychiatry.”

For example, she said, persisting in a behavior even though it has adverse consequences is reminiscent of the conduct “exhibited by people with addictions.”

“Once they start searching for their next ‘fix,’ they will often go hours or days on the same quest, even if it means giving up food, relationships, their job,” Dr. Flagel said.

Learning more about the distinct processes that go awry in psychiatric disorders like addiction might yield new strategies for treatment, she added.

In the study, led by a doctoral student, Brian M. Sweis, three research laboratories at the University of Minnesota collaborated to conduct tests on mice, rats and humans. The rodents were trained to forage for the flavored pellets — banana, chocolate, grape or plain — in a square maze with a “restaurant” in each corner.

The humans were taught to “forage” on a computer for videos of kittens, “dance landscapes” or bicycle accidents. Both rodents and humans were given an overall time limit for the foraging tasks.

In the rodents’ version of the task, the animal first entered an “offer zone” outside a restaurant and heard a pitched tone that informed it how long the wait would be for the pellet reward — a delay that varied randomly from 1 to 30 seconds.

The animal could skip the offer, in which case it was withdrawn, or it could enter the “wait zone” of the restaurant, setting off a countdown signaled by a descending tone. At any time during the countdown, the rodent could choose to leave the restaurant, but once it left it could not return without going all the way around through the other restaurant offer zones.

In the human version of the experiment, subjects were offered a video and presented with buttons saying “stay” or “skip.” A download bar informed them how long they would have to wait to view the video. Clicking the “stay” button started a countdown, and the screen showed the progression of the download.

The study found that the more time the rodents spent in the “wait zone,” the more likely they were to stick out the delay to the end, even though the longer they waited, the more it cut into their overall time to seek food.

Similarly, the longer the human subjects spent waiting for a video to download, the more likely they were to stay the course until the download was finished.

Surprisingly, the amount of time that the subjects — rodent or human — spent deliberating whether to accept the “offer” of a reward did not affect whether they quit before receiving it or stayed through to the end.

“Obviously, the best thing is as quick as possible to get into the wait zone,” Dr. Redish said. “But nobody does that. Somehow, all three species know that if you get into the wait zone, you’re going to pay this sunk cost, and they actually spend extra time deliberating in the offer zone so that they don’t end up getting stuck.”

Dr. Flagel, of the University of Michigan, noted that as compelling as the new research was, it was not without limitations, including the fact that the tasks presented to humans and rodents, though similar in some ways, were still quite different.

“The challenge moving forward,” Dr. Flagel said, “is going to be to know that one is truly capturing the same phenomenon across species. Or perhaps more appropriately, what is the meaning of the differences that will be revealed between species?”

 

 

 

Where is Dr. King now? A Civility Emergency

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Where is Dr. King now? A Civility Emergency

As the well-known, dramatic story unfolds, “Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses, and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.” Coincidentally, this nursery rhyme has me thinking about an important leadership issue.

During this Independence Day season, I’m concerned that our freedom is being threatened. Now is the time for honorable patriots to speak up and do our part on this issue. We must take a stand for civility in our culture, and it’s a basic responsibility as fellow colleagues and citizens.

What is Civility and why is it important?  

The word “civil” ties back to the Latin word for citizen, and the core meaning is the idea of people living together as a society under a government. The other well-known and related definition of the word civil is being courteous, respectful and considerate of others. To have and maintain freedom requires a degree of civility and tolerance for each other.

Just over fifty years ago Dr. Martin Luther King set the standard for civility when debating highly contested issues. Out of that era, our society learned a lot about respectful tolerance for others—it has been a foundational ethos over the past 30 years in the issues of race, gender, and religion, and it’s made us a better nation because of it. We had our differences in the past, but there was a general attitude of civility in debating them.

Today though, the tragic change is tolerance for being intolerant of others who have different ideas and views.

“When people reach a point of hate for each other because they have different perspectives, then you have a serious problem.”

Emotions are Contagious

From my past work in human behavior and performance, I know that emotions are contagious. Positive emotions give positive energy and make it easy to live and work together. Negative emotions bring negative energy and make it difficult to work together. We all know this principle from time spent with our work teams as well as relationships with family and friends. And the same thing applies to our culture.

Now we’re seeing intolerant and rude conversation on a mass scale. Some media outlets and politicians ignore the boundaries of civility, aggressively promoting disrespectful personal attacks on others who don’t share their views on politics or social issues. And social media has provided a layer of protection, allowing individuals to lash out in vicious ways at people they don’t even know. These actions aren’t illegal, but they are certainly anti-social and attack the civility needed to maintain a free society where we can live and work together.

Another Civil War?

A recent Rasmussen Poll showed that “thirty-one percent (31%) of U.S. voters say it’s ‘Likely’ that the United States will experience a second civil war sometime in the next five years, with 11 percent saying it’s ‘Very Likely.’[i]” This poll seems to confirm what I’m feeling—that we’re crashing over the boundaries needed in a civil society.

Underneath this breakdown in civility is the subtle mindset that “the ends justify the means”.

This is the bone-chilling Communist manifesto that we experienced in the POW camps, so I’m highly sensitive to this type of attack on freedom and independence. This abandonment of truth and civility can happen in our American culture, a business boardroom, a dysfunctional family relationship, or a dispute with a neighbor. No one can escape it, but we have an opportunity to do our part in arresting it.

What can we do?

If you’re agreeing with this article, then you’re part of the tribe that has decided to live and lead with honor! Regardless of your personal and professional perspectives or your allegiance to your like-minded group of people, you know that the true essence of influence and courage is taking a stand in a civil way regardless if that civility is returned in kind.  For more on this challenge, see my coaching video this month and hear my personal story.

Here are four things that we can do –

  1. Guard your own character first. Avoid using uncivil tactics to advance your arguments.
  2. Be direct and honest, but keep strong boundaries on your words and actions. Set an example of someone who can disagree politely and factually with those with whom you disagree.
  3. Speak up when you experience the intolerance of others, those who resort to negative name-calling that is hateful and viscous. Consider how we can respectfully not tolerate those who use incivility as a weapon to advance their ideology.
  4. Get a free copy of the Honor Code and share it with others. Pay special attention to Articles 2, 6, and 7.

If Humpty Dumpty takes a fall, it will be very difficult to put him back together again. Take a stand for our freedom and independence, stand and advocate for civility…in a civil way.

 

 

 

 

WHY HUMILITY DELIVERS MORE RESULTS THAN ARROGANCE

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Why Humility Delivers More Results Than Arrogance

Courage and humility:

You’d be wrong if you said humility is kin to fear.

Courage is the willingness and ability to fail and try again.

Arrogance needs to appear perfect so it plays it safe. It won’t try unless success is certain. Arrogance fears and rejects failure.

Humility accepts responsible failure and keeps going.

Wisdom and humility:

The arrogant become fools.

Arrogance learns slowly, if at all. It won’t accept advice or guidance from others because it believes it already knows best.

Learning is hard for arrogance.

Arrogance knows. Humility knows there’s more to know.

Humility learns from failure, improves, and gains insight. Arrogance, on the other hand, repeats ineffective behaviors and blames others for failure.

Humility learns because it listens. Arrogance despises listening.

Arrogance points fingers.

Humility takes responsibility and grows.

There is no growth apart from taking responsibility.

Humility and results:

Humility respects and appreciates others. Teams work hard for leaders who appreciate their hard work.

Humility connects with others and honors their talent.

Arrogance stands aloof and feels threatened when others shine.

Five practices of humility:

  1. Learning.
  2. Listening.
  3. Courage.
  4. Connection.
  5. Responsibility.

Which of the five practices of humility are most relevant to you?

How are courage, learning, and results connected to humility?