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Tag Archives: Leadership
“BEYOND COMPETENCY – WHY CHARACTER, COURAGE, AND COMMITMENT SETS YOU APART”
Watch this clip – “Beyond competency – why character, courage, and commitment sets you apart”
Rather than having fear and trepidation about the concept of accountability, Lee briefly explains the positive aspects of courageous accountability as a means to achieving your goals.
The key is to establish an authentic foundation of character, courage, and commitment so you can build consistency and trust with yourself and others. Please watch and share your comments – thank you
Why Geisinger’s health plan stays on the ACA exchange
Danville, Pa.-based Geisinger Health Plan has maintained a steady presence in Pennsylvania’s individual ACA exchange, despite other insurers leaving the state’s marketplace.
Over the last two years, a number of U.S. insurers decided to exit states’ ACA exchanges, citing financial losses as well as concerns regarding future stability of the individual market. Pennsylvania’s individual ACA exchange is no exception. Hartford, Conn.-based Aetna, for instance, pulled out of ACA exchanges for 2017 in 11 states, including Pennsylvania. Additionally, Minnetonka, Minn.-based UnitedHealthcare left ACA exchanges in Pennsylvania and nearly 30 other states for 2017.
Ultimately five insurers remained on Pennsylvania’s individual ACA exchange for 2017 and will remain in the market for 2018 — Geisinger Health Plan, Pittsburgh-based UPMC Health Plan, Harrisburg, Pa.-based Capital BlueCross, Philadelphia-based Independence Blue Cross and Pittsburgh-based Highmark.
Because some insurers left the state’s individual ACA exchange, Geisinger Health Plan experienced an increase in membership, says Kurt Wrobel, the plan’s CFO and chief actuary. The plan currently has 47,000 members, up from more than 30,000 in 2016. About 60 percent of the plan’s enrollment is individuals with Medicaid, Medicare or plans on the state’s individual ACA exchange.
Geisinger Health Plan also requested a rate increase for 2018 that it says is consistent with other insurers in the state. According to the Pennsylvania Department of Insurance, the five insurers that will continue selling on Pennsylvania’s individual ACA exchange for 2018 requested average statewide rate increases of 8.8 percent for individual plans.
Regarding Geisinger Health Plan’s choice to stay on the ACA exchange in Pennsylvania, Mr. Wrobel says it comes down to Geisinger’s commitment to the people of central Pennsylvania. “As a nonprofit, our primary stakeholders are the people, so with that we’re going to have a different calculation as far as our interest in staying in a program. While policy improvements are still needed, we’ve stayed in the program and we believe it’s workable as it stands now.”
One significant advantage Geisinger Health Plan has is its connection with Geisinger Health System. Geisinger Health Plan representatives said that connection allows it to develop programs such as care management programs for members, and many of the plan’s case managers work directly with physicians’ offices to provide more support and connectivity to members’ physicians.
“We think that’s a really clear differentiator. Within that, we have more robust care management systems and programs that allow us to control costs and improve outcomes, especially relative to traditional insurance companies,” Mr. Wrobel says.
As far as the future, the health plan will remain on Pennsylvania’s individual ACA exchange as long as it has a workable program.
Mr. Wrobel says Geisinger Health Plan wouldn’t rule out expanding to ACA marketplaces in other states at some point, but it’s not a high priority right now.
Overall, without the elimination of cost-sharing reductions, which help insurers subsidize the cost of coverage for low-income Americans, Mr. Wrobel believes Geisinger Health Plan could see greater stability moving forward.
“It’s our hope we can move beyond discussions, beyond all the financial issues with the program and really get to the meat of what we try to do as a health plan, which is provide cost-effective quality care,” he says. “I think we all look forward to the day when there’s sufficient stability — and that’s what we have in the Medicare and Medicaid program as well as the employer group program — where the focus is on that operational excellence of providing cost-effective quality care and we can move beyond these discussions about financial issues.”
What Keeps Healthcare Finance Executives Up at Night?
Cartoon – Doesn’t make it Indefensible
Cartoon – Leadership Course
Cartoon – My New Five-Year Plan
84% of Execs: Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Healthcare
Artificial intelligence has the potential to completely revolutionize the way healthcare systems interact with their patients.
More than 80 percent of healthcare executives polled by Accenture believe that artificial intelligence is on track to completely revolutionize healthcare, and a similar number believe that the advent of machine learning and digital healthcare is driving a significant restructuring of industry economics.
“AI is the new UI,” proclaims the report. “It’s a new world where artificial intelligence is moving beyond a back-end tool for the healthcare enterprise to the forefront of the consumer and clinician experience.”
“AI is taking on more sophisticated roles, with the potential to make every technology interface both simple and smart – setting a high bar for how future interactions work.”
The report envisions a healthcare environment where AI can take over the majority of processes currently overseen by humans. Consumer relations and patient engagement are likely to be among the first tasks to undergo the shift.
Eighty-four percent of executives believe that AI will fundamentally alter how they gain information from patients and interact with consumers. A similar number have prioritized the implementation of centralized platforms that take advantage of messaging bots and other services.
More than three-quarters believe that these decisions will make or break their ability to develop a competitive advantage over their peers in the near future. Eighty-two percent agree that industry leadership will be defined by how well healthcare organizations architect comprehensive, seamless digital ecosystems that truly understand what motivates the choices of their patients.
“The new frontier of digital experience is technology specifically designed for individual human behavior,” the report asserts. “Healthcare leaders recognize that as technology shrinks the gap between effective human and machine cooperation, accounting for unique human behavior expands not only the quality of the experience, but also the effectiveness of technology solutions.”
Humility is the New Smart: Are You Ready?
SMART used to be a quantity game. “I know more than you. I get more things right.” But Ed Hess and Katherine Ludwig say that in the new Smart Machine Age, that’s losing game. The new smart is about quality. Specifically, the quality of your thinking, your listening, and your relating and collaborative skills.
Are you ready?
The Smart Machine Age (SMA) will revolutionize how most of us live and work. In Humility is the New Smart, the authors state that “smart technologies will become ubiquitous, invading and changing many aspects of our professional and personal lives and in many ways challenging our fundamental beliefs about success, opportunity, and the American Dream.” This means that the “number and types of available jobs and required skills will turn our lives and our children’s lives upside down.”
New skills will be needed. Uniquely human skills. Those skills, while uniquely human, are not what we are typically trained to do and require a deal of messy personal development. We will need to become better thinkers, listeners, relators, and collaborators, while working to overcome our culture of obsessive individualism in order to thrive in the SMA. Humility is the mindset that will make all of this possible.
Most of today’s adults have had no formal training in how to think, how to listen, how to learn and experiment through inquiry, how to emotionally engage, how to manage emotions, how to collaborate, or how to embrace mistakes as learning opportunities.
In short, say the authors, we need to acquire and continually develop four fundamental NewSmart behaviors:
Quieting Ego
Quieting Ego has always been the challenge for us humans. As they observe, “Even if we don’t consider ourselves part of the ‘big me’ cultural phenomenon, for many of us to feel good about ourselves we have to constantly be ‘right,’ self-enhance, self-promote, and conceal our weaknesses, all of which drive ego defensiveness and failure intolerance that impedes higher-level thinking and relating.” This tendency negatively affects our behavior, thinking, and ability to relate to and engage with others.
Managing Self—Thinking and Emotions
We need to get above ourselves to see ourselves impartially. We all struggle “to self-regulate our basic humanity—our biases, fears, insecurities, and natural fight-flee-or-freeze response to stress and anxiety.” We need to be willing to treat all of our “beliefs (not values) as hypotheses subject to stress tests and modification by better data.”
Negative emotions cause narrow-mindedness. Positive emotions on the other hand, have been scientifically linked to “broader attention, open-mindedness, deeper focus, and more flexible thinking, all of which underlie creativity and innovative thinking.”
Reflective Listening
Because we are limited by our own thinking, we need to listen to others to “open our minds and, push past our biases and mental models, and mitigate self-absorption in order to collaborate and build better relationships.” The problem is “we’re just too wired to confirm what we already believe, and we feel too comfortable having a cohesive simple story of how our world works.” Listening to others helps to quiet our ego.
Otherness
To create these new behaviors and mindsets, it should become obvious that we need to enlist the help of others. “We can’t think, innovate, or relate at our best alone.” As Barbara Fredrickson observed, “nobody reaches his or her full potential in isolation.” Jane Dutton out it this way: “It seems to be another fact that no man can come to know himself except as the outcome of disclosing himself to another.”
The NewSmart Organization
Optimal human performance in the SMA will require an emphasis on the emotional aspects of critical thinking, creativity, innovation and engaging with others. “The work environment must be designed to reduce fears, insecurities, and other negative emotions.”
To do this it means “providing people a feeling of being respected, held in positive regard, and listened to. It means creating opportunities for people to connect and build trust. “It means allocating time and designing work environments that bring people together to relate about nonwork matters.” Finally, it means getting to know employees and helping them to get the “right training or opportunities to develop and provide feedback.”
The NewSmart organization needs to be a safe place to learn. “Feeling safe means that you feel that your boss your employer, and your colleagues will do you no harm as you try to learn.”
Culture Is Not the Culprit
https://hbr.org/2016/04/culture-is-not-the-culprit
hen organizations get into big trouble, fixing the culture is usually the prescription. That’s what most everyone said General Motors needed to do after its recall crisis in 2014—and ever since, CEO Mary Barra has been focusing on creating “the right environment” to promote accountability and head off future disasters. Pundits far and wide called for the same remedy when it came to light that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, deemed a corrosive bureaucracy by federal investigators, kept veterans waiting months for critical health care. Cultural reform has likewise been proposed as the solution to excessive use of force by police departments, unethical behavior in banks, and just about any other major organizational problem you can think of. All eyes are on culture as the cause and the cure.
But the corporate leaders we have interviewed—current and former CEOs who have successfully led major transformations—say that culture isn’t something you “fix.” Rather, in their experience, cultural change is what you get after you’ve put new processes or structures in place to tackle tough business challenges like reworking an outdated strategy or business model. The culture evolves as you do that important work.
Though this runs counter to the going wisdom about how to turn things around at GM, the VA, and elsewhere, it makes intuitive sense to look at culture as an outcome—not a cause or a fix. Organizations are complex systems with many ripple effects. Reworking fundamental practices will inevitably lead to some new values and behaviors. Employees may start seeing their contributions to society in a whole new light. This is what happened at Ecolab when CEO Doug Baker pushed decisions down to the front lines to strengthen customer relationships. Or people might become less adversarial toward senior executives—as Northwest employees did after Delta CEO Richard Anderson acquired the airline and got workers on board by meeting their day-to-day needs.
The leaders we spoke with took different approaches for different ends. For example, Alan Mulally worked to break down barriers between units at Ford, whereas Dan Vasella did a fair amount of decentralizing to unleash creative energy at Novartis. But in every case, when the leaders used tools such as decision rights, performance measurement, and reward systems to address their particular business challenges, organizational culture evolved in interesting ways as a result, reinforcing the new direction.
Revisiting their stories provides a richer understanding of corporate transformation and culture’s role in it, so we share highlights from our conversations here. Most of these stories involve some aspect of merger integration, one of the most difficult transitions for companies to manage. And they all show, in a range of settings, that culture isn’t a final destination. It morphs right along with the company’s competitive environment and objectives. It’s really more of a temporary landing place—where the organization should be at that moment, if the right management levers have been pulled.
HENRY KOTULA 