Coach+Leader: October 2012

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Tip 8: "But that's not my patient."

"But that's not my patient."

We've all heard that line before... and when working with a medical staff recently, it raised its ugly head again. I say "ugly head," because it immediately tells me that whoever said it is focused on his/her job description, and not their role description, which is what guides us to giving our patients what they really need.

Comments like that or "That's not my job," speak to a dire need for an organizational role description. When you're not cognizant of your organizational role, or when we fulfill our job as if that is the only thing that matters, patient care won't improve, and the idea of truly being patient centered will always remain an unattainable goal.

In my last issue, I highlighted the three ingredients required to design a patient centered culture:

Role Design
Focusing Leaders on Coaching
Mobilizing Problem Solving Teams

Role Design is not a new business concept, nor is it a complex solution to dealing with cultural challenges. The most innovative consumer-facing businesses outside of healthcare focus on Role Design to improve team collaboration and performance, instead of using many of the institutional carrot and stick strategies we've historically relied on in healthcare.

In healthcare, we haven't taken the requisite steps needed to design an organizational role that informs leaders, physicians, nurses and staff on how to work together to improve patient value. Instead, we've overwhelmed ourselves with an array of initiatives that only target the symptoms of a suboptimal culture, resulting in overburdened, disengaged physicians and staff, higher operational costs, and inferior patient experience and quality. An Organizational Role Description is the starting point to improving our culture and driving a new standard for how we show up and work together. More importantly, Role Design is the cultural foundation required to make teamwork possible.

Consider how your job description sets the standard/tone and focuses us on our duties/tasks, to make us accountable for our job performance. We must be just as intentional about designing our role description.

To do this, our organizational roles must be attached to a systematic process. We have systems in place for hiring and evaluations (job description), we have checklists for safety, and process improvement, but until now, we've lacked the equivalent process needed to understand our roles (Role Description). When leaders and physician leaders adopt Role Descriptions, everything changes... beginning with improved patient care.

Tip 8: The prerequisites to an Organizational Role Description

Before you discuss developing an Organizational Role Description with your team, let's be sure we have a consensus for what really matters most to patients.... agreeing on that is the starting point to recognizing an organizational wide role that improves care and team performance.

Surprisingly, I often discover a lack of consensus related to ideas on what constitutes quality patient centered care (or what matters most to patients). If we are going to design a culture that reduces errors and prevents harm, physicians and leaders must be able to consistently communicate what constitutes patient centered care.

Trusted Card

Creating a patient centered culture requires us to help our teams/staff discover and differentiate the critical difference between Role vs. Job. Our roles based on what matters most to patients: TRUST. As I've shared before, not only are these patient values (what patients need most) but they are values highly relevant to us as physicians and leaders and more importantly reflect the conditions that must exist to deliver better care and reduce errors.

In the next issue I'll continue to share road-tested tips that will help you build consensus and help you define an Organizational Role Description that sets us on the path of team problem solving based on what matters most to patients.

Feel free to join me on Facebook to further this conversation - I'd be happy to visit with you about how you'd see your organization implement a role description.

Visit the Patient Driven Leadership Site.

The Coach Leader is a bi-monthly series of ready-to-use tips to assist you in developing a concrete leadership practice that has the most impact on improving patient care. Why become a Coach Leader?

Patients expect us to work as teams.
Patient centered teams need a coach.
Every leader has a coaching role.

It's a straightforward point of view that focuses on best utilizing your time as a leader by emphasizing your role as a coach. As a Coach Leader, you'll gain the ability to mobilize your people into patient centered problem solving teams and have the most impact on improving care.

COMING SOON!

Everyone is looking forward to Dr. Brian Wong's upcoming book.After years consulting with hospitals across the country, Dr. Wong's unique perspective and deft storytelling takes us inside a hospital fraught with the day to day challenges Physician Leaders, Managers, and Nurses all face, and introduces cultural strategies to overcome them without adding more work to our overburdened days. Dr. Wong has created memorable, real-life characters illustrating today's most pressing challenges in a dramatic hospital setting every reader will recognize.

Billing's MT session video.For those of you who would like to learn more about our statewide Patient Driven Leadership program we will soon have the entire video uploaded to thanks to the Billing's Clinic for making this video production possible.
Visit the Coach+Leader Blog.
and the Patient Driven Leadership Site.

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Tip 7: "I can't get no satisfaction."

What does culture have to do with patient satisfaction?

Everything... According to what my clients management team concluded when their CEO asked them to determine how best to improve overall patient satisfaction. Was their diagnosis right? I congratulate them for responding to the overwhelming evidence; to improve patient satisfaction and experience, we need to stop treating the symptoms and address their root cause. If the word "culture" feels too all encompassing let me simplify their conclusion: Patient satisfaction, like most of the challenges we're dealing with, has more to do with how well we all work together than anything else.

We healthcare leaders tend to get a little nebulous when talking about culture. We're more comfortable dealing with the concrete nature of operational initiatives instead. As I shared in the last issue, J.D. Powers, Bloomberg and many others are starting to pay more attention to human factors as the root cause of most of our challenges. And regardless of how abstract modifying a culture may sound up front, having a concrete step-by-step plan that does just that, makes all the difference in the world... especially to our patients.

In our last issue, we also identified the impact physician leaders (coaches) have on improving patient value... and how a culture that emphasizes physician coaching will significantly impact care. Notice the word "culture," in the previous sentence. Teaching your physicians to leverage their coaching abilities to create more productive teamwork... teams that solve problems together... is purely relational... and a concretely teachable practice, that will significantly modify your culture.

The goal of the following tip is to help you establish a relationship between how you personally lead, your organization's leadership approach, and how it affects your culture. Because whether or not you set out daily to improve your culture, whatever you do will affect it one way or the other. The way you interact and lead has direct implications for building a patient centered culture. That's why empowering physician coaches, and instilling a practice of coaching in general, generates the teamwork and group problem solving skills necessary to create a culture that's always focused on improving patient care.

Tip 7: "I can't get no satisfaction."

Whether you're working to improve the performance of your leadership team or patient satisfaction, it begins with understanding that your challenge is cultural, not operational. We need to ask ourselves, "Is our culture aligned with, and based on, what matters most to patients?" or "Is it perfectly aligned to get the results we're currently experiencing?" Once we accept a cultural solution as the only sustainable solution, we then need to stop talking about transforming cultures and actually take the steps needed to affect cultural change. To do this, we must first understand the components of a patient centered culture.

As you review these three key ingredients , I ask that you consider how they could help build consensus for your leadership team (and eventually your entire workforce) when it comes to defining a healthy patient centered culture. And consider this, each of these key ingredients has implications and relevancy at the individual, team and organizational levels.

1) Role Design: Creating a patient centered culture begins with designing our roles based on what matters most to patients: TRUST. An Organizational Role Description is the starting point to improve patient care and a prerequisite for improving team function.

2) Focus Leaders on Coaching: Coach Leaders create the conditions needed to improve patient care and trust. Each of your leaders will need to develop the one-to-one coaching skills necessary to create patient centered relationships, a prerequisite to teamwork and essential to improving organizational culture.

3) Mobilize Problem Solving Teams: To best improve patient care, leaders must focus their time on creating the conditions necessary for improved team problem solving. Improving patient care is dependent on this essential leadership skill and your organization must recognize this competency as a measure of a high performing culture.

Summary: Improving patient satisfaction and solving most of your operational challenges depend on modifying your culture based on what matters most to your patients. By designing and leveraging your newly established role description/coaching culture, you'll have the tools and knowledge to mobilize Patient Centered Problem Solving Teams, and realize the measurable relationship between team performance and improved care.

Over the next several months, I'll be drilling down on each of these 3 key ingredients to building a patient centered culture, and sharing strategies, tactics and tools that will help you have the greatest impact on your culture

Feel free to join me on Facebook to further this conversation - I'd be happy to visit with you about how you'd see your organization implement a role description.

Visit the Patient Driven Leadership Site.

Patients expect us to work as teams.
Patient centered teams need a coach.
Every leader has a coaching role.

COMING SOON!

Everyone is looking forward to Dr. Brian Wong's upcoming book. After years consulting with hospitals across the country, Dr. Wong's unique perspective and deft storytelling takes us inside a hospital fraught with the day to day challenges Physician Leaders, Managers, and Nurses all face, and introduces cultural strategies to overcome them without adding more work to our overburdened days. Dr. Wong has created memorable, real-life characters illustrating today's most pressing challenges in a dramatic hospital setting every reader will recognize.