Tip 4: Ultimate Question for a Healthcare Leader

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?

1. Patients expect us to work as teams.
2. Patient centered teams need a coach.
3. 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.

The Ultimate Question for a Healthcare Leader

Yesterday, I had an eye opening conversation with a medical director I admire. He'd read the initial Coach+Leader tips and called me to share that while the ideas sounded inspiring, he just couldn't do any more or ask any of his docs to either... his staff was already at capacity and suffering from initiative overload. Having felt it often, I understood that feeling of being overwhelmed, inefficient and fragmented. Knowing his frustration got me to thinking that there are some aspects of coaching and leadership that require more effort than others, there are also a good number of actions we can take that result in saved time, less rework, and greater efficiency.

This led me to the "The Ultimate Question": How can we contribute as leaders so that we have a greater impact on care without adding more to our workload?

While I can't promise you that there are not aspects of coaching that require skill development and practice, the most important aspects of coaching and leadership are more about how we show up... how we lead our staff, and eventually affect our community. It begins with identifying the leadership skill (coaching) that allows you to spend more time proactively leading your organization versus managing recurring problems. This is the first step toward having the most impact on improving patient care.

Here are a few highlights from the past 3 tips:

1. Start thinking like a Coach. Patients need us to work as teams. Patient centered teams need coaches. Every leader has a coaching role
2. Improve team performance by helping your team as a coach understand their role. Our organizational role must be based in patient values (T.R.U.S.T.E.D.)
3. Help to improve team problem solving by making it safe for your team to speak-up and share ideas. The measure of a team is how well they solve problems together.

Take a closer look at the short list above. These patient driven ideas depend on leaders being focused on how to show up to create the conditions needed to improve care, rather than how much of their "to do" lists they accomplish.  Improving care begins and ends with integrating a coaching mindset... which takes no additional work to do... and leads to less recurring problems to deal with.

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.

Tip 3: Reach for your whistle first... then your stethoscope.

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?

1. Patients expect us to work as teams.
2. Patient centered teams need a coach.
3. 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.

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Reach for your whistle first... then your stethoscope.

In the last issue, I shared an everyday example of a physician helping colleagues defuse an argument that was impeding patient care. Some of you responded to the posting with surprise that a physician would readily approach the situation from a coaching perspective, with the goal of improving patient centered teamwork. It turns out, that most of the executives, nurses and docs I work with are natural coaches... when they learn to switch their primary focus from getting their individual jobs done, to fulfilling their organizational role as coaches.

Design your coaching role: One physician executive wrote to me, “I think my job would be much easier if all of my 160 physician’s acted like coaches of a team.” She wanted to know how an organization like hers could attract physicians with a coaching mindset. So I shared some of my last week's experience in Montana facilitating a quality collaborative. I had the opportunity to ask a series of questions to a number of physicians, nurses and executives, including, “Where would you be today without coaching?” The ensuing discussing led us back to the beginning... to medical school, nursing school or grad school, where we all realized that the most effective teachers/mentors, were the ones who delivered as coaches. The 100+ Montana leaders continued by validating the overt benefits of coaching - including improved metrics on physician staff relationships, reduced re-work, and a culture of teamwork emerged... which all translated to improved care... not to mention the savings of significant dollars that we lose every day from poor organizational performance. Unfortunately, most of the hospitals they all ended up in didn't emphasize coaching at all. Instead, everything revolved around their jobs. Now that they've become aware of the significant benefits of coaching, beginning with improving patient care, they're making role design (emphasizing their organizational role as coaches), their first priority. It helps that we all inherently know how to coach - we just have to decide to do it... again!

Getting serious about Role Design: Coaches know that building a highly functioning team is a deliberate process. We have systems in place for hiring and evaluations (job description), we have checklists for safety, and process improvement, but we don't have equivalent processes in place for what it takes to understand our roles as coaches... our "role description."

When our clients and audiences realize they can design organizational roles, everything changes. Leaders in Montana understood that they must make this happen throughout their organizations. They realized that designing and implementing a role description is the key to improving patient care.

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.
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Congratulations to the Montana Hospital Association staff for a successful Patient Driven Leadership Champions for Quality Conference. I look forward to continuing to collaborate with many physicians and clinical leaders that are working tirelessly to improve quality not only in their communities but throughout the state.

Billing's MT session video coming soon! 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 Patient Driven Leadership site.

Tip 2: Let's move the conversation forward...

In our first issue, we outlined the business case for all healthcare leaders to take on the role of Coach+Leader:

1.  Patients expect us to work as teams.
2.  Patient centered teams need a coach.
3.  Every leader must have a coaching role.

While many of you noted the simplicity of these points and the clear purpose it offered, a number of you asked us to get a little more definitive about what being a Coach+Leader actually feels like and accomplishes. 

Tip 2:  Let's move the conversation forward...

When we as executives, physicians and nurse leaders focus on our role as coaches, we help our teams solve problems together more effectively, which directly impacts care. And it all begins with acting like a coach.

Think of a coach who had an impact on you? What attributes did he or she demonstrate that you now admire? The positive approach "your" coach shared with you plays an even more important role in the ultimate team sport, healthcare. On the field, good coaches know how to help their team perform at optimum levels, but in healthcare, working at optimum levels hinges on our ability to solve problems together as teams. And as leaders, it's our primary objective to direct our people toward that end.

In healthcare, although it begins with leaders, I've seen the tremendous gains made when physicians begin to treat all of their relationships as coaching opportunities. Here's an example of a "coachable moment". A client recently reported that one of their physicians defused a disruptive conversation between a fellow physician and a staff member by showing him his T.R.U.S.T.E.D. card as an informal reminder. By referring to this coaching tool, he prompted his colleagues to think about their organizational role as a Patient Centered Problem Solving Team, prompting the conversation to shift toward, "What matters most to their patients?"

Bottom line: Coach+Leaders improve team performance by helping everyone understand their role. To request a Coach+Leader card simply reply to this email and visit us on Facebook to share your thoughts.

Visit the Patient Driven Leadership site.

Tip 1: Start thinking as a Coach Leader

Tip 1:  Start thinking as a Coach Leader

1.  Patients expect us to work as teams.
2.  Patient centered teams need a coach.
3.  Every leader must have a coaching role.

So many of our clients tell me that before we started working together, they saw themselves as an executive, administrator, a physician, a nurse etc. Most of them defined themselves by their job descriptions. They shared that their first step to becoming a Coach Leader was to realize that along with their job, they have a role to perform... and that role is to be a coach to everyone they work with.

Begin to think: “I need to approach every conversation as a coach because it is the most effective way to lead.” Coaches help their teams solve problems together.

Visit the Patient Driven Leadership site.