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.