According to Quint Studer, founder of the Studer Group, the success of a hospital is dependent on leadership's performance in three core areas — alignment, action and accountability. In order to improve the performance of a hospital, leaders must assess themselves and their facilities in these three areas and then work aggressively to improve any gaps.
Mr. Studer discusses each of the three areas, provides questions that can be used to survey employees and assess an organizational performance and offers tips to improve performance in each area.
Alignment
Successful alignment means that all levels of hospital staff share the same goals and understanding of the healthcare marketplace. According to Mr. Studer, many hospital CEOs see the external environment differently than frontline supervisors because leadership is constantly looking to the future while frontline supervisors are more often focused on the immediate needs of their departments.
"There can be a gap here. The rest of the organization may not understand the need for urgency at the same level as the C-suite sees it. The C-suite knows about the challenges facing the industry, but they fail to communicate that information to frontline managers and employees so others understand the impact of the changes and actions that need to be taken," says Mr. Studer.
A recent survey by Studer Group asked C-suite executives and frontline supervisors at several health systems the following question: "If leaders in your organization continue to perform exactly as they do today, will your results over the next five years be much worse, somewhat worse, better, the same or much better?" The survey found that the majority of senior leaders felt that their organization would be much worse if nothing changed, while 63 percent of frontline supervisors thought that the organization would be perform about the same.
These results indicate that many hospital leaders need to better job communicating and explaining the external environment to their staff through regular, transparent and cascading communication, Mr. Studer says. He recommends that internal newsletters include information about the healthcare environment, including summaries of reform and other external pressures and the impact of these pressures on their facility. Leaders should then ask their frontline supervisors if they read the newsletter, which can often be done when rounding on the various supervisors, and encourage each supervisor to ask questions about the future of the hospital.
Action
Action refers to the ability of the organization to respond to pressures from the external environment effectively, says Mr. Studer. Leaders can assess their organization's ability to take proper action by asking questions such as: "Are our leaders getting the training they need to ensure they have the skill sets needed to respond to the external operating environment?" and "How well does current leadership prepare you to be a leader?"
Hospitals with survey results that reveal potential gaps in these areas should begin by ensuring that their leaders and supervisors receive adequate training on running a meeting, how to select, hire and retain the best talent, how to develop leaders and how to improve or fire low-performers. All of these skills are critical to ensuring a hospital can successfully respond to a difficult external environment, says Mr. Studer.
Action also includes the ability of an organization to move best practices from one area to another. "This is just an overall weakness for many hospitals. We are able to spot a high-quality leader, but we are unable to transfer his or her best practices to other areas," says Mr. Studer.
Organizations must identify these best practices, break them down and then ensure that leaders in other areas of the hospitals have both the training and the willingness to implement them in their own departments or service lines.
Accountability
Accountability means holding leaders and employees responsible for job performance. Research by the Studer Group suggests that healthcare organizations over-evaluate employees, meaning supervisors provide evaluations that overstate the employee's level of performance. This practice inhibits organizations truly evaluating employees and makes it more difficult for organizations to fire employees who fail to perform, says Mr. Studer.
"In a recent survey we completed, we found that supervisors report that, on average, 1.8 of the employees under their supervision were not meeting performance expectations. However, only 0.8 of their employees were in some sort of performance improvement or counseling program," says Mr. Studer. "How can we expect high-quality organizational performance if we have a group of employees with performance issues that are not being addressed?"
Hospitals should ask employees questions such as "How well does your organization's evaluations hold people accountable?" and "Are evaluations objective and not subjective?" to assess performance in this area.
A strong evaluation should use objective measures to asses leaders in up to five key areas — quality, expense management/revenue enhancement, employee management/development, service line growth and service, says Mr. Studer.
Quint Studer is a recognized leader and change agent in the healthcare industry and has more than 20 years of healthcare experience. Learn more about assessing and improving these three core areas in Mr. Studer's new book, "Straight A Leadership: Alignment, Action & Accountability."