posted by admin at 2:02 pm
A client of ours recently completed our Managerial Quality program. We worked with them up front and connected a few times during the year. They had great results. Here’s the link to an article about their achievements from Nurse.com.
Our clients tend to get results like this, but that’s not the point of this entry.
The point of this post is that most of what we have been able to do to create sustainable improvement at the frontline is to create a systematic way for managers to learn how to lead their units. Achievement and accountability are much easier to attain when managers have simple principles and tools they can employ to become effective leaders.
This is a no-brainer, I know. But I’m continually surprised at how seldom organizations have a systematic way of creating ways for new managers to learn on the job. (I often hear dreams for big educational programs, but we’ve found that they’re both impractical and ineffective.)
Managers must, of course, use good judgement. To make best use of that judgement, though, we’ve found that simple, standard work for managers is essential.
posted by admin at 10:18 pm
Our colleague, Dolly Bellhouse, just had a column published in the For Your Advantage e-newsletter. The newsletter’s publisher, Jerry Pogue, introduced her column by saying “Ms. Bellhouse shares that when an organization is in a crisis mode, remarkable things can be accomplished if everyone pulls together. However, when an organization operates all the time in a crisis mode, the performance gap can widen, and as it widens, managerial anxiety again spikes. A continuous “tough get going” mantra will fuel the performance gap cycle. Management teams need to learn how to break their performance gap cycle with not only new thinking, but new actions and experiences.
Read her column at http://www.foryouradvantage.com and if you read this after October 3, 2011, you can find her article at the same link in the archives, look for the Volume 10, Issue 18 – September 19, 2011 issue.
posted by admin at 7:34 am
Lately, I’ve begun to point out to leadership groups face an important and persistent problem that requires their attention.
The easiest way to say this is planning/initiatives will always outpace the ability of an organization to change.
Here’s a graphical representation of what I mean.
On the one hand, this graph represents a predicament: the gap between expectations and execution causes increased demands on monitoring and “educating” or forcing “buy in.” These become activities that occupy much of leaders’ time. On the other hand, this predicament causes a sense of hopelessness or cynicism on the part of workers. I consistently hear healthcare professionals bemoan the fact that they feel “scattered,” that they feel like they have “a million initiatives.”
I contend that leaders must match their initiatives to the pace of change. Not because it’s morally right, but because leaders have no other option if they wish to succeed.
posted by admin at 8:40 am
This blog entry hints at what we’ve developed (and continue to improve) over the last several years.
Let me start with what may be two controversial assumptions:
- Managing well, like other skills, is acquired through practice.
- The vast majority of success in executing key strategic initiatives lies in the hands of frontline managers and their staff (plus docs). (See the opening to Fred Hassan’s “The Frontline Advantage”
In the same way that we invest in understanding clinical quality, our group has developed a relatively simple program that enables managers to continually develop “managerial quality.” High quality managerial work is characterized by three things.
High quality managers
- actively engage staff and docs as they create sustained improvement along the dimensions of quality and cost;
- understand how to lead and coach their people–rather than merely “telling” or “implementing”; and
- know how to translate key initiatives into the daily work of them and their staff.
This post is getting long, but I can tell you that we’ve been surprised at how even the most “difficult” managers thrive when they get a chance to learn and teach what they’re learning. Managing no longer amounts to doing a staffing matrix, defending a budget, and refereeing fights among staff members. It becomes satisfying, generative work.
