"Well CEO" Check-Up
Nine Principles for Taking Your Organization From Good... To Great... To Greater
Published Date: 04/21/2005“Well CEO” Check-Up: Nine Principles for Taking Your Health Care Organization from Good . . . to Great . . . to Greater
A new book sets forth Nine PrinciplesSM guaranteed to increase customer satisfaction,
improve employee productivity, reduce turnover, support growth,
and foster bottom-line results.
Gulf Breeze, FL—As a health care CEO, you face enormous pressures. Dealing with regulations, financial challenges, and a tangled web of administrative red tape can keep you from focusing on your real job: creating a hospital that attracts the best employees and earns rave reviews from patients. You know your hospital is good, but you want to make it even better. If only you could stop fighting fires long enough to make the dream a reality! What you need is a set of implement-right-now remedies— proven to work by an expert who has walked in your shoes—that could help you transform your hospital from a good place to work and heal to an excellent one.
Quint Studer, a nationally acclaimed health care management educator and coach for leaders, has such a set of remedies and he’s used them to move many organizations to excellence. In fact, in his 20-year career as a top hospital administrator, he led two hospitals in different states to the top 99 percentile in employee and patient satisfaction. He thoroughly explains his approach in his new book, Hardwiring Excellence: Purpose, Worthwhile Work, Making a Difference (Fire Starter Publishing, 2004, ISBN: 0-9749986-0-5, $28.00).
“I think of my book as a ‘Well CEO’ check-up,” explains Studer. “It’s not written for CEOs of organizations that are in trouble, but for CEOs whose organizations are doing well but that want to move up to great. I firmly believe that every hospital can be Fire Starter Publishing ~ 913 Gulf Breeze Parkway, Suite 7 ~ PO Box 730 ~ Gulf Breeze, FL ~ 32562-0730 the kind of place where people work with passion and a sense of purpose and go the extra mile to make patients happy. And the CEOs I work with share this belief. They just need a simple set of turn-key tools and techniques to help make their vision a reality.”
In Studer’s new book, he clarifies the intimate connection between happy employees and happy patients. By focusing on employees, he writes, you create a culture of service and operational excellence that naturally leads to those beyond-the-call-of-duty moments that are hallmarks of extraordinary patient satisfaction. Furthermore, when you hardwire the right behaviors, tools, and techniques into every level of your organization, the identity of individual leaders no longer matters. Excellence is ingrained into the very culture of your organization, and it perpetuates itself.
In Hardwiring Excellence, Studer examines the five pillars for achieving excellence in health care—People, Service, Quality, Finance and Growth—and lays out the Nine PrinciplesSM to service and operational excellence that every health care organization should follow in its quest to be the best.
Principle 1: Commit to Excellence
You commit to excellence by setting measurable goals—or desired results—for each of the five pillars of excellence. The best part of aligning goals this way is that the pillars work together synergistically. Say you have a goal under your Quality Pillar of reducing the occurrence of inpatient pressure ulcers. Your data shows that typically 5 percent of patients will acquire pressure ulcers during an inpatient stay and the cost to treat each pressure ulcer can exceed $20,000. So along with improving quality of care, a commitment to excellence in preventing pressure ulcers will result in substantial cost reductions under the Finance Pillar. See how you positively impact two pillars with one strike for excellence?
Principle 2: Measure the Important Things
Simply stated, what gets measured gets done. Often, top management places greater emphasis on Finance than the other pillars. But Studer says that great CEOs focus as much on the People, Service, and Quality aspects of their organizations as they do on the Finance Pillar. In fact, a focus on People, Service, and Quality creates better financial results and higher growth in market share. The more often you measure the important things—like employee satisfaction, patient satisfaction, and progress—the more likely you are to reward successes and correct deficiencies.
“I often find there is a temptation to focus on the patients who ranked their experience as poor on patient satisfaction evaluations,” adds Studer. “Instead, I recommend you focus on those patients who rated you good to learn how you can move them to very good. One North Carolina hospital I know asks patients and their families up front what it would take for them to be completely satisfied. If the answer is an extra pillow or coffee that is hot, the hospital makes sure they get it.”
Principle 3: Build a Culture around Service
You probably already know that it is critical to tell patients, staff, and physicians why you do things. Studer reminds excellence-oriented CEOs to teach their staff to “connect the dots” for people. For instance, incorporate “Key Words at Key Times” into your patient care protocol. If your hospital has curtains between beds and a nurse walks into a room and pulls the curtains closed without saying anything, the patient might think the nurse is either being rude or hiding something. If the nurse simply says, “Mrs. Medley, we want to make sure you have privacy here at our hospital. Let me close those curtains for you,” the patient will see you as a hospital that cares. It may seem like a small thing, but using “Key Words at Key Times” can make all the difference in the world in a patient’s perception of care.
Principle 4: Create and Develop Leaders
You no doubt know that great organizations must make leadership training a priority, but it’s a point that bears repeating. In his book Studer offers an anecdote about a CEO who was having trouble with employee turnover. Studer suggested taking leaders off-site for a couple of days every three months or so to train them on employee retention. When the CEO said the leaders didn’t have time to leave the hospital for that long, Studer asked exactly how high the turnover was. “It’s 33 percent,” said the CEO. “They may be too busy interviewing new employees!” Studer replied. “Sometimes, because we don’t deal with the cause, we get overwhelmed with the symptoms,” Studer writes. “Leadership training is at the heart of why employees want to come to work and why they want to stay. People don’t leave their jobs. They leave the work environment. The majority of employees leave their position because their relationship with their supervisor is not what they want it to be . . . The supervisor holds the key to high employee retention.”
Principle 5: Focus on Employee Satisfaction
Studer reminds readers that one of the most important things you can do to increase employee satisfaction is “Rounding for Outcomes.” This means walking around the hospital and interacting with your team. Focus on the positive and ask employees who has been helpful to them. If your employees compliment another department, make sure to relay that to the appropriate department’s leader. Of course, this doesn’t mean focus only on the positives. If the system is broken, you need to know about it. That means listening to employee problems—and fixing them.
During rounding at one hospital where Studer worked, a nurse told him that her team needed a copy machine. So administration got copy machines for every nursing unit, and, as a bonus, decided to get rid of the keys. In fact, they had a big key-smashing ceremony in the parking lot. One of the Sisters of Saint Casimir drove a piece of heavy equipment over the pile of keys, accompanied by employee cheers from the windows. “This wasn’t about getting rid of keys,” writes Studer. “It was about creating more trust in the organization. And it started with a simple question during rounding.”
Principle 6: Build Individual Accountability
It’s no secret that the most desirable employees are the ones who act like owners. Studer points out that a hospital cafeteria is a great place to observe ownership. If employees leave trays on the table, they are renters, not owners. To foster a sense of ownership, he suggests that administrators:
- Involve employees in the interviewing process. Encourage them to get involved in hiring, training, orientating, and becoming role models for new employees.
- Work on retention of new employees. Check in with them often over the first 90 days to gauge satisfaction and expectations and to help smooth the transition.
- Harvest intellectual capital through a Bright Ideas program that encourages employees to contribute innovative and quality ideas.
Principle 7: Align Behaviors with Goals and Values
This principle speaks to taking a tough stance when it comes to raising your expectations of your organization’s leaders. In order to ensure that your employees have a great place to work, that physicians enjoy a supportive environment to practice, and patients receive exemplary care, you must take steps to ensure that the goals and values of the organization are aligned with the behavior of its leaders. In other words, walk the talk. And the place to begin is with your management team. To that end, you might consider:
- Adopting an objective, measurable leader evaluation tool and hold leaders accountable for the results.
- Being prepared to reward leaders for a job well done.
- Demonstrating a sustained commitment to training and coaching leaders; set them up for success.
Principle 8: Communicate at All Levels
To achieve excellence, everyone in an organization—from the vice presidents to the cashiers in the cafeteria—must have the same information about the organization’s goals, direction, and progress. Studer suggests the following ways to rev up your communications:
- Manage up by communicating positively with your boss about his or her value and accomplishments, how well your staff is doing, and how well other departments are doing.
- Communicate with the entire organization staff through regularly scheduled employee forums. Use the forums as an opportunity to really engage, teach, and align the staff.
- Harness the power of storytelling. Every health care organization has heroes— people who go above and beyond the call of duty to care for a patient or make a difference in a distraught family member’s life. Learn about your own heroes and pass along their stories.
Principle 9: Recognize and Reward Success
“When I talk to CEOs a year after they have started implementing our recommendations for hardwiring excellence, I like to ask them, ‘What’s the biggest lesson you have learned?’” writes Studer. “They always say, ‘The power of the Employee Thank You Notes.’ To many, the thought of sending employee thank you notes seems too simple to actually make an impact—or they consider it insincere— but it is neither. It is powerful.” A few tips:
- Send exemplary employees handwritten, personal thank you notes.
- Ask managers to send you regular e-mails pointing out employees who they think deserve a compliment. Send a few handwritten lines to the employee’s home, making sure to be specific about what the employee did, how it came to your attention, and why it has positively impacted the organization.
- Recognize and reward physicians with a personal note of appreciation. Obviously, doctors have to do tough things every day and they do appreciate recognition and support from the staff and administration.
“When a nurse gets a wheelchair ramp built at a patient’s home, or a cafeteria cashier takes a patient’s clothes home to wash—well, those are the kinds of moments that can’t be mandated,” explains Studer. “These stories reveal the culture that develops when people love their jobs and truly feel that their work is worthwhile. That’s the kind of culture you get when you hardwire the right behaviors, tools, and techniques throughout your organization. It doesn’t matter who your leaders are, because everyone is self-motivated. Everyone is committed to doing his or her best. Physicians, nurses, maintenance people . . . everyone.”
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About the Author:
Quint Studer, a former hospital president and 20-year health care veteran, is founder and CEO of Studer Group, headquartered in Gulf Breeze, FL. An executive coaching firm and national learning lab, Studer Group is devoted to teaching tools and processes that organizations use to achieve sustained focus on Service and Operational Excellence. Partner organizations see clear results in the arenas of higher employee retention, greater customer satisfaction, healthy financials and growing market share, and improvements in various other quality indicators.
A nationally recognized health care management thought leader, Studer was named one of the “Top 100 Most Powerful People” by Modern Healthcare. Studer has devoted his professional career to helping health care organizations become world-class leaders in Service and Operational Excellence. He has contributed to features in USA Today and Inc. magazine, and has authored in-depth feature articles on consumerism, service excellence, organizational alignment, and communicating quality to major health care trade journals.
Studer’s 20-year career in health care management includes positions as COO of Holy Cross Hospital in Chicago and president of the Baptist Hospital, Inc. in Pensacola, FL. As a result of Studer’s leadership, Baptist Hospital was awarded the prestigious Quality Cup by USA Today and the Rochester Institute of Technology. Studer led both hospitals to the top 99 percentile in employee and patient satisfaction as compared to hospitals nationwide in an independent health care survey.
Recently, Quint received the HFMA’s Helen Yerger/L. Vann Seawall Best Article Award for 2003-2004. This award—given for his article titled “The Value of Employee Retention,” published in the January 2004 issue of HFM—honors outstanding contributions to professional literature in the field of health care financial management.
Studer received B.A. and M.A. degrees in education from the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. He has the honor of serving on the Board of Directors of the 32,000-member Healthcare Financial Management Association, a national professional organization of CFOs and finance executives in health care.
Studer is also the author of the newly-released 101 Answers to Questions Leaders Ask (Fire Starter Publishing, 2005, ISBN: 0-9749986-2-1, $16.00).
About the Book:
Hardwiring Excellence: Purpose, Worthwhile Work, Making a Difference (Fire Starter Publishing, 2004, ISBN: 0-9749986-0-5, $28.00) is available at bookstores nationwide, major online booksellers, or directly from the publisher by calling (866) 354-3473. Copies also can be purchased online through the Studer Group website at www.studergroup.com.
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