Tag Archives: News

How long past 65 will you work: Where are the next leaders?

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Looking for new ways to improve the performance of your leaders? Join Healthcare Performance Solutions for a free Webinar on the “Coaching Adults in a Professional Setting.” There will be two times to conveniently meet your scheduling needs. Click on the links below to sign up and join us to learn how to turn the odds of success in your favor.

Tuesday Mar 13th – 12:00 -1:00pm (EST)

Click Here to Register
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/483746602

Thursday Mar 15th – 2:00 – 3:00pm (EST)

Click Here to Register
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/334663218

The Leadership Void

83% of today’s leadership positions in Healthcare are between the ages of 35-55.  By 2020 these numbers will change drastically.  Demographics don’t lie.  Eventually the Baby Boomer generation will look to retire.  The total number of potential leaders will NOT be large enough to fill the vacancies of the retiring Baby Boomers.

As seen in the graph below, there will be significantly fewer experienced leaders in the workforce in the near future. This will lead to a competition for this demographic.  The workers that are supposed to be taking over leadership positions will not be ready.  What will happen to your organization?  How will you make up this shortfall?  How long will your current leaders hang on?  How long will you hang on?

The old process was to put people in jobs, give them a chance, and weed out those who couldn’t face the pressure or handle the responsibility.  This laissez-faire leadership development model is broken if the leadership pool is shrinking faster than you can discard marginal candidates.

Structured talent management and superior business practices are the only demonstrated ways to survive this certain leadership void.  Succession Planning should be the result of disciplined Talent Management programs.  Changing tactics to adopt a structured program that will build a Succession Planning Roadmap is going to give your organization a measurable competitive advantage in the challenging dynamics of the Healthcare industry.  Those that grasp these structured concepts will reap the competitive rewards of the early adapter and thrive while others around them wither.

From finding, to hiring, to developing the right leaders so they are available for your organization when you need them, structured talent management that results in pro-active Succession Planning is a superior approach.  Based on measurement, fore-thought, and incisive action, it will dramatically improve your Healthcare organization’s performance as a business.

Healthcare Performance Solutions has a full suite of tools, featuring the industries finest in visual presentations.  The full suite forms a “GPS-like” array of measurement tools that give leaders precise and actionable information about their departments and leaders.  The measurements and resulting actions culminate in our structured and powerfulSuccession Planning Roadmap.

Improving the health of healthcare one organization at a time is our core purpose.  But our business is about people as well as their performance.  So we add on experienced executive coaching to our products.  We believe in the value of coaching and that it improves a leader’s performance, in turn increasing your organizations odds of success.

Visit us on-line at http://healthcareps.com/ to learn about the Eye Chart tools, performance measurement, 100 Day Leadership and Management On-Boarding, Compelling Coaching Conversations, and the Succession Planning Roadmap.

Read any or all of our blogs at blog.rightpeoplerightroles.com

Or give us a call.  We are the most affordable and effective performance and talent management company in Healthcare.  We will help you be successful.

Transparency Challenges for Leaders — How You Can Be More Effective

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Looking for new ways to improve the performance of your leaders? Join Healthcare Performance Solutions for a free Webinar on the “Coaching Adults in a Professional Setting.” There will be two times to conveniently meet your scheduling needs. Click on the links below to sign up and join us to learn how to turn the odds of success in your favor.

Tuesday Mar 13th – 12:00 -1:00pm (EST)

Click Here to Register
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/483746602

Thursday Mar 15th – 2:00 – 3:00pm (EST)

Click Here to Register
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/334663218

Transparency is a powerful, energizing concept.  Sharing information with transparency to all stakeholders is critical when creating a “Healthy” culture.  Incorporating a healthy culture adds to a company’s performance and life expectancy much like living a healthy lifestyle. Logically, a “Healthy” Culture” that demonstrates ownership thinking and behavior can provide better and more consistent care within healthcare organizations. The culture can create the value equivalent of 4% to 12% positive net operating margin in most cases.

Top 10 examples of “Healthy” cultural business practices include:

1. Open and transparent communication
2. No “secrets” rumor environment
3. Constructive dialog
4. High trust, collaboration
5. Effective delegation
6. Innovation
7. Coaching focus for development
8. Structured approach to talent appointment
9. Compelling sense of purpose/mission
10. A passion for exceptional service and caring

However, not all information handled by leaders is designed to be shared with everyone.  It can be uncomfortable by nature when the news is not good.  There may be challenges in deciding where to balance discretion with honesty, and there can be challenges with where you draw the line (how transparent).   In other words, one of the critical factors to consider when sharing information is deciding exactly who the stakeholders are.

In almost all cases, hiding facts, even nuances, from Senior Leadership can have disastrous consequences for both the far-reaching decisions that result, and also personally for the confidence lost in your ability to accurately frame executive decisions.

And you must tell subordinate leaders, who are the lifeblood of an organization, when they could be doing better or the organization’s performance will stagnate and suffer. One crucial feature of healthcare is narrow operating margins.  In such an environment, a company-wide difficulty with honest, constructive feedback can literally spell the difference between success and failure.

Objective measurement can be a frightening thing for people to hear, especially in public, when they are used to hearing they “look marvelous”.  It can be difficult for an organization to constructively manage without dysfunction, especially as they move from an opaque culture to one of translucency and then to transparency.

For example, it could be quite chilling to conduct a climate survey and then provide the entire company with the information as to who complained about what.  Presenting some information as if from a blind source can improve harmony especially if leadership acts on the issue as a serious concern without regard to or appearance of trying to find a source to “blame”.

Information about the relative performance between departments is very important for senior leadership to hear.  However, that same information, if released to a general audience, could hurt morale and further erode performance if one of those departments was struggling.

Individual performance results are best shared with supervisors, the individual leader or employee, and senior management.  It is not necessary for everyone to have access to this personal data as long as enough leadership is involved to ensure there is a consistent standard across the organization.  The exceptions are, naturally, when it is appropriate to praise someone for a job well done. Then you can’t have too many people around to hear this news.

Business practices assessments should be shared openly with everyone.  An honest assessment of the organization’s performance and where it is positioned with respect to competitors in its field, especially when embarking on a campaign to move up in those very rankings is fair to share across the entire company, to initiate a sense of competition and teamwork.  This kind of communication can bring almost a joyous sense of camaraderie to an organization.  You can just imagine the impact that would have on employee engagement.  The company’s vision, purpose, and performance, as a whole, against these public yardsticks are also valuable to share broadly and transparently.

Tools that are powerful in their ability to communicate, can be powerfully motivating and potentially discouraging.  Choosing the right stakeholders with whom to share this information must rest on what decisions need to be made and the impacts of the decisions.

Every one of Healthcare Performance Solutions’ tools is about the visual display of quantifiable information.  Since the power of our approach is “Visual” – it makes transparency “easier” when you decide to share it.

Click here to read about how our tools can improve transparency with judgment. 

Visit us on-line at www.healthcareps.com or www.successprofiles.com.  Read any or all of our blogs at blog.rightpeoplerightroles.com

Or give us a call.  We love to talk about you!

The Performance Management Eye Chart — Part V

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Looking for new ways to improve your Talent Management and Leadership Alignment? Join Success Profiles and Healthcare Performance Solutionsfor a free Webinar on the “Key Elements of Leadership Performance and Talent Management.” There will be two times to conveniently meet your scheduling needs. Click on the links below to sign up and join us to learn how you we can take your organization the next level.

Tuesday Feb 28th – 12:00 -1:00pm (EST)

Click Here to Register
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/452022386

Thursday Mar 1st – 2:00 – 3:00pm (EST)

Click Here to Register
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/191420178

THE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT EYE CHART

Performance Management Eye Chart

Being a leader is difficult work. In some departments it is very difficult work. In others it is moderately so, but all leaders contribute to your organization’s success. Successful organizations make a great effort to match the abilities of its leaders to the difficulty of the role in which they are being placed. Putting the right people in the right roles is one of the most powerful actions an organization can use to guarantee its own success.
The Performance Management Eye Chart (PMEC) is an inclusive, incisive, broad and detailed look at an organization. Objective performance rankings are color-coded in the PMEC. The combination of color-coded ranks and specific performance measurements shows how individual departments contribute to the overall performance both accurately and at a glance.

It is hard to always get leadership alignment right, especially without help from a tool like the PMEC; the first step to getting alignment right is to recognize, then admit, when you have succeeded and when you have not. The very best way to make that recognition is through objective measurement! The second difficult challenge is taking action on the knowledge. Objective measurement gives senior leadership the confidence to take action earlier, when it can make the most difference in charting a better course for the organization’s success.

This means taking early action is an incredibly effective skill, making the Performance Management Eye Chart an extreme value. Especially in tight economic times, it is essential to not shut down performance measurement activities, but to make sure the organization invests in products that deliver out-sized value. The PMEC is the premier performance measurement tool in Healthcare, and is remarkably affordable.

Only through measurement can an organization truly determine how a broad spectrum of departments are performing and contributing to the operation’s bottom line. Through measurement, each department and leader can be held accountable and the organization’s critical leadership talent apportioned where it will do the most good. Without it, we are all, more or less, sophisticated guessers; a great game to play when things are going well and a very uncomfortable place to be when performance starts to deteriorate. You can see it, feel it, but only wonder why things aren’t quite the same anymore . . . .

ODDS OF SUCCESS CHART

Odds of Success Chart

What are the 7 typical appointment mistakes that organizations make?

  1. Appointing a B level person into a complex management role based upon their tenure period or technical competency (clinical/financial expertise). The ability to lead others does not correlate with tenure or technical expertise. Odds of Success = 45%.
  2. Appointing a lower level “supervisor” into a manager position in a bottom quartile (failing RED) department out of convenience. They are usually unsuccessful because of their lack of management experience (higher level of responsibility); they tend to be part of the status quo culture, and they are less likely to take action on the low performers or make tough decisions. Odds of Success = < 20%.
  3. Not recognizing that a complex department in the bottom quartile (failing RED) will require a “Turnaround” specialist who is used to making tough decisions quickly. Most B level managers do well in maintenance roles. A “turnaround” is a completely different, very challenging situation where doing what’s right for the department and stakeholders outweighs the personal interests of an individual. Odds of Success for a B level leader = < 20%.
  4. Waiting too long to act and failing to set hard, measurable target performance expectations with milestone dates on the first-year road-map for a new manager. “As goes the first 90 days, so goes the remainder of the year.” If new managers don’t make the heavy-lifting decisions, especially dealing with negative, disruptive, poor performers, immediately, turning around the department takes longer, is usually more painful, and has a lower overall success rate. Odds of Success = < 20%.
  5. Not considering leadership talent or ability. Assigning a C or D level leader in any role has low Odds of Success. The average C player has Odds of Success of 30% and a D player has odds of 15%. The overall success rate for a combined C or D level leader is that they have a 25% Odds of Success.
  6. Low acceptance rate of a new leader/manager by the staff because of an “old school” mindset that tenure in the department is a qualifier or even prerequisite for appointment. Some departments (and people within the departments) are unforgiving when it comes to a manager’s qualifications to lead in the role. The behavioral pattern is to “chew up and spit out” the “substitute teacher” managers as soon as possible. It can be extremely difficult for some people to handle this situation long enough to succeed. Odds of Success = < 33%
  7. Ignoring Competency Alignment. Sometimes, even the most talent leaders (A players) can be out of alignment technically, business-model wise, behaviorally, or in maturity or experience. The most common situation is insufficient technical competence and/or a business-model deficiency where a competent leader in one department/function cannot be respected as a leader in a totally different area of expertise. They simply won’t know what to do in difficult situations. The other common situation is a poor cultural or behavioral fit, where the culture of the organization is too dominant for the person to adjust to or the maturity level of the leader is too low to adapt to what will be most effective. Odds of Success = < 33%.

The Performance Management Eye Chart is the ultimate tool for measuring the performance of every department in your organization and putting it on one intelligible, accessible page. It is based on multiple sources, giving it stability and accuracy. It is actionable, and it is the first step towards aligning talented leaders into your organization’s most difficult roles.

Get one for yourself! Give us a call about what the PMEC can mean for your organization. . . We love to talk about you!