Becker's Hospital Review

Executive Briefing: Selecting Top Talent 30 Sponsored by Talent Wins – It's That Simple: 6 Ways to Ensure You Have the Team to Succeed By Bryan Warren, Manager, Healthcare Solutions, Select International A ll hospital leaders face the same pressures and challenges: reduce costs, standardize practices, risk sharing, consolidation, information technology implementation, physician integration and the need to provide "value" to the healthcare consumer. Why do some hospitals succeed while others fail? There are scores of books on how to adopt the Toyota Production System; no shortage of research on process changes that will eliminate hospital-acquired infections; and plenty of experts who know how to reduce supply chain costs or improve patient satisfaction scores. What differentiates hospitals that accomplish these goals from those that do not? A sports analogy: In football, there are no mysterious schemes or strategies that can't be examined and understood. More often than not, between two well-coached teams, the one with better blockers, tacklers and players with the talent to execute, will win. Successful hospitals do not have exclusive access to secret software products or strategies. They do have more leaders, physicians and staff who can adapt, innovate, work in teams, solve difficult problems, perform and deploy proven strategies and technologies. It really is just this simple. The difference between success and failure Research, data and observation confirm it. Successful organizations have teams that display certain behaviors. Organizations that are able to find, hire, develop and retain people who can perform, succeed. Those that don't, struggle. When programs fail, it is because key individuals fail to demonstrate critical behaviors. Why does a hospital struggle to eliminate central line infections even though it adopts identical protocols proven successful at another hospital? Is it a lack of software or the group's technical skills or knowledge? No. The failure is that people on the team do not have the ability to collaborate, to manage the people involved, to adapt, to innovate, to handle pressure, and to influence others. Same problem, same facts, same situation, but different people. The relevant variable is talent. Talent as a top priority Does your organization dedicate sufficient time, energy and resources to building the team? Healthcare, generally, is woefully behind the rest of the world when it comes to using deliberate talent strategies. Think again about our football analogy. Winning teams commit resources to finding and developing talent — all year round. Scouts scour the college ranks. Teams know with great specificity what attributes they are seeking. Strengths are leveraged and weaknesses addressed. Players are put in positions where they have the best chance to succeed. Players that develop stay and progress. Those that don't are replaced. Nothing is more important to a winning program than its approach to talent, and it is reflected in its priorities. In many hospitals, human resources is still thought of as an administrative function. It's only recently that some hospitals have given HR a seat at the senior leadership table. Talent strategies of successful organizations 1. Define the behaviors that will drive your culture. Most hospitals spend a fair amount of energy developing vision and mission statements, and then a list of values. The challenge is in "operationalizing" these values. How do you link every job to these values? How does a physician, a nurse, a manager or a transporter, demonstrate, for instance, teamwork, collaboration, adaptability, caring or integrity? The culture of your organization is not defined by the values on your website. It is defined by the behaviors of individuals, and the behaviors that are reinforced and displayed in the workforce, as a whole. This requires work one level below defining values — defining specific behaviors that are to be expected — and that leads to the outcomes you desire. Successful organizations define the specific behaviors at each level of the organization that will lead to, for instance, patient-centered care. A word of caution: As important as this is, it's an endeavor that can very easily become all consuming and grow to be unwieldy. That being said, how can you have a patient-centered culture if you have not defined what patient-centric behaviors you expect from physicians or nurses or senior leaders? 2. Select better leaders — at all levels. Successful organizations identify and develop individuals with leadership potential. This is a relatively new concept for hospitals. Traditionally, a physician who is vocal, productive, influential and perhaps academically prolific rises to a leadership position. It's been common to make our best nurse a nurse-manager. This in spite of the fact that success as a clinician not only does not ensure success as a leader, but traditional healthcare training and development often discourage the sort of collaboration, adaptability and servant leadership that is needed today. Rarely was serious thought given to understanding the behavioral competencies that predict success in a leadership role in the organization. Even less common has been an attempt to objectively evaluate those competencies either for promotion or as the basis of a developmental plan. Fortunately, more hospitals and systems are now committing resources to identifying and developing leaders. They use their performance management program to identify those with leadership potential and use structured leadership development to build their next class of leaders. Hospitals have been particularly slow to adopt executive level selection strategies used by other industries. The vast majority of medium to large sized companies use some form of structured executive assessment process to select senior leaders. By contrast, even in a time when we are asking more of leaders, many healthcare organizations have ignored succession planning and still make placement decisions based on nothing but intuition. 3. Increase your odds; use the science of selection. You know that today's healthcare challenges require a workforce that is patient-focused,

• Cover