Leading a healthcare organization requires effective, intentional focus on the Four Cornerstones of Healthcare. If we – as leaders – want to transform our unhealthy organization into a healthy, healing one, these four areas must have our attention.
These four cornerstones are Culture (People), Quality (Systems), Finance (Resources), and Governance (Accountability). These cornerstones create the strong infrastructure that maintains healthcare. Each is interdependent to each other. As a leader, these cornerstones are your main drive and priority.
The Cornerstone of Culture
If you ask many healthcare leaders how much time they dedicate to culture development in their organization, the answer may surprise you. Often, time spent by leadership on culture assessment, cultivation, and development is a low percent. Traditional healthcare over the years did not make organizational culture a topic of discussion or priority. The cultural transformation was not recognized as something needed.
Healthcare Education and Leadership
Historically respected, healthcare education has not addressed it as an important part of leadership’s role. There seems to be an assumption that culture takes care of itself. In this mindset lies a major misconception. Traditional healthcare culture has been mainly top-down. Often, culture became more anarchical – a culture of “us” against “them”. The “us” consisted of the providers and employees; “them” takes the form of administration.
The Great Divide
Leadership and management were perceived by many to have their own closed club, or ivory tower. This culture mindset formed a great divide. When there was communication between “us” and “them”, it was a monologue of goals and objectives that one or the other party wanted to accomplish. Trust is an issue in the “us/them” world. Decisions are mostly made in silos and others outside the upper circle were rarely asked for input.
Lack of Priority
Serving as a leader in a traditional healthcare culture in the past years, I experienced firsthand some of the leadership gaps faced. Minimal discussion took place in regard to the type of culture we wanted to create by senior leadership or board members. In fact, cultural discussions were rarely part of the agendas or on the table. Corporate values were sometimes listed within the mission and vision statements, but not discussed beyond that.
We talked about our employees and work environment when we needed to fix a problem like patient dissatisfaction or low employee morale. We did not address culture in a systematic comprehensive manner. The topic on culture seemed to be an add-on of less value and never a priority. It seemed to be lost in importance with so many other competing needs.
Focus on How to Utilize People
If you asked healthcare leaders how much time they feel they have to spend on culture development, they may say “little” to “none”. As I reflect on my early years as a senior leader, I realize that we mostly extinguishing fires to the point that we were not aware of the answer inside our walls as part of a sustainable solution to extinguish fires.
Many hours we focused on how to fix people instead of how to utilize people to help us lead the organization more effectively and find collaborative solutions. The answer to healthcare excellence was under our nose, right in the room. As leaders we were not able then to make a connection that sustainable excellence grows from the inside out. The Cornerstone of Culture (People) was missing.
The Culture Baseline Survey
Interested to see how your organization can make improvements around culture? Take part in our FREE Culture Baseline Survey. The results of your self-administered work culture survey offer a unique and valuable perspective on the success, challenges, and opportunities your organization has in taking the next steps toward organizational cultural excellence.
