Committing to Tomorrow's Leaders Today

Our company, Atlantic Health System (AHS), is the owner and operator of two major hospitals and, with over 10,000 employees, one of New Jersey's largest employers. We are honored by the talent of our employees and they in turn seem to be rather proud to work here, as evidenced by our enviable engagement scores and retention rates (upwards of 95%). In fact, AHS was just recently named for the third consecutive year by Fortune magazine as one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For®.

Given the healthcare industry's evolving regulatory environment and the declining patient volumes we're seeing in our state, delivering the highest level of patient care and satisfaction has become more critical than ever. Of course with hospitals, like all other services businesses, happy employees tend to lead to happy customers (patients). Therefore AHS views high employee satisfaction and engagement as mission critical.

We accomplish these high levels by acknowledging that people want to accomplish great things and be recognized for doing so...and not just with pay increases. They want the tools and opportunities to be successful. Research shows that people view opportunities to take on new challenges and more responsibility as more important than any other factor when it comes to career satisfaction. This not only improves an individual's career by helping them acquire knowledge and skills, but also helps the company to identify and cultivate tomorrow's leaders.

This last point has become even more important to our organization in light of the fact that a significant portion of our senior leadership is expected to retire in the next couple of years. To prepare for this inevitable change, last year we embarked on a new leadership development program to prepare our staff for current and future leadership challenges. We wanted something more personally engaging and reflective of AHS's culture and priorities than an off-the-shelf program. Therefore we partnered with WJM Associates to deliver their customized Leadership Discovery Process (LDP)™ for 20 of our officers and directors. Rather than a conventional classroom or software-based program that some organizations rely on to teach leadership skills, the LDP™ was tailored for each individual participant, focusing on the individual's strengths and opportunities for development in relation to AHS's identified core leadership competencies.

While Lynn Turner, AHS's Head of HR/OD, and I were intent on creating a developmental experience that was highly engaging at the individual level, we also wanted to avoid the cost and lack of organizational "leverage" associated with the individual, uncoordinated executive coaching engagements that our organization had employed in the past. We also wanted a process with clear measures of success. Here's what our LDP™ process looked like:

Our WJM Account Director, Tracy Duberman, selected a cadre of exceptional WJM executive coaches who interviewed each participant and their manager and administered an online personality assessment to the executive. Next an online "360-degree" survey was sent to each participant's manager, peers and direct reports, customized by WJM for our identified core leadership competencies.

The results of the interviews, assessments and surveys were summarized and delivered to the participants by the coaches in feedback sessions with them and their managers. During these individual conversations, an action plan focusing on the 2 or 3 most important developmental opportunities was agreed upon for each executive.

For the next two months, the participant and his or her coach met to explore strategies for meeting these developmental goals. During this time, our WJM Account Director, Tracy Duberman, facilitated regular sessions with our coaches during which predominant leadership developmental themes were identified and discussed. As a result, WJM designed specific content for group workshops for the participants on subjects such as Developing Your Direct Reports and High Impact Communications Training, which allows us to provide further high-priority and cost-effective development to our leaders.

One year since program kick-off, and now nearing the end of Phase 2 of the LDP™ with an additional 12 leaders at Atlantic Health System, we have been very happy with the result. The participating executives have made significant progress toward identifying and achieving leadership development goals that resonate with the individuals and are aligned with AHS's leadership and succession objectives. In a follow-up survey, 95% of the participants report that the LDP™ process strongly helped them improve their self-awareness regarding their strengths and developmental opportunities and make meaningful progress towards attaining their goals. By this point the cadre of WJM executive coaches working as AHS coaches are intimately familiar with our unique culture, are on top of organizational developments and changes, and understand the function of coaching within the company's succession management and talent developmental efforts. We've been very happy to utilize these same coaches in various initiatives outside the LDP™ program, including on-boarding new leaders into key senior roles at the company.

We are planning on continuing the LDP™ program through 2011 and expanding it to other groups including our Physician Leaders, a special area of focus for WJM (see the article Developing Physician Leaders Today below). After all, we believe that the best way to get our next generations of leaders to make a long-term commitment to Atlantic Health System is for Atlantic Health System to make a long-term commitment to them.

Dr. Smith had been the Vice President of Medical Affairs of an integrated health system for two years. A highly skilled clinician with an MBA, one day Dr. Smith found himself seriously stuck. Blind-sided, he was passed over for a plum new leadership position. The feedback he received was that something was still missing. He wondered, "What went wrong?"

Healthcare delivery today requires a fundamentally different approach - and a new breed of physician leader that can rally around new requirements resulting from changes in healthcare financing, physician reporting requirements, standards for Accountable Care Organizations, clinical process improvements and team-based care. Today, physician leader are being measured by the results they achieve; the value, or efficiency with which they achieve good outcomes; and, improvements in performance resulting from a focus on teamwork through superior coordination, information sharing, and teaming across disciplines. Chief Medical Officers, Chairmen of Departments, Vice Presidents of Medical Affairs, and other physician leaders must rally around these new requirements and bring teams of clinical and administrative leaders together. This article identifies the top challenges facing physician executives; leadership behaviors that successful physician executives exhibit to combat these challenges; and, identifies a learning paradigm, the 70/20/10 rule, for developing new competencies.

PHYSICIAN LEADERSHIP CHALLENGES: WHAT'S NEW FOR 2011?
WJM Associates' research with a sample of 52 physician executives from the American College of Physician Executives revealed several leadership challenges resulting from the changing US healthcare landscape. The top five cited include new challenges for physician executives:

1. Identifying and communicating metrics to define physician "value" to patients and health partners
2. Understanding clinical systems thinking and applying the concepts to new models of care delivery
3. Communicating effectively to engage physicians and other healthcare providers to work as a high performance team
4. Employing patient-centered clinical integration
5. Leading culture change rooted in trust between physicians and the health systems they support

4 CRITICAL LEADERSHIP COMPETENCY CLUSTERS FOR TODAY'S CHALLENGES
For decades, studies have been conducted in corporate America which identify the key behaviors of successful leaders in multiple industries and job categories. Most widely accepted models include some dimensions of impact and influence, team leadership, initiative and team development. Given the emerging insights about the needs and challenges of physician executives, we reviewed the literature on top executive leadership behaviors to identify the behaviors that successful physician leaders ought to exhibit to navigate the rocky waters of healthcare reform. Our research reveals that effective physician leadership requires competence in four main leadership areas:

 

 

 

Leading Self

• Self Awareness - Recognizing one's emotions and their effects, knowing one's strengths and limitations
• Self Management - Ability to manage emotions and impulses, taking responsibility for personal performance
• Self Development- Demonstrating commitment to personal development

Leading Others

• Building Effective Teams - Understanding the individual competencies required for success in the key positions on the care coordination team; building trust, commitment and alignment with patient and organizational goals
• Developing, Communicating and Inspiring - Creating and communicating a compelling and inspired vision or sense of core purpose, recognizing and leveraging team members' strengths and providing developmental opportunities.

Leading Change

• Resiliency - Demonstrating personal flexibility, being comfortable handling risk and uncertainly, able to shift gears in response to emerging priorities
• Courage & Authenticity - Keeping one's word, fulfilling one's promise, identifying and acting upon appropriate risks, saying what needs to be said
• Change Management - Ability to rally teams and entire organizations against a burning platform for change

Leading for Results

• Decisiveness - Making sound and defensible decisions in a timely fashion, especially in times of uncertainty
• Systems Thinking - A mind-set for understanding how things work. A perspective for looking for patterns to seek underlying systemic interrelationships which are responsible for the patterns of behavior or events

DEVELOPING PHYSICIAN LEADERSHIP USING THE 70/20/10 RULE
How do we enable physician leaders to develop these critical leadership competencies? Best practice from corporate America offers the 70/20/10 rule of thumb for leadership development. About 70 percent of leadership development/organizational learning should take place on the job, through solving problems and through special assignments and other day-to-day activities. Another 20 percent of development ought to occur through drawing on the knowledge of others in the workplace, from informal learning, from coaching and mentoring, and from support and direction from managers and colleagues. Only 10 percent of development ought to occur through formal learning, whether classroom, workshop or, more recently, e-learning. However, current physician leadership learning programs rely too heavily on formal learning, with limited opportunity for on-the-job development options, coaching and mentoring.

Dr. Smith finally figured out what was missing. On advice of a trusted colleague, Dr. Smith began working alongside a highly respected physician leader as a mentor. He engaged with a coach to help him identify his core strengths and motivators to unlock his change management and team building potential. One year later, Dr. Smith flourished. He found his groove. He had learned important navigation skills, including how to relate to others, how to listen, how to reflect and how to validate. He was recognized as a high potential leader, and eventually became CMO of his organization.

We propose a radical shift in learning emphasis to incorporate the best strategies and learning formats from corporate America that help to cultivate leadership competencies in current and emerging physician leaders. Physician leadership education programs must effectively pull upon all three learning methodologies in varying degrees, namely on-the-job experiences most often, coaching and mentoring to support on-the-job experiences, and, to a lesser degree, formal classroom learning. The most effective programs will likely build upon experiences and training and translate them to business thinking applied to healthcare management.

We are very proud to welcome Scott Gingold to the WJM team as Vice President. Scott has over 20 years of consultative sales, client management, and consulting experience, and has worked with Fortune 100 and mid-size clients across a wide range of industries. Most recently, Scott served as Vice President at Right Management, a global talent and career management consultancy. Based in New Jersey, Scott will be working with WJM's clients to develop and implement customized talent management solutions such as executive coaching, assessment, team effectiveness and high-potential executive development.

"Scott's tremendous track record of client service and his passion and intellect for talent development will make him a huge asset to WJM and our customers. We're very excited to have him join us." said Tim Morin, President and CEO of WJM.

Please join us in welcoming Scott to WJM!