Leadership Development to meet the Value Challenge

Behind every successful organization there are principle-based leaders, or individuals who strive for perfection and exhibit the constancy of purpose required to implement meaningful cultural change.   According to Steven Spear, organizations that generate more value for the customer with less effort do it by generating and sustaining “broad-based, high-velocity, non-stop improvement and innovation.”

And, we need a critical mass of successful organizations in the healthcare marketplace to tip the balance toward a transformation into an industry that consistently rewards value instead of volume, practices transparency of results, and continuously improves care delivery processes.

Principle-based leaders do the right thing for employees, patients, and the communities they serve every day, regardless of how much market pressures pull them in the opposite direction.  According to Paul O’Neill, the leader must articulate non-arguable goals and “has the obligation to create the conditions so that employees can say yes to these propositions:  I am treated with dignity and respect, I am given the things that I need so that I can make a contribution that gives meaning to my life, and every day I can say someone I care about and respect noticed what I did.”

The question that concerns us at the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value is how to support healthcare leaders in making the shift to principle-based leadership.  At the Center, our hypothesis is that we learn by first becoming awareof a gap in our competencies (knowledge and skills), and as the gap becomes clearer, we seek solutions to close the gap by exploring and discovering alternatives.  We then develop a hypothesis about an approach or method, and weexperiment and study the results.  This purposeful experimentation allows us to become proficient in new competencies.  As a result, we are ready to share and teach others so that we may continue the learning process.

The scientific method, or P-D-S-A (Plan-Do-Study-Act), is inherent in this continuum of learning, depicted in the graphic included in this document:   Education Experiences.

Therefore, education experiences (training programs, conferences, workshops) around specific competencies should be designed to replicate this cycle of learning while at the same time helping individuals transition from one phase of learning to another in their overall leadership transformation.

Our hypothesis is that as leaders experience this learning process around principle-based leadership competencies, their organizations will serve as laboratories in which they experiment with care delivery improvement, payment structures that reward value, and transparency of results.  As more leaders travel this path, the overall marketplace will also shift to delivering customer value-driven care, the ultimate goal.

I welcome your thoughts to inform our thinking around leadership development.  Please email me at mkarlov@createvalue.org to share your insights and engage in a conversation around this important topic.