When I connected with bestselling author Patrick Lencioni before he spoke at the Medical Group Management Association's annual conference in San Antonio on Oct. 23, I asked him about the central message he intended to deliver in his speech. Not surprisingly, given that he's written eight books on leadership and organizational health and is the founder and president of San Francisco-based management consulting firm The Table Group, Lencioni said he planned to focus his presentation on the critical role good leaders can have in shaping the strength of their organization.
"I want leaders to understand there is a framework to revolutionize their organizations available to them. Addressing organizational health will allow their medical groups to create a productive, effective environment where they will outperform their counterparts, free themselves of politics and confusion and create an atmosphere where star performers never want to leave," he said.
According to Lencioni, effective leaders remove ambiguity and dysfunction from their organizations and empower employees to better serve their customers, and in the case of healthcare providers, their patients.
"Organizational health is essentially about making a company function effectively by building a cohesive leadership team, establishing real clarity among those leaders, communicating that clarity to everyone within the organization, and putting in place just enough structure to reinforce that clarity going forward," he said.
It's clear that to be effective, a leadership team must be focused on empowering and building up its employees to carry out the organization's mission. Without the right people engaged in an active process to create a culture of excellence all the modern technology and state-of-the-art equipment in the world doesn't mean very much to the overall health of an institution.
The importance to an organization of having a successful leadership team can't be overstated, and it's a theme I've heard several times recently.
Sarah Holt, PhD, practice administrator of Cape Girardeau Surgical Clinic in Cape Girardeau, Mo., echoed Lencioni's sentiment about the need for clear leadership that empowers employees during our recent back-and-forth on leadership and financial viability.
"The right people in the right place, empowered to use their judgment and creativity, allow the organization to thrive," she said.
"The biggest financial challenge facing physician practices today is the internal behavior in the organization," she added. "On the other hand, if everyone in the organization recognizes the role they play in the financial responsibility of the organization, buys in to the unified philosophy of the organization and lives the patient-centered mission of the organization, the organization will succeed financially."
Although these principles may seem straight forward, it's amazing how many organizations can't seem to master them. Lack of communication, disorganized management and an inability to generate genuine buy in among employees plague leadership teams throughout all industries, including healthcare where, ultimately, patients pay the price for leadership failures.
Failures that Lencioni says still manage to surprise him despite his many years consulting with leadership teams.
"I still get surprised by what I see in companies I work with, even after all these years," he said. "Some of that surprise is just a function of the fact that no two people, and thus, no two organizations are exactly alike. The nuances are interesting and keep me on my toes. But ironically, the biggest surprise I get is being reminded again and again that even the most sophisticated companies struggle with the simplest things."