Looking to crash your vessel? Try these tips
By Shelley Burns
(Part one of a two-part blog)
Given it’s summer, we’ll continue with the nautical theme we started in a prior blog. So, imagine the winds of change are fierce and blowing your hospital ship toward the rocks at a rapid clip. Endlessly measuring the wind with greater precision and understanding each time you take bearings is highly satisfying, and seems a prerequisite to action. However, nothing short of adjusting your sails and changing course will prevent your ship from being dashed against the rocks.
So, if that’s your goal, consider following these tips:
1. Don’t define your “gap.” Really, senior leadership shouldn’t have to set the course for the organization. Surely, you can delegate this detail to someone less senior.
2. Make cost improvement a goal – this year.
3. Keep your managers in the dark about your expectations. Let them guess about the overall dollars you want to squeeze out of the cost structure and the amount you expect each to contribute. Lack of focus and goals are helpful for managers – they like managing to ambiguity.
4. Restrict managers’ access to data and performance improvement tools. All those numbers, graphs, benchmarks, and best practices require such an effort to comprehend. All the managers really need to know is that their costs need to be cut.
5. Join your managers in hashing out the minutiae indefinitely. Absolutely! They must be 100 percent comfortable with even the most irrelevant data before they can make a single cost improvement or suggest any ideas to streamline their processes.
Shelley Burns is HMC’s knowledge manager.
