Eric Norwood was sitting in a meeting with administrators and physicians trying to solve a tough issue facing DeKalb Regional Health System Inc., but he wasn’t having much luck.
“[It] had so many different dimensions to it, it was like a spider’s web of interconnected issues and problems, that if you just tried to solve one, the unintended consequences of the others that are affected by it would offset any benefit that you got,” says Norwood, the medical center’s president and CEO
He noticed that situations like this were becoming increasingly common. When it comes to leading 3,800 employees and maximizing their effectiveness in achieving goals, Norwood now has to take a more collaborative approach to problem solving.
“Gone are the days when a hospital administrator can stiff-arm physicians on the medical staff and say, ‘I’ll take care of running the hospital, and you take care of practicing medicine,’” he says. “We just can’t solve the challenges of health care in the United States that way. We have to, as hospital administrators, reach out and draw in physician leaders and make a place for them at the decision-making table and share that power and authority and responsibility with our physician partners, and it works.”
In order to make any organization more effective, Norwood says you have to build teams for each issue, have better discussions and respect people’s time.
