Crystal Haynes is proud of Saint Louis University Hospital. It’s a level-one trauma center, meaning it’s capable of handling the worst of the worst when it comes to illness and injury.
It’s a 356-bed academic teaching hospital that has provided health care to the St. Louis region for more than 70 years. But as Haynes looked at the hospital’s range of service offerings a few years ago, she felt like maybe her staff was trying to do too much.
“This was a facility that wanted to do every aspect of the health care business and be involved and engaged in it and wanted to do that at an exceptional level,” says Haynes, CEO at the hospital, which is part of Tenet HealthCare Corp. “The lack of real adherence to specialization and narrowing the choices to what you want to do, and doing those really well and selling those services appropriately, was a bit of a departure from where this organization had been.”
Another problem was Barnes-Jewish Hospital, located right across the street from SLU Hospital.
“We don’t have the size and scope or depth to be a Barnes, nor do we want to be one,” Haynes says. “We were literally duplicating the services that were being offered over at Barnes and competing against them.”
Haynes decided it was time to stop trying to be everything to everybody and start focusing on what her 1,800 employees do best. SLU needed to find its own niche. It needed to sell a more targeted vision to the community of what it could do instead of trying to compete with everything that Barnes was doing.
“This goes way beyond just the health care industry,” Haynes says. “It’s all about defining your product and understanding what it is you do well. It’s figuring out what are the best aspects of your product or service and being able to enhance that. Instead of offering a very broad or generic service or product, we became much more precise about what it was we were going to market and where we were going to place our resources and how we were going to deliver that.”
Haynes succeeded by focusing on what could be gained rather than dwelling on what would be lost. She sold her employees on the opportunity to take their most valuable skills and put them to use for the betterment of the organization.
“Our success has been moving forward the things we have in place, not going out and inventing new things to do,” Haynes says.
Here’s how Haynes got her employees to focus on their core talents, improve performance and raise their organization’s standing in the community.