Communicate
As you move forward in your plans, it’s also important to continue to engage the same people from whom you had solicited input in the early planning stages.
“You want to have the ability to create and share a vision to those that you’re leading in a way that helps them understand where you’re trying to go and what their role might be in it. Your vision becomes their vision, and it’s much easier to lead things forward,” Moore-Hardy says.
Make sure that you communicate with them in a consistent manner.
“It’s important to be visible in the organization,” she says. “The face-to-face conversation — staying on message, making sure that you’re communicating consistently, that you’re on point and that the things that you’re saying are focused, and you’re not saying one thing one day and something else the next day.”
Moore-Hardy uses a variety of methods to communicate with her employees, including newsletters, lunches with departments, quarterly employee forums and shift meetings throughout the day and night as the shifts and people change. She says it’s important to update employees on the progress toward the goals that you established, and you also need to find ways to connect individual employees’ particular jobs with the greater goals so they understand how they fit into the picture.
“We break those objectives into certain categories that cascade down the organization, and everyone would have had an opportunity to work with their managers to determine how they individually and they as a department relate back to the corporate strategic objective,” she says.
But it’s also not enough to simply communicate. You also need to touch back with people to make sure they understood you correctly.
“When used correctly, you will check to see if they’ve heard what you’re saying,” Moore-Hardy says. “You’ll allow them to say it back to you in their own words and until you’re sure that you have a mutual understanding. Then it pays to do some follow-up to make sure that you can find out if they had any questions or concerns about it after thinking about it for a period of time.”
Just like communicating the message itself, there are multiple ways you can follow-up with people, including by e-mail, by phone or face to face. Moore-Hardy prefers face-to-face follow-up, and she says that how long you wait before following up really depends on the situation and the person, but you need to at least decide when you’re going to follow up.
“If it’s an issue of great magnitude, at the end of the conversation, we agree that we’ll talk again in a few days or a week or whatever it is — whatever is the agreed-upon time frame,” she says.
Whatever you decide to do, it simply all comes back to the communication factor.
“The best advice that I can give is you can never communicate enough,” she says.
And Moore-Hardy hasn’t stopped communicating to her staff. Doing all of these things takes a lot of effort, but she wanted to be a good leader.
“A good leader is a role model,” she says. “A good leader is someone who can communicate clearly, and a good leader reminds themselves that they’re only a leader because they have followers. The question you have to ask yourself continually is, ‘Would you follow you?’”
People did follow her, and the new facility opened Oct. 21. While it was a lot of work, she says it was a labor of love, and that it all came down to doing all of these things over and over again and not diverging from them.
“The key thing is to establish a direction you would like to go and engage those that you’re working with in the process to create a common vision,” she says. “The key to all of that is just continuous communication and inviting feedback and providing explanation. It requires having the ability to listen to others and hear things from their perspective. It requires the ability to be flexible yet maintain the key tenets of the vision or direction that you’re trying
to go.”
How to reach: Lake Health Inc., (440) 354-2400, (440) 375-8100 or www.lakehealth.org
