Larry Heydon realizes he can’t do it alone.
Heydon is the president and CEO of Johnson Memorial Hospital, a health care facility with 850 employees and $83 million in 2008 net revenue. An organization of that size requires a great deal of communication, goal-setting and teamwork throughout its ranks. With that in mind, one of the most pivotal jobs for Heydon is to keep his hospital stocked with trained and motivated leaders.
Those in leadership and management positions help Heydon keep his messages consistent as they are cascaded throughout the organization. Heydon’s managers also aid in the decision-making process.
“In general, my leadership style is one that is participatory in nature,” Heydon says. “I value the input and ideas of others and group-based decisions for the organization.”
Finding the right leaders takes a keen eye for leadership talent and a training structure that is capable of teaching that talent to lead.
Smart Business spoke with Heydon about how you can develop leaders in your organization.
Build structure. If you want to build leaders within the ranks, No. 1, you have to give them structure. You have to allow them to be successful through a structured approach. What we’ve done here that has been very successful in bringing structure to the organization is we’ve gotten them to understand the goals of the organization through a structured format. We have five values that we call our pillars of excellence, which we have all of our managers and employees gear their efforts toward. The five values, which we kind of stole from a renowned health care consultant, are people, No. 1; service, No. 2; quality and safety, No. 3; growth and innovation, No. 4; and financial stewardship, No. 5.
Through a structured program, our managers are not only able to understand better for themselves but also communicate with the employees that report to them what the vision and goals are.
Building that kind of structure takes a commitment from the entire leadership team. It’s a situation where the program is only as good as the weakest link. Once you get that commitment, you have to allow for proper resources. There is much education and much training going on around this program, and we were very fortunate to identify one of our in-house managers who agreed to facilitate all the necessary training and other aspects of the program.
Education is No. 1. You need to make sure that the ideas and beliefs behind this program are properly shared with the management team. Four or five times a year, we allow for off-site retreats to emphasize the program. During that time, we also allow for in-depth training on how initiatives are being carried out by employees. The initiatives include customer service aspects, how do we hire the right employees and various other aspects to make our management team an overall better team.
That’s one side, the education and the retreats we have with our leadership team. The other aspect is that we go out of our way to promote these pillars of excellence across the organization. We have multiple display boards across the hospital, not only for our employees to see but also for the public to see how we make our decisions here at JMH.
Once you get the commitment and identified the resources needed, it’s a matter of being persistent, hammering home the ideas of the program and holding people accountable in the program. We can’t afford to have a segment of the management team continue to do things as they normally have. We need to have everybody involved in this, so we have accountable measures to make sure that we’re all on the same page.