Shortly after taking over as president and CEO of Palomar Pomerado Health in 2003, Michael Covert performed an assessment of his health care system.
Two things immediately stood out to him: The organization had a lot of talented employees, but management was unable to leverage that talent to improve the organization.
“When I came here, I sort of did my assessment after 45 days, and what I saw was a group of employees that felt unempowered at all levels,” Covert says. “I saw that I had good people here who believed in what they were doing individually but not necessarily as a team.”
Palomar Pomerado was suffering from a lack of a central, unifying focus. Though the system had a stated mission to provide its patients with the best possible service, it was not a concept that drove employees to raise their collective performance each day.
In short, Covert had a good organizational philosophy and good employees, but the communication aspect of the organization needed work.
“That was our challenge moving forward — to get people to believe in themselves by focusing on a vision and a mission,” he says. “Early on, I tested out whether people knew our mission and vision, from the board, to the medical staff, to employees, to community groups associated with us. Truthfully, everyone was sort of all over the map, and when I started down this journey, I talked to our employees every three weeks about our vision and mission. I wanted to make it come alive — what is our purpose, and what values do we want to represent in the organization.”
But refocusing the health system was about more than just Covert speaking to employees every few weeks. It involved a great deal of brainstorming, asking questions, soliciting input from employees and putting their ideas into action. Once that was put into place, continuous rounds of mission and vision reinforcement from management became a top priority to make sure the more focused vision and mission stuck.
Ask employees what they want
Covert says that there are few things more powerful to employees than to see their words integrated into the company’s vision and mission statement. With that in mind, Covert engaged employees by soliciting their feedback, gaining their perspectives on what the vision and mission meant and how it should be interpreted moving forward.
Covert engaged his 3,800 employees in small groups, and on a grassroots level, they began to develop a picture of how they viewed and interpreted the vision.
In each meeting, Covert made it a point to not discuss the feedback derived from other meetings, avoiding the possibility that the power of suggestion could influence the opinions of his current audience. By meeting with small groups, he was able to view trends as they developed.
“For example, we spent a lot of time asking our staff what should be done if we’re recruiting people into this organization — what should we be looking for with regard to individuals,” Covert says. “The same five or six things kept popping out all the time. Our people kept talking about wanting people like themselves who are caring and compassionate. They talk about having people here who want to be here and do a good job, not people who you’d have to help carry. They wanted people who believed in the concepts of teamwork and trust pulling together. They wanted people who valued each other.”
After numerous sessions, Covert and his leadership team met with Palomar Pomerado’s medical staff leadership and board of directors and began to develop a plan for communicating the mission and values. Based on the positive response to Covert’s meetings, management made it a priority to continue engaging employees in a dialogue about the vision, mission and culture of the organization.
Covert says that listening is, in many cases, a more critical communication tool than speaking.
