Involve employees in change
You’ve outlined your reasons for why change needs to occur. Now you need to get employees to develop what the organization should become.
Olivia quickly realized upon arriving at West Penn Allegheny that the health system wasn’t only facing financial problems, but it didn’t have a clearly defined purpose, mission, vision or set of values. If the hospital and its employees were going to move collectively in one direction, the organization needed to clarify what it stood for and where it was headed. Olivia included employees in the process to piece together those questions.
“You have to involve them in the decision-making, that’s how you get people motivated,” he says. “Leaders define the boundaries of what has to get accomplished, and then let employees show you the way to get it accomplished.”
Obviously not every employee can be included in the process, so Olivia started by gathering a representation of the staff.
“You can’t put everybody on the team,” he says. “You have to be selective and put the people on the team that can add to the process and the people on the team that are key to making the process happen after you make the decision. We got the doctors involved, management, nonphysician people involved and some of our operating people.”
Involving multiple people in trying to form a consensus is valuable because the unpopular opinions tend to get squashed during the process, making for a better result.
“You eliminate outliers in broad deviation and decision-making; that’s one benefit,” Olivia says. “The other benefit is you get buy-in because the people that actually have to carry through the policies that come out of the process are the ones who design the outcome.”
All told, several hundred people were involved in defining West Penn Allegheny’s purpose, mission, vision and set of values.
“Purpose and mission, our people develop those,” Olivia says. “The vision — what we need to become — that’s where leadership and I weigh in a little bit more on the direction. The last component is the values. Leaders drive the values; values drive behavior.
“As far as our purpose, mission and our vision go, it’s not something that I have some external consultant bring to the organization or, frankly, I even brought to the organization. It was here already. People know why these hospitals were founded. People know what we do every day. People know what behaviors we want to see. My role is to help unlock all of that, but that was developed by our people.”
Olivia says your employees hold the answers. Once you have a team in place, you need to set boundaries and guide the group through the process.
“‘Here is what you have to get done; here is the time frame for it. You help me define the way to get it done,ȁ
9;
” Olivia says. “People will put something together that they have ownership of, and you may not always get a process exactly the way you want it, but generally you get a better process than if I stand over you and say, ‘Here’s how it has to be done.’”
For example, when Olivia assembled a team to define the organization’s purpose, he posed the question: Why are we here? In defining the mission, the question was: What do we do? When it came to developing the values, Olivia and about 200 others went off-site for two days and walked through the questions: What type of characteristics do West Penn Allegheny employees need to possess? What values? What behavior should be expected?
When you’re defining such important organization fundamentals, the idea is to ask for a broad range of input and narrow the thoughts based on popular views.
“You have to get your purpose, mission, vision correct, and then I would add the values,” Olivia says. “Getting all of that right ultimately is critical in getting your business aligned. Again, what you don’t want to do is go outside and bring somebody in who is an expert with a bunch of slides. … What you want to do is get your people organized inside to help develop these things and then they have ownership.”
