Enable your employees.
As the turnaround gained momentum, Duggan could begin focusing on the types of employees he wanted his staff to recruit
and retain as DMC moved forward.
Duggan says talent is only part of the equation when it comes to
building a staff. You must also inspire your employees to follow
your vision and enable them to best utilize their skill sets.
Getting employees on board with a new plan when the company
is in a state of crisis is easy compared to keeping that level of buyin once the situation has stabilized and upper management is no
longer speaking in terms of survival.
“In many ways, it’s a lot easier to get people focused when
you’re in trouble than when you’re doing well,” Duggan says.
“When they’re in trouble, they’re paying attention to you. When
things are going well, people are busy patting themselves on
the back. So in that first year or so, I had an advantage in that
everyone was paying attention to me.”
For his plan to achieve long-term success, Duggan needed to take
the big-picture goal of saving the organization and drive it down to
the personal level. Individual doctors, nurses and staff members
wouldn’t be able to effectively implement a 29-minute emergency
room guarantee if each person didn’t know how his or her specific role played in to making the guarantee a reality for patients.
Throughout the organization, Duggan had his managers construct individual goals for many staff members. Each individual set of goals had to play in to turning around the entire
organization.
Setting goals helped DMC employees think in terms of the big-picture turnaround and also helped foster a culture of accountability.
“Everybody has a role in the turnaround and is precisely measured on what their role is,” Duggan says. “If you start to make
excuses while others are making their targets, you quickly realize excuses aren’t going to work. If you put those kinds of goals
and measurements in place and hold people accountable, I’d say
90 percent of the people who can’t get the job done will leave voluntarily.”
Employees thrive when their roles are defined. When Duggan
arrived at DMC, many employees either didn’t have a solid grasp
of their roles within the organization or were miscast in roles that
did not suit their talents and skills.
Improperly leveraged talent can become a major hindrance to
a turnaround, and it’s something Duggan addressed in his meetings and conversations with employees soon after he started.
“We had a lot of people here who I was told were poor
employees, but they excelled when they were told what their
roles were and how they fit in,” he says. “A number of people
did extremely well and had been waiting for years for someone
to give them a program in which they would succeed.
“That’s the most fun part of the job for me, to watch people
who had been beaten down in a job for years come back to
become great. We’ve had that happen many times.”
Experience and intuition can help a leader identify how to
best leverage talent. But even more important is the willingness to observe and listen to your employees.
“You have to create an environment where people achieve
more than they ever thought they could,” Duggan says. “Every
employee has individual strengths and weaknesses. The key is to
put each person in a position that maximizes his/her individual
talents and then set goals that push the employee to reach that
potential. You have to evaluate the progress each week and
make one of four assessments: One, the employee is meeting the
goals or making measurable progress in that direction; two, the
employee is not meeting the goals because of barriers outside of
the employee’s control (in which case management must act
timely to remove those barriers); three, the employee is not
meeting the goals due to work ethic, attitude or personal problems (in which case you need to either motivate or remove the
employee); or four, the employee is not talented enough to
meet the goals and you put him/her in the wrong position in the
first place.
“If you’re closely and objectively monitoring performance,
it’s pretty easy to figure out which of the four it is. The problem most managers have is the lack of courage or commitment
needed to act immediately to correct the problems and assure
that you’re getting strong performance from every position.”
If you create an environment where talent is properly leveraged, you will maximize your company’s productivity and
increase your employees’ sense of fulfillment in their jobs.
That has been one of the biggest keys to the success of DMC’s
turnaround. The health system is once again profitable, with $2
billion in revenue in 2008.
“I’ve seen cases where people are failing in customer service
jobs, but they understand the statistics and trends of the business,” Duggan says. “So we’d put that person in charge of
pulling together reports, and put someone with interpersonal
skills out front. All of a sudden, that person is thriving, and it’s
not that he didn’t care about his old job, it’s not that he didn’t
want to be a good employee, it’s that you weren’t using his talents the right way.
“The leaders I love are the ones who talk in terms of salvageables. The people who I consider to be the greatest leaders are
the people who take an employee who isn’t doing well and can
salvage them in a different role. There is a great deal of pride
on the part of managers when they take an employee who was
said to be a bad apple and allows that person to succeed by
putting them in the right job.”
HOW TO REACH: Detroit Medical Center, www.dmc.org
