Karen Sexton says it sounds kind of corny, but it’s true: You
have to empower your employees to be successful.
To Sexton, vice president and CEO for hospitals and clinics at
The University of Texas Medical Branch, “empowerment” is an
umbrella word that describes a strategy of listening, supporting,
communicating and staying visible to your employees. In other
words, it’s not as magical as it sounds.
Regardless of your industry, Sexton says empowerment is the
sum of a number of common-sense actions meant to keep
employees involved in the present and future of your company. If
you are responsive to the needs of your employees, you are
already well on your way to an empowered work force.
“What I have to do is make sure I am attentive to the
resources my employees need, both in people and materials,”
Sexton says. “I have to make sure they have the best equipment they can use, support them in process change as appropriate and make sure they have the right support from other
ancillary services.”
At UTMB’s hospitals and clinics — which account for approximately 7,000 of the 12,000 employees in the Galveston-based
health care system — empowerment has its roots in good communication from Sexton and her senior management. With
approximately 100 facilities and total revenue of $1.4 billion in
the UTMB system, it’s up to Sexton to make sure everyone
hears the same messages, interprets them properly and has an
opportunity to deliver feedback to the administration.
For Sexton, empowerment is a constantly present duty that
requires attention every day of every week. This is how she
does it.
Relating the vision
In order for your employees to understand your company, you
first must understand it.
Sexton says communicating to empower your employees begins
with a company mission and consistently keeping that mission
statement in front of your people.
“You have to understand why you exist, what your mission is,”
she says. “Once you have a mission, you have to understand it. For
us, it’s providing the best health care for the people we serve.
“Once you understand that mission, it’s easy to set the vision to
say you want to be the best, that if you are going to do something,
you want to be the best at it. But then you have to work across the
departments to help people identify how they want to contribute
to that.”
The challenge of creating empowering communication is taking
wide-ranging concepts like a companywide vision and driving it
down to the individual level so that each person believes what he
or she does contributes to the whole of the organization. Sexton
says that is your essential job as a leader: to drive big-picture concepts downward through the organization, allowing each level to
spread the word to those below.
“Not everyone contributes on the same level or in the same way,”
she says. “But it’s helping them align what they’re doing with the
values and goals of the institution. It might sound easy, but it’s not.
“In our case, it’s not easy to bring 7,000 people in the immediate clinical enterprise together and moving in the same direction with
the same priorities. That’s what leadership really has to do, establish what those strategic priorities are and then help our employees understand how they align with those.”
Sexton says your employees have to believe that no one person
is any more or less important to the grand scheme than any other
person. It’s a tough task when you oversee an organization that
might include highly educated, accomplished administrators on
one end, and blue-collar factory workers and support staff at the
other end.
In Sexton’s case, she oversees a work force of everyone from
doctors and nurses to food service employees, janitorial staff and
office professionals. Every day, she has to remind all employees
that they are all spokes on the same wheel.
She begins by reminding herself and the administrators who
oversee various departments that everyone wants to take pride
in his or her work. Through those initial communications with
her direct reports, she starts her messages cascading through the
organization.
Everyone in your organization is reliant on those directly above
for communication. That’s why Sexton says having strong communicators throughout your organization is vital.
“To ensure that we involve the layers between the front-line staff
and administration, there are people out with our front-line staff at
all times, supervising them and managing them,” she says. “Those
are the people who need to understand the values and be able to
communicate those and help the employees live those. So leadership development is extremely critical. I can have face-to-face contact with employees, and I should, but I’m not with them every day
as they’re doing the work.
“We have to have people who are strong communicators, people
who are confident and competent in what they are doing. They are
my ears and mouth in the field, and we all need to be working as
one.”
The right people
If you know what you value in yourself as a leader, Sexton
says you probably know what leadership qualities you value in
others.
She says finding the right people and putting them in the right
positions is a matter of having the discipline to ask the right
questions and remember what each position needs with regard
to leadership and communication skills.
Sexton calls it “values-based interviewing,” and it’s a process
aimed at aligning personal goals with the organization’s goals.
When trying to get to the root of who a person is and what he
or she values, creating a dialogue is essential, according to
Sexton.
“You have to ask the right questions and have an opportunity
to dialogue about who they are, what is important to them and
find examples that easily come forward from them,” she says.
“I don’t believe I’ve ever hired someone with a sense that
something was wrong, that they might not be the right person,
and it really has not come to pass. After you’ve done it for a
while, you just learn to ask the right questions.”
Sexton and her leadership ask questions pertaining to how
the candidate works with people, what he or she values about
his or her relationships with people and his or her history of
developing others professionally.
“It’s about asking them how they have helped others to be the
best they can be.”
However, leaders first have to be able to lead themselves
before they can inspire others. Sexton says frank self-analysis
is every bit as important as your ability to analyze others. You
must be willing to isolate your areas for improvement and
work on them, then encourage others in your organization to
do the same.
“I’m lucky enough that somewhere I learned to be responsible and accountable to myself,” she says. “It’s not a hard
process for me to do it, but when you’re interviewing people,
it’s important to ask the right questions to make sure that this
is a person who is really going to put a mirror in front of themselves.
“I don’t remember where I first read it, but sometimes you have
to consider that the problem might be looking at you in the mirror.
It’s the old adage that if you’re not part of the solution, you must be
part of the problem.”
Authentic communication
You can’t communicate enough. It’s a business cliché, but that
doesn’t necessarily mean you should roll your eyes when someone
says it.
Sexton says there are usually ample opportunities for communication with your employees, and no CEO takes advantage of all of
them. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.
“I’m not sure it’s possible to communicate enough,” she says. “You
have to do it through different modalities because people like different ways of communication. In our world, we have gotten very
used to communicating by e-mail but that has taken away from face-to-face communication, and we need to build that back into the
work we do.”
Sexton says it’s better to hammer away at the same messages
with your direct reports and be able to trust them to carry the
message downward and outward than to try and reach the
masses with every word you have to say.
Much of communication is being able to stay simple and
authentically communicate your own passion and vision to a
few people. If you can sell a few people on what you are trying
to accomplish, she says chances are you’ll be able to create
more buy-in over time.
“Most of my time is spent either with my direct reports or our
directors, helping them understand the passion I have for what
I do, the commitment I am making to help them do the best
they can do,” she says. “I want to look them in the eye and see
if I’m connecting with them, allowing them to share their concerns and joys and desires. That eye-to-eye contact is very
important in dialogue because they can take that interaction
and go out and touch the thousands of employees I can’t possibly get to every day.”
Much of communication is the grunt work of repeating the
same things over and over again throughout the organization.
Sexton says it can seem tedious, but it is one of the most necessary aspects of maintaining a good communication strategy.
“We tend to want something new and flashy, but that confuses employees,” she says. “We try to use the same words over
and over so that the messages are very clear and succinct. It
doesn’t always have to be a new message. In fact, if it is always
a new message, it kind of becomes like the flavor of the
month.”
The real key to communication goes back to taking those
often-repeated messages and figuring out a way to fit them to
each person in the organization like a puzzle piece. If you can
do that, Sexton says you will create a strong bond between
your employees and your vision and core values — a bond with
the organization that becomes personal.
“For example, patient safety is patient safety, and we can’t
say it enough at any level of our institution. There are a lot of
things that fall under patient safety, and our job as administrators is to help connect those dots. If we take a new patient registration process, it sounds great and it’s the right thing to do,
but if we don’t connect it back to our basic value of patient
safety, we’ve missed that opportunity.”
If you’ve shown each employee how individual performances
affect the whole company, the best workers should feel
empowered to take that responsibility and run with it. Sexton
says you should expect a sense of accountability in return for
your investment in communication with and educating your
people.
“We make sure they know we’re holding our employees
accountable for creating that safe environment in whatever
you’re talking about,” she says. “It comes full circle in that you
identify the core values, you help them see how their job fits in
to that, you hire the best people and make sure they’re competent in their jobs, are supervised well and that you have metrics you are looking at to ensure you are meeting targets. Then
you connect it back to that unit, employee or manager.”
If you’ve done all that, she says, you should have developed a
company culture that values communication and workers who
understand the big picture.
“You have to start out with communication being the expectation, knowing that you have a responsibility to communicate,” Sexton says. “I need to respect the importance of my
communication as well as the communication of others. It
needs to be purposeful and meaningful, and it needs to align
with the organization I am responsible for leading.” <<
HOW TO REACH: The University of Texas Medical Branch, www.utmb.edu