Kim Cripe knows how it feels to be busy.
“The demands for your time are probably double the time — at least — that you have,” says the president and CEO of Children’s Hospital of Orange County. “The demands for your time and your energy, they just seem to exponentially grow year after year.”
Lately, Cripe has been busier than ever as she repositions CHOC from a community children’s hospital to a nationally recognized children’s hospital. The new vision has brought big changes, like building a new hospital and affiliating with UC Irvine.
However, she recognizes that her 2,432 employees face the same time pressures. Her job is to keep them focused on the right things.
“The things you talk to people about are the things they pay the most attention to,” Cripe says. “If we’re focusing and talking about something, I’m certain that people are paying attention to it. And if I don’t, there are many other things to fill that time slot.”
To get everyone concentrating on the same vision, Cripe learned she had to refine the organization’s focus and communicate it relentlessly. It took a lot of effort to reach all of the employees across a 238-bed main facility in the city of Orange, a hospital-within-a-hospital in Mission Viejo and 12 other clinics. It required a clear plan laying out the steps to becoming the kind of children’s hospital CHOC aspired to be.
“If you’re trying to move your company, you need to have a plan, and then you have to have tools to deploy the plan,” Cripe says. “You need to be able to develop the plan, communicate the plan and explain to everybody that works there what their role is in achieving the plan.”
Create an involved plan
Half a dozen years into her CHOC tenure, Cripe stepped into her current position with a bigger vision for the company. She knew she couldn’t get there — or get others to follow — without a plan.
She started by evaluating what propelled other hospitals to CHOC’s desired position by benchmarking the top players in the field, as determined by top 10 criteria-ranked lists in several publications.
“We studied the key attributes of those children’s hospitals, and we came up with 11 to 13 different core attributes that they all had,” Cripe says. “For example, they all had academic affiliations with universities. They all had robust fundraising efforts and endowments.”
The critical step, then, is mapping your position in comparison to those and analyzing why gaps exist. For example, the hospitals with large endowments had been around for a hundred years in comparison to CHOC’s 45 years — which made sense, considering how endowments grow over time.
That analysis can be too much for one person, especially someone close to the organization. Cripe recommends external help.
“There’s a time and a purpose for a consultant,” she says. “Sometimes it’s really hard to hold the mirror up and be painfully honest with yourself about where you are. If you’re really serious about transforming your company, having someone from the outside that has relevant expertise coming in and helping you hold up a mirror and debating the truths that you have [is important].”
Those analyzed attributes became a pool to pull priorities and eventually evolved into CHOC’s strategic plan.
“It was clear, when we looked at all the things that were on the list, so many of them tied back to the need for an academic affiliation,” Cripe says. “So that was the strategic initiative that we pursued first. Typically, there’s either a chronology or there’s some sort of foundational piece that needs to get done, and then the different elements build upon that.
“The first ranking was: What’s the most important thing to advance this institution? And then: What is the timeline, and then, what pieces fall after that?”
Remember, when prioritizing, that you can’t do everything.
“Every company has dozens — if not hundreds or thousands — of demands for their time and resources,” Cripe says. “A word of caution is for leadership to be reasonable and set realistic expectations. … We were trying to take on too much at one time, and over the years, we’ve learned to discipline ourselves from trying to tackle 10 things at a time to two or three so that we do them and do them well.”
