Keep employees informed
Because your plans don’t only affect you, don’t forget about your employees while you’re planning. Involve them in the process through constant communication.
“If people aren’t involved on the ground floor with helping to develop that plan … it certainly reduces the likelihood that they’re going to buy in and support what you’re doing,” Cripe says.
She tries to reach as many employees in as many ways as possible — from focus groups and electronic surveys to town-hall meetings.
“You truly cannot spend enough time or too much time designing communication systems,” she says. “Every channel’s important. You can’t just send out a company newsletter or give a big talk. It’s an endless job of engaging and communicating with your stakeholders.”
Like any other part of your plan, lay out a communication strategy up front.
“We try to think of every communication channel possible for a particular initiative,” says Cripe, who works closely with her public relations department to select appropriate methods. “You have to be realistic; you can’t do 15 different things every single time. We prioritize: Where do we want focus groups? Where do we want departmental meetings? Where do we want town-hall meetings? [We] think through the importance of what we’re doing and the best way to get that word out.”
Regardless of the avenue, the goal is fostering buy-in. Specifically, employees in a certain department need to understand why an initiative affecting them has been delayed.
“Most people tend to think what they’re working on is the most important thing,” Cripe says. “But it might not be, at the time, the most important thing for the organization. Helping them understand why we have to make decisions to delay or defer is also important.”
You may not get agreement from everyone — but you don’t have to. Cripe has found that when employees understand decisions, extreme dissension is rare.
“If you bring people along and they have knowledge of what you’re trying to do and what the circumstances are and the limitations, while they might not completely agree … they’ll at least understand why you’re pursuing the different strategic initiates in a particular order,” she says. “Understand that people don’t have the same information that senior leadership has. They don’t have access to the broad band of what the company is facing. If you help them get some insight into what all the demands are and the strategic direction, they understand, and they want to do their part to help you.”
Make messages relevant
Just as a single communication method doesn’t reach everyone, one message doesn’t fit all, either.
“One of the biggest challenges for a chief executive officer is to translate that vision into something that every employee can relate to personally,” Cripe says. “I tend to get very excited about our vision and can talk about it and it’s crystal clear to me, but then I need to think about, if I were a nurse, what’s that vision mean to me personally and how do I contribute to it?”
To some extent, you can tailor your message by putting yourself in employees’ shoes.
“You need to think about the person receiving the message, how you make it meaningful to them,” she says. “Think about, for the gentleman cleaning the room, what does that mean to him? Then craft the message specific to, ‘OK, to be a great children’s hospital, one of the things is that we want really clean patient rooms,’ and get it down to a clear picture.
“People need clarity: Exactly what does that mean to me and what do you want me to do? Develop a communication plan to help that individual understand their role. It can’t just be broad and generic. You need to think about the audience and what you need them to do.”
But it’s rare you’ll have specific knowledge of each department. Even if you did, it’s difficult to step back from your own understanding of the vision. Recognize those limitations — and the importance of delegation.
“Our job is to be clear about the vision and then to get the right people in the room to start to translate that down throughout the organization,” Cripe says. “I long ago realized that there’s no way that one person, no matter how good a CEO might be, can do all of that himself or herself and do it well.”
Cripe requires other leaders in the organization — from senior leaders to front-line supervisors — to develop their own offshoot of the vision for their teams, complete with specific goals, objectives, metrics, timelines and communication strategies.
“You literally need to get down to the individual level, and one of the best ways to do that is to involve all of your management,” Cripe says. “Ask your departmental managers to develop their own little strategic plan for their department (that) ties into the company’s vision and how they’re going to contribute.”
Department heads have several resources available for assistance, like access to CHOC’s strategic planning department.
CHOC even set up management training on setting and measuring realistic goals. For example, the program covered the balance between ambition and achievement.
“(Goals) shouldn’t be so ambitious that there’s no chance that they’re going to be achieved, because that’s demoralizing in the end,” Cripe says. “You need to work with your management team on, realistically, given everything a department’s working on, ‘What rate of improvement should we be aspiring to achieve?’”
The program also trained them to set reasonable timelines.
“You can set a really aggressive timeline, but that might sacrifice buy-in,” Cripe says. “The manager has to weigh the pros and cons of the timeline versus the depth and penetration of a particular goal.”
Offering those tools enables consistency, but checks and balances ensure it. The vice presidents of each department review the mini-visions so no one veers from the ultimate company mission to “nurture, advance and protect the health and well-being of children,” or the vision to “achieve national recognition as a premier children’s hospital.”
