Steven Altschuler believes the most successful organizations
are mission-driven organizations.
He says mission-driven organizations are easy to distinguish
from organizations motivated by something else if you know
where to look. They are able to unite everyone, regardless of the
role he or she performs, around a uniform set of goals and objectives.
It’s the type of organization Altschuler has built and maintained
at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where he serves as
president and CEO.
Throughout The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (commonly
referred to as CHOP) system, Altschuler has strived to rally doctors, nurses, administrators and support staff around the systemwide goal of remaining on the cutting edge of pediatric medical care.
It’s much easier said than done. For any business to climb to
the summit of its industry and stay there, ambitious mission
statements are a starting point. To get there, Altschuler says you
need persistence and an unquenchable thirst for improvement —
both self-improvement and the improvement of your company.
At CHOP — which has 7,000 employees and an estimated $1
billion in 2007 revenue according to Hoovers.com — it means
Altschuler must tirelessly communicate with many different
groups of people, keeping messages consistent and easily
understood. He must foster teamwork among departments
that perform completely different tasks, and he must run a hospital enterprise like a business while accomplishing a health-care-oriented mission.
“In order for us to be successful and meet our goals, we have to
operate like a business,” Altschuler says. “We have to have the
same principles, we have to operate within the margins so we have
the money to invest to take care of kids.
“In your business, you have to maximize profit. That’s your
obligation. Our obligation is to the kids we take care of and
their families, to maximize their health and development.”
Altschuler says it’s a juggling act that requires both skill and
stamina. You will never totally perfect it, but over time, you
can get better at it.
Becoming goal-oriented
If you want to have a goal-oriented organization, you first have to
define what your goals are. For Altschuler, that process begins
with a well-defined strategic plan.
“We are very disciplined in terms of strategic planning,” he says.
“We recently began a new strategic planning process for the next
seven years. The elements of the strategic plan really determine
our yearly operating plan, which is developed in conjunction with
the budget. So the operating plan is really built from the ground
up.”
Altschuler says you have to get the people on your company’s
ground levels involved in the process. During the planning
process, Altschuler both actively and passively seeks input from
his employees, both by engaging them through various communication channels and by letting everyone in the organization know
that his office door is open as often as possible.
“We solicit every level of the organization for what should be our
goals for the next year,” he says. “I have an open-door policy where
anybody in the hospital can come and see me all the time and about
any issue. Our senior executives, our medical leadership, act in a very
similar way.”
He says that face-to-face communication is the most effective
form when trying to disseminate a message and get instant feedback
from many people at once. But since your opportunities to communicate with many employees at once might be limited, you have to
make each chance count.
When seeking input and feedback from employees on issues that
affect the entire organization, Altschuler says you must know your
audience. That’s easy if someone stops by your office to chat or ask
a question, but it gets exponentially more difficult when you are trying to speak to dozens in a particular department or hundreds
throughout your organization.
“An open-door policy typically involves a one-to-one interaction
with an employee,” he says. “But when you get out and talk to people, typically you might be speaking to a larger audience, many different constituencies throughout the organization. You can say the
same message, but you have to tailor it in a way that fits the constituency.”
However, Altschuler says you shouldn’t try to outsmart yourself.
Remember that everyone in your organization is probably interested
in producing a good product. What you have to do when communicating with members of a specific group or department is show them
how they relate to the topic on the table.
“Everyone wants to attain the same results, but the issue might
look different to the nursing staff than it does to our physician staff
or our resident doctor staff or to our researchers,” he says. “Getting
out really allows me to talk to a group in detail, to try and tailor a
conversation that would be most appropriate and most effective in
communicating what I want to get across.”
A case for change
Achieving buy-in is enough of a challenge when your goal is maintaining the status quo. When your goal is change, it becomes that
much more difficult.
CHOP is currently in the midst of a $2 billion infrastructure expansion to deal with increased demand for the hospital’s services, due
to a drop in the number of pediatric care facilities in the Philadelphia
area. It has forced Altschuler to become something of a salesman to
his people, attempting to sell everyone from doctors to nurses to
office staffers on the benefits of growth and change.
Altschuler says a period of rapid growth can become a confusing
time in a business. You are trying to keep the people in your company
focused on the same mission and goals while everything is changing
around them.
That’s why, if change is in your organization’s future, he says you
need to start communicating the need for it as soon as possible or
you run the risk of allowing your employees to lose sight of the bigger picture.
Regardless of the business, he says there is a need for
employees to develop something of an entrepreneurial, risk-taking spirit.
“In many ways, people here have to have a competitive, entrepreneurial spirit, so if you can show them what the outcome is
going to be by embracing change, you can get them to where they
need to be,” Altschuler says. “Part of change in an organization is
that when you want to perform change and see it through, you
have to see it through to the success of the change. Once your people see success, they are more likely to embrace it.”
As a leader, Altschuler says you will sooner or later be forced to
put a stake in the ground when making a major change to your
company. You will have to make the statement that change is
inevitable, and in the end, your employees are either coming on
board or they’re not.
However, he says the best way to minimize the difficult personnel-related decisions you’ll have to make goes back to enabling
employees to take ownership in the decision-making process.
Even if you’re the one drawing the line in the sand, Altschuler
says it’s always better if the employees who accept change feel like
they’ve reached that conclusion themselves.
When the time came to sell CHOP’s employees on the need for expansion, he once again led his senior managers out among the people, meeting with them, proposing ideas, soliciting feedback and refining the
vision.
“What I and my senior leadership do is really try to engage people in
the decision-making process,” he says. “You can get to a strategy, but if
you can’t implement the strategy, it does you no good. So it’s really critical for individuals in leadership positions to really be able to engage
the work force and make the part of the process to induce the change.”
Altschuler has implemented some formalized methods of soliciting
feedback from staff members within the CHOP organization. Aside
from frequent electronic communication, such as e-mail, he holds
large organizational meetings four or five times a year where he’ll lay
out the current state of the hospital and the direction in which he
wants to take the hospital in the near future.
Altschuler also tries to place what is going on in his organization
within the larger context of the industry. He says any larger perspective
you can give your employees will give them a better understanding
about where they and the company stands.
“I’ll always try to give people an update on what is happening out there,
how could the presidential election affect health care, things like that,” he
says. “It’s always good to get out there and catch up with people and tell
them what is going on. I think that develops trust in the leadership, which
is critically important. There has to be trust in the vision and the ability
to manage through difficult situations.”
The right kind of communication
Even if the concept of keeping your organization goal-focused might
seem obvious to you, Altschuler says that’s only half the battle.
Whether you want to keep everyone steadfast on consistent objectives
or whether you’re trying to change course and take your company in a
new direction, it’s not just what you say, but it’s how you say it.
At CHOP, Altschuler underscores the importance of a multifaceted
communication approach. General messages are mass-distributed
through e-mail or the Internet. If an issue requires more specific attention, he will make time in his schedule to meet with a person or group.
“A good communication strategy has many different facets,” he says.
“If I’m trying to get out to the entire organization with a good message,
we will typically do an e-mail message to everyone. We have a very
robust Internet site for our organization, and our (chief operating officer)
does a monthly blog. So it’s really multifaceted, and as companies grow,
the ability to communicate through electronic media becomes more and
more important.”
At CHOP, Altschuler shares a challenge with the leaders of many publicly traded companies: the need to communicate frequently and clearly with a board of directors. Altschuler needs to relay health-care-related concepts to board members who don’t have a medical background.
If you have to translate industry jargon for a board filled with members who come from diverse professional backgrounds, Altschuler
says the only thing you can really do is streamline the language and
prepare yourself to answer a lot of questions.
“We have to make sure that our board understands what we’re going to
be doing because they are typically community and business leaders who
don’t necessarily appreciate the nuances of health care,” he says. “They’re
good, smart businesspeople, but health care is a bit of a peculiar business.
“My style with the board is to talk with as many people as possible
on a personal basis. That’s not the most efficient style, but the board
is so important, and the ability for them to understand what is going
on is so important to our success; I really have believed over the
years that it’s worth the time.”
HOW TO REACH: The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, www.chop.edu