Identify problems by listening
After enduring unionization and teetering on the threshold of a
strike, many executives would have blindly taken action to
address the hospital’s many ills.
Wolfe took a decidedly different approach.
“In my first 100 days on the job, I really didn’t come in to impart
any wisdom on the organization,” he says. “I came in to listen, and
I did.”
That action — or rather, the lack thereof — may seem a bit backward to those more familiar with a take-charge style of leadership.
Wolfe says that in such a tumultuous situation, it’s better to slow
down and assess your surroundings rather than make rash decisions to change them.
“We were trying to understand the circumstances that we had,
why that was occurring, what we needed to do to make ourselves
better, what our goals should be, our weaknesses and strengths,”
he says. “It was a chance to understand some of those things better.”
Wolfe says that the best way to uncover those issues is to meet
with employees and other stakeholders one by one. It’s not a matter of walking the halls and eavesdropping on private conversations or asking direct reports to infiltrate different departments.
If you really want to understand a given problem, you must set
aside time to speak with the people it affects and just listen.
“I really did have a lot of formal meetings set down,” he says.
“Especially when you’re starting out, people generally appreciate
the fact that you would take the time to set a meeting to really hear
from them.”
This process may seem daunting at first. Meeting with hundreds
of people and hearing hundreds of complaints and hundreds of
opinions over the course of 100 days isn’t going to be easy. Wolfe
says to stay the course and never delegate the task to your management team. The best feedback comes straight from the source.
“I really was a bit of a lone ranger as far as just hearing what people were saying,” he says. “I didn’t want to have it filtered or
screened from the team. That’s no disrespect from them. They’re
good people. But you need to hear it unfiltered for the first bit.”
Wolfe says by personally sitting through so many one-on-one
meetings, it’s much easier to identify the major themes that continually float to the top of the conversation.
“I wish I could tell you there was more science to it,” he says.
“When you talk to that many people, and you keep hearing the
same top 10, 15 things, I really had no shadow of a doubt as far as
what the major things were.”
That’s not to say the task is easy. Those themes only made themselves apparent after countless sessions of diligent focus and concentration. But if you’re willing to put in that effort and listen to
hundreds of people vent their frustrations, Wolfe says the benefits
are certainly worth it.
“It was intense going out and listening to all the stakeholders,
whether it was physicians, employees, managers, [the] senior
team, the board or the community,” he says. “If I would take another job, I would do the same thing for the first 100 days again. It
came back in spades.”