Don’t look back
Once you’ve developed a vision of where your organization needs to go, you need to overarticulate every step of that vision to your employees.
“We spent so much time in the development and communication of what we were trying to accomplish that honestly, by the time we turned it on, the physicians and other stakeholders were sort of sick of hearing about it,” Geidt says. “They were saying, ‘Let’s just go with this thing.’”
Geidt relentlessly hammered every nuance of the plan into every member of the organization. The communications came from every angle, in forums of every type: meetings, newsletters, e-mail, and conference calls.
“There was no doubt we were committed to this thing,” he says. “Everyone clearly knew that it was coming; they knew why.”
After you’ve over articulated the vision, the second step you need to take is to eliminate any doubt about the organization’s new direction. Geidt says if your employees know that they have an opportunity to step back into the safety of their old ways, the success of your project is in serious jeopardy.
“We’ve offered that crutch many times historically, and we realized that was a mistake,” he says. “There is no place to run from technology, especially information technology. We’re all going to get there eventually; we just thought we’d rather be there earlier than later.”
Through his communications, Geidt made it absolutely clear that once the organization made the switch, no one would be going back. Saddleback was going all in, and the change was either going to be a complete success or a total failure — there would be no in between.
“People had to be clear that this was not something we were iffy about,” he says. “We were fairly rigid when it came to not taking a step backwards. We basically got rid of the paper; we got rid of the forms. We would not let them write things down.”
Although it may seem drastic, Geidt’s all-in approach convinced his staff that returning to the days of pen and paper was not an option — they would have to adapt to survive.
