Find communicators
To facilitate an ongoing dialogue between employees and management, you need to have leaders on your management team who are willing and able to communicate. That means you need to choose wisely when you recruit and hire the people who will become the future leaders of your company.
Rector calls it “hiring tough.” When you hire tough, you refuse to settle for a warm body to fill a position. You are willing to struggle with a shorthanded staff in the short term to reap the benefits of a good hire and a more cohesive team in the longer term.
“You might be overwhelmed with work, but you do not settle for a person who might get the work done but doesn’t share the same intrinsic values,” Rector says. “I never want someone who is going to come in here and be a yes-man. If I were to come into a meeting and tell everyone that I wanted to paint the hospital pink, I don’t want everyone standing around me and telling me that’s a great idea. I want people to tell me, ‘You might want to think that over first.’
“That’s why you want to have a good hiring process, to make sure that you understand who you’re hiring and that they share some of the same values that you do. Maybe they don’t have all of the same ideas or thought processes but the consistent values are there.”
In the hiring process, Rector and his staff formulate questions geared toward finding out about a candidate’s set of personal values. They want a candidate who brings an adequate skill set to the table, but they want to find the cultural match first. Skills can, to an extent, be taught by an employer. Personal values can’t.
“We have a pretty specific interview process that engages a candidate in questions that aren’t just work-related but reveal a lot of their values set,” Rector says. “It’s lasted as long as I’ve been here, and it’s a process that works very well for us.”
Rector and his staff also employ peer interviewing sessions, in which management-level candidates speak with their prospective peers and subordinates. A candidate for a director position is interviewed by other directors but could also be interviewed by the people who will report to that position.
“Candidates are probably going through five or six individual and five or six group interviews over the course of a few days,” Rector says.
You need a cultural match when you look for hires, because you need people who are willing to make your organization’s mission personal. You might not deal in saving lives the way Rector’s organization does, but the need to have your employees internalize and live your message is still there.
Rector doesn’t want his managers and employees to memorize the mission statement at RMC Bayonet Point. He wants them to believe in it. If, as an employee, you can parrot the organization’s mission and core values back to a manager, it should be because you’re living the mission and values each day, not so that you can placate your bosses.
“We can create a set of rehearsed core values that look important, but our core values are exactly what they are, and our team members have to embrace them,” Rector says. “So we have to keep things very simple along those lines. One of the questions I always ask people is, ‘How do you know good care when you see it?’ And you have to ask yourself, ‘Am I treating this patient the same way I’d be treating them if they were my own family?’ If that’s the standard we’re using for treating people, we’re probably going to do a really good job of delivering care.”
