Take an honest look
If you don’t know what you’re really good at, the chances are pretty good that your clients and customers don’t know either. Haynes felt this was one of the biggest obstacles holding SLU Hospital back from reaching its full potential.
The hospital was known for doing a lot of things well. But if it could put itself in a position to be lauded for doing a few things exceptionally well, that would be even better.
“You need to be honest with yourself about truly what it is you do well,” Haynes says. “Sometimes you can have one piece of your whole business doing really well, but it could do a lot better if you were willing to change and either add to or subtract from other services you’re providing in the organization. It’s understanding the bits and pieces. If you turn the dial to the right or the left, you might be able to even enhance the opportunities for the service you want to provide. You don’t have to be everything for everybody.”
For too long, Haynes says employees would wistfully dream of what they could do, if they only had this money or that equipment to do it.
“The first piece is kind of emotional and just a little bit hard,” Haynes says of launching the identification process. “We stopped wishing for things, like, ‘Gee, I wish we did better in this particular service line.’ We really looked at what we had at that moment. Instead of just saying, ‘If we added this person or brought this surgeon on,’ and how we would do this, we were very critical of ourselves. What do we have in place that we can do now without having to expend a huge amount of money, buy a bunch of capital or hire a bunch of people? What is it we have that we can enhance?
“Someone would come to you and say, ‘I’ve got this ability to do these things, and it’s not going to cost an arm and a leg.’ That would be a very strong indication of opportunity. People that would come and say, ‘If you give us this new type of technology or this new piece of equipment or you completely rebuild something, this is going to cost you millions and billions of dollars,’ generally that was not something indicative of a good investment. They were suggesting the reason they hadn’t moved forward was related to equipment or technology or money.”
So how do you get to that point to know what it is you really do best? How do you convince employees who have been doing something a certain way and feel a certain level of pride at how they do it that you’re going to go in a new direction and not do it that way anymore?
“It needs to be data-driven and not based on motives,” Haynes says. “You really have to look at things with a jaundiced eye and ask critical questions. When you hear specific pieces of information that don’t jive with what you know from an experience base to be true, you stop. The data may be right, and it may be showing you something that you haven’t experienced before or find hard to believe. But at least you can go through the process of understanding it more deeply.”
You also have to remove as much bias as you can from your analysis of the data to make a truly honest assessment.
“We have a tendency to delegate responsibility for determining what data should be and what metrics should be to the people that are actually being measured,” Haynes says. “There’s a bit of a bias attached to that. There is good merit in having people kind of extraneous to that be able to look at that data and use that data. … It’s all part of that honesty and trying to divorce yourself from wishing and trying to create an environment where you’re really looking at the stuff that is tangible.”
In the end, what’s often most important in developing a niche is asking yourself what your customers would want and what you can give them.
“It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling shoes or working in a telecommunications company,” Haynes says. “If you embrace the same kind of concept we embrace in health care, which is to look to the patient, as you are going through your decision-making and testing your ideas and questioning whether you made the right decision, that will give you the answer you are looking for.
“As these things merit themselves out, you’re able to deploy your resources and your money in a way that supports the effort of people that are changing process or redeveloping or retooling their product based on what is a much stronger set of business principles than just saying, ‘If you build it, they will come.’ You have to step away from that. … That was one of the key decision factors in deciding what it was we would spend our energy and efforts on.”