Get focused
Penrose emphasizes focus over and over again with his management team. He says that without focus, a management team won’t pick the most important targets for improvement. You only have a finite amount of resources, and your metrics may tell you that several projects deserve attention.
“You have to prioritize,” he says. “If you try to tackle everything at once, you’ll fall down.”
To combat this problem, Penrose established a top-down, bottom-up approach to focused management.
From a top-down standpoint, the executive team needs to refer to the organization’s vision, mission and long-term goals to determine which problems should be tackled first.
The top executives are the most familiar with the organization’s strategic plan, and so they must always have the big picture in mind when deciding what problems are the most critical.
To get the bottom-up perspective, Penrose goes to the department level to understand what issues are the most important to each department.
“There are things that are happening to your organization, inside your organization all the time,” he says. “Some of them are things we’re reacting to; some are things that we, proactively, we want to build and create. Understanding what internal and external forces are working in the organization — that are driving where people are spending their time — is something that we need to be considering.”
To try to understand those factors, ask for input from the people who know best.
“We encourage each department to focus, identify their top area of focus,” he says. “Then, we also make sure we are communicating from a top-down standpoint what our organizational focus is. Hopefully, if we are doing our job right, there is a connection between the two.”
However, the two groups aren’t always on the same page. Penrose says that about half the time the two sides don’t agree on what should be the organization’s top priority, but that doesn’t mean he’s changing St. Jude’s core mission every time one of the departments has a problem.
“It sparks a conversation,” he says. “The other 50 percent of the time, the focus area for a particular department is somewhat reactionary. That isn’t a bad thing. There is some force at work that is causing the focus for that department to be other than what the organizational focus is.”
So if that happens, the first step is making sure everyone in management is aware of the issue. Once they know about it, they can begin working to resolve it so that department can bring its main focus back into lockstep with the organization as a whole.
“It’s like trying to get everyone rowing in the same direction, so to speak,” Penrose says.
No matter what industry you’re in, you can use the same techniques Penrose used at St. Jude to improve employee performance and strive for perfection.
“As you start breaking it down, we all have processes, we all have humans involved in those processes,” he says. “We all have opportunities for process improvement. It’s the same type of thing. Understand what the outcomes are that are key to your industry or to your business. Start to measure those outcomes, measure your performance. Benchmark yourself if you can against others, and identify your opportunities for improvement.”
How to reach: St. Jude Medical Center, (714) 871-3280 or www.stjudemedicalcenter.org
