5 Strategies for Building Healthcare’s Comfort With Continuous Change
Originally published in Modern Healthcare, May 2023
While healthcare leaders were taught to consider organizational change as a formalized, fixed process with a clear start, middle, and end, today’s business environment has forced a shift in thinking. Specifically, the industry’s constant state of change has created whiplash and change fatigue among employees at all organizational levels, leading to inefficiencies, lack of productivity, and even burnout.
Addam Marcotte
To counteract the various downstream effects of this non-stop change, savvy healthcare leaders are embracing a new narrative focused on change agility and the benefits of responding to continuously shifting markets spurred by ever-evolving economies, demographics, and technologies. They have adopted “change agility” as a pillar of their cultures to best capitalize on internal and external opportunities.
The work of becoming more agile remains extremely challenging, especially among change-resistant institutions. Fortunately, there are actionable steps leaders can take to help build their organizations’ comfort with continuous change and shift their people’s mindset toward change readiness. These include:
1. Align your leadership team to a vision, not a concrete plan.
When considering your organization’s objectives, specifying an intended destination versus a set pathway makes agility in the face of unpredictable market forces all the more possible. For example, a scaling multi-site healthcare provider might have previously excluded rural regions from its expansion strategy, but reassessed this approach given a clear opportunity to make substantial inroads in untapped markets. Staying true to a vision focused on high quality care, while staying flexible about organizational capabilities, allows for continued forward motion, even in the face of obstacles. It further keeps teams focused on achieving shared goals, not elements subject to potential change.
2. Cascade your strategy in relevant terms to all levels.
Once leaders have fully communicated an organization’s high-level strategy, they would be wise to translate strategic components into terminology and actions relative to respective functions or departments. This helps maintain individuals’ and teams’ focus on their specific goals and allows them to best internalize and respond to strategic changes. To illustrate, an organization seeking to expand into new markets should consider what that will mean to the Finance team versus the Clinical Quality team. They should then translate what’s required accordingly, instead of utilizing a one-size-fits-all approach.
“Savvy healthcare leaders are embracing a new narrative focused on change agility and the benefits of responding to continuously shifting markets.”
3. Design organizational structures around capabilities rather than hierarchy.
Flatter organizations with looser hierarchies and less rigid job descriptions have more ability to pivot quickly in response to market forces. Yet maintaining these organizational structures becomes increasingly challenging for healthcare companies as they grow. To stay agile, larger healthcare institutions can create short-term teams or task forces focused on cross-functional imperatives. These teams can work parallel to organizations’ existing structures, identifying change goals, executing to meet their objectives, and disbanding when they’ve reached set milestones.
4. Allow information to flow easily in all directions.
Embracing a culture that supports employee feedback and open communication – especially from front-line providers and staff – helps inform leaders of market changes early. This creates more runway for organizations to pivot and better compete in a shifting healthcare space. Leaders can directly encourage such dialogue by using strategic internal communications to welcome staff insights as a means of informing big-picture strategy. They should also provide their team members with a clear communication channel to share such observations.
5. Embrace a compelling strategic narrative.
As human beings, we respond positively to well-told stories. Adopting a narrative approach to communication will go a long way in helping leaders make their case for change. To illustrate, instead of outlining information in the form of accounting facts and figures, or bulleted goals and text-heavy slides, they can share stories and images that bring these details to life. For example, a clinical leader could describe the improvements in quality of life experienced by a home care patient and then weave in statistics about performance, care, and outcomes, rather than jumping right into a numerical overview of those same data points.
Fostering organizational conditions that improve agility will only make healthcare organizations more competitive in today’s environment. Normalizing change as a predictable and often valuable part of the employee experience will better help even historically change-resistant professionals quickly shift direction and embrace new strategic priorities and initiatives with minimal resistance and disruption.
About the Author:
Addam Marcotte, Managing Principal at the human capital advisory firm FMG Leading, brings more than 20 years of experience managing organizational operations and leadership development initiatives. He focuses on helping healthcare services and private equity backed healthcare companies enhance strategic alignment, lead change, build internal trust and improve leadership effectiveness.