We’re tasked with continuing to build our hospital system into a national brand, but our CEO doesn’t see our nurses as a part of the brand equation. Our senior leaders see them as entirely replaceable, and accept high turnover as part of our culture. I’ve heard that the answer is better training, but training alone does not create retained, engaged employees. We train them and they leave. I don’t believe training is a magic bullet; the culture has to value its skilled staff. How do you convince the president of a company that employees matter?
Sincerely,
Searching for the Solution
Dear Searching,
Thank you for asking a challenging question that is relevant to every employee and senior leader—not just those in healthcare. How do improvements in employee engagement, commitment, and retention fit into an organization’s brand equation? And how do you convince a harried and skeptical team of senior leaders? Your challenge will be to show that a) these improvements are possible, given your current situation and the turnover in the profession, and b) these improvements are worth the investment, given the strategic goals that keep senior leaders up at night.
Begin with Their Existing Goals and Strategies. You suggest that your senior leaders have a clear objective: to build your hospital system into a national brand. Make it very clear that you support this goal. Your desire to improve engagement, commitment, and retention needs to be positioned as an essential strategy for achieving this strategic objective. But how do you convince skeptics that it really is essential? How do you change their hearts and minds?
Create Personal Experiences. The mistake we make is to try to change hearts and minds with our mouths. We think that if we find the right words, the right data, and the right tone of voice, we can somehow bring the skeptics over to our side. The sad result is a mix of lectures, sermons, data dumps, and rants. Verbal persuasion is the least effective way to convince others.
Personal experience is the gold standard for changing hearts and minds. Find ways to put senior leaders into situations where they will experience for themselves the importance of engagement, commitment, and retention. But how can you do that?
Partner with them on their current strategies for building your brand. We’ve worked with several hospital systems that were engaged in similar initiatives, so I can share some common strategies. Your team will need to build at least one world-class heart center, cancer center, and children’s hospital. You will need to either purchase or partner with at least twenty community hospitals in your area to expand your reach to where patients live. And you will need to build research facilities and partner with a medical school in order to raise your profile to a national level.
Continue to read more :- How to Help Senior Leaders Appreciate Their Staff
