Purposeful rounding? Or rounding with a higher purpose?
Has there ever been a single management practice that has promised to solve more problems than rounding? Especially in the realm of patient experience improvement, leadership teams often turn to various interpretations of rounding — including “purposeful rounding” — as the silver bullet to turn around lagging CAHPS scores. More often than not, they are disappointed. So, is leadership rounding an ineffective strategy? Hardly. But like so many management principles, the magic is in the why and how we implement the practice. Rounding has been tagged with many different monikers, including LEAN’s “gemba walk” and Hewlett and Packard’s “management by walking around.” But more important than what we call the practice, all successful, purposeful leadership rounding approaches have one thing in common. They are about