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Has there ever been a single management practice that has promised to solve more problems than rounding? Especially in the realm of patient and employee experience, leadership teams often turn to various interpretations of rounding as the silver bullet to turn around lagging staff engagement or 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 & Packard’s “management by walking around.” But more important than what we call the practice, all successful leadership rounding approaches have one thing in common: they are about making real

Should you become friends with your boss? It’s a question both employees and leaders ask themselves. One of the first pieces of advice I remember receiving when I became a supervisor was, “Your goal should not be to become their friend.” While that’s sound advice that is well documented in leadership theory, the issue arises when bosses take the I’m-not-their-friend philosophy too far and assume that it isn’t a problem when employees consider them the enemy. This post is the third in a series featuring excerpts from Burl Stamp’s upcoming new book, Becoming a Better Boss, which is scheduled to be published next year. This entry is from the chapter titled “The Better Boss Mindset.” I experienced first-hand how this exaggerated, warped view of leadership

No one argues that the stress you carry when you are in charge can be daunting, and it usually only gets more intense as you rise through the leadership ranks of an organization. In addition to the inherent pressures of the job itself, senior leaders carry a sense of personal responsibility with them 24/7 in ways that often feel like the weight of the world is on their shoulders. This post is the second in a series featuring excerpts from Burl Stamp’s upcoming new book, Becoming a Better Boss, which is scheduled to be published early next year. This entry is from the chapter titled “The Better Boss Mindset.” So, given the pressures and responsibilities that come with leadership, executives must do the most important

How often have you heard an old-school boss say (or at least think), “Hey, they should consider themselves lucky to have a job.” Our next few blog posts will feature excerpts from Burl Stamp’s upcoming new book, Becoming a Better Boss, which is scheduled to be published early next year. This entry is from the chapter titled “The Better Boss Mindset.” This mindset probably traces some of its roots all the way back to the Great Depression, when individuals did indeed feel lucky to have any job at all. I still remember spending time as a kid with my grandparents who spent a good part of their early working life during the Depression. That frightening, discouraging time influenced the way they thought about life and

Another meeting. (Sigh.) In our work with healthcare teams, there are few shared beliefs that are more widely held than, “We have too many meetings!” And healthcare isn’t alone. When you search “meetings” in the Harvard Business Review archive, 381 magazine articles, 1,016 digital articles, and 4,071 case studies show up. Clearly, we know there’s a problem. So, why have most organizations made so little progress in crafting solutions? It’s likely because the core issue is complex and requires meaningful change. When companies jump to the conclusion that “too many” is the only problem with meetings, predictable solutions emerge. Believing that reducing supply will reduce demand, organizations try implementing every imaginable version of “No Meeting Zones,” from blocking one-hour-a-day, to one-day-a-week, to flexible versions that

“I’m not cancelling my gym session to attend your pre-work meeting.”    Not surprisingly, this recent LinkedIn post from Stephanie Brown of Creative Career Lab was met with polarizing responses. Feedback ranged from “Couldn’t agree more!” and “Love this!” to “Nope!” and “Balance doesn’t mean selfishness and inflexibility.”  The desire for a healthy work-life balance has become one of the rallying cries for younger generations.  And while this has been met to some degree with headshaking and questioning of work ethics and laziness, the truth is, something needed to change.   Due to their intrinsic interconnection, the ability to achieve a true “harmonious equilibrium” may be a misconception, as highlighted in a recent Forbes article.1   However, a shift in the way organizational culture supports overall employee well-being

“Another meeting?!” It’s a frustration we hear often, especially in health care provider organizations. And for good reason. Staff meetings are often held for the wrong reasons, are poorly planned, and can be just plain boring. But when they are inclusive, open and well-structured, department staff meetings can be one of the most powerful places to cultivate teamwork and trust. Like so many long-standing, accepted management practices, the key to success is in the how and why we deploy them. First, if leaders believe that the primary purpose of a staff meeting is to share information, they will likely continue to be disappointed in the lukewarm reception they get from their staff. Too many department meetings consist of 55 minutes of standard reports, recitation of

In our work with major health systems over the past 20+ years, the “golden” 5-to-1 ratio has been one of the most enduring recommendations we make to leaders who want to better engage and support team members is to provide balanced feedback. This research-based strategy reveals the power of five positive comments for every one criticism in high-performing organizations. This practice and the underlying research were cited in a 2013 Harvard Business Review article by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, “The Ideal Praise-to-Criticism Ratio.”  By design, this leadership principle focuses on quantity. But sometimes we see a limiting flaw in the way people think about the 5-to-1 ratio.   Insightful leaders understand that the practice works best when they develop a mindset and bias toward

Transformative leaders who make exciting, innovative things happen in their companies usually possess a higher sense of urgency than their colleagues. They have a bias for action over indecision that others admire. But to be successful over the long-term, these same great leaders also know when to suppress that sense of urgency. Their emotionally intelligent side tells them their best reaction sometimes is to sleep on it. Especially when it comes to people-centric leadership skills and practices, effective bosses understand that knee-jerk reactions are seldom productive. Even worse than being ineffective, they can leave lingering scars that affect an employee’s sense of engagement, commitment, and drive to improve.  Philosophically, that may make perfect sense. But the challenge for leaders is that knee-jerk reactions are emotional,

“You’re not a very strong leader.” I still remember that feedback from one of my first bosses soon after I was “rewarded” with supervisory responsibilities. I was promoted because I was a hard-working, strong individual performer. But I was 23 years old and didn’t know what I didn’t know. My immediate thought and gut reaction: “What the hell do you mean that I’m not a very good leader?!” It was several years – and many more life experiences – later that I finally began to understand the gift my boss had given me. Leadership was something I needed to work on. “Leadership is a process of self-development,” Linda Hill, a Harvard Business School professor and leadership guru commented in a recent HBR article. “You need