Tag: Process Improvement

Are your team’s goals driving better results? Maybe we need a SMARTer approach.

If you’ve worked in any large organization during the past 30 years, there is a very high probability that someone recommended that you try setting SMART goals. This easy-to-remember acronym was originally introduced in a 1981 issue of Management Review by authors George Doran, Arthur Miller and James Cunningham. If one of their goals was to develop a memorable model that would stick in management practice, then they’ve been extremely successful. When I speak to large groups and ask, “Has anyone heard of “SMART” goals?”, almost every hand in the room goes up. Despite its memorability and simplicity, setting SMART goals has limitations. As suggested in the authors’ original article title – “There’s a SMART Way to Write Management Goals and Objectives” – the focus

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man with a clipboard graphic at stamp & chase

Five Sure-Fire Ways to Wreck Rounding

Over the past decade, health care leadership rounding has become a best-practice staple for organizations that are striving to improve patient experience, employee engagement and the overall culture of performance. While in healthcare we sometimes act like we invented the practice, it has been pursued in different forms for many years in other industries. If you are a disciple of Lean Manufacturing and the Toyota Production System, you call it “going to the gemba.” Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard coined the term “management by walking around” in the 1960s when their rapidly-expanding technology company was growing beyond their capacity and ability to be involved in every detail of the business. In health care, our name for the practice of going to where the most important

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Five Ways to Keep Goal Achievement On Track

Part 6 in our Series: A Smarter Approach to S.M.A.R.T. Goals In our six-part series, A Smarter Approach to S.M.A.R.T. Goals, our first five posts have focused primarily on the front end of the goal setting process. Making sure your goals are specific enough to change behavior, meaningful so they engage the team, agreed-upon for shared success, and realistic enough to be achievable is a great start. Now you have to effectively implement. The final element of our model, “T,” stands for tracked and addresses how the implementation plan and monitoring of results are critical to success.How often are well-stated organizational goals developed and distributed at the start of a new year – then barely addressed by individual teams until 12 months later when we

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Medical employee holding patients hand

The Ultimate Compliment for Healthcare Providers

It was almost nine o’clock in the evening when I finally arrived at my hotel in Indianapolis from a long day of meetings and travel in preparation for the full-day workshop I would lead the next day. I was tired, but I was also hungry. I asked the front-desk clerk as I checked in if there was a place nearby where I could still get a quick bite. She pointed across the lobby and said, “I think Joan over in the bar can still get you something to eat.” The bar at the suburban hotel where I was staying was not exactly a hot spot on a Monday night. There were only two other people at a small table talking when I walked in and

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spinning plates graphic from stamp & chase

In patient experience work, there’s no “Silver Bullet.” But are you trying to keep too many plates spinning?

In a recent blog post, I argued that the problem of searching for a single, easy-to-implement patient engagement tactic goes beyond the fact that one doesn’t exist. Believing that a simple silver bullet strategy is out there actually stymies continuous improvement, innovation and effective implementation. So if there is no single silver bullet, one might reasonably jump to the conclusion that a shotgun approach – implementing multiple solutions simultaneously – would produce better results. But that strategy has real flaws, as well. When I was working closely with the Experience Team at Ascension Health several years ago, we termed it “initiative fatigue.” In other words, teams were trying to launch and sustain so many different initiatives to improve care that they lost focus. It felt like

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