I was recently dining with friends at a restaurant after having just completed a workshop on service recovery. During my workshop, I had talked about the typical restaurant experience where the wait staff asks how everything is, and, regardless of what you really think about the food, you say, “fine.” I find that about 98 percent of my workshop participants report that they say “fine” in many less-than-satisfactory situations just to avoid confrontation. Read more...
I really love this time of year. The lull that we have around the holidays gives me the chance to reflect on the previous year and set my sights on the great opportunities that lie in the year ahead. Plus, there’s something so refreshing about having a whole year spread out before me with nothing but possibilities! January is a time for setting goals for myself and for my business. It gives me direction and helps me stay aligned with my mission and vision (I have a personal mission and vision as well as for my business.). Read more...
Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of seeing the movie The Mighty Macs. It’s a story of a fledgling women’s college basketball team that rose to the national championship in the early 70’s at a time when the words “women” and “athletics” were rarely spoken in the same sentence. Read more...
Remember the scene from the movie A Few Good Men when Jack Nicholson’s character shouted from the witness stand, “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!”? I often feel like shouting that myself. There are so many times I face off with leaders who want us to come in, wave the magic wand, and fix their patient satisfaction scores rather than facing the truth about the underlying culture that is at the root of poor patient satisfaction. Read more...
What goes up must come down, right? This indisputable law has been regarded as a hard, fast fact for hundreds of years, but it doesn’t have to apply to your patient satisfaction scores. Just because your scores go up, doesn’t mean they have to fall again. And on the flip side, just because they go up, doesn’t mean they’ll stay up.
I was recently chatting with a client about what it takes to sustain positive change and I was shocked to realize how many leaders assume that positive changes aren’t sustainable. Read more...
None of us wants to believe that we are the roadblocks to innovation and change, yet there are so many times when I hear leaders shoot down opportunities for growth and innovation with one simple sentence. Take your pick of these most common squelchers, including: Read more...
- It won’t work!
- We tried that once back in…
- They won’t approve. (The we/they thing is always a clue to filter.)
- That will never fly here!
- You don’t understand. We’re different. (Healthcare suffers from terminal uniqueness, including one doctor’s patients being sicker than all others, one hospital having unique issues with running 24/7, and—my personal favorite—only angry patients fill out satisfaction surveys.)
The word ‘accountability’ gets tossed around a lot in leadership discussions. Everyone agrees that accountability is necessary in high-performing organizations but creating a culture of accountability is tough. I’ve seen even some of the most experienced leaders waver on this one. Read more...
The term, “never events” strikes fear in the hearts of anyone in health care. High quality, safe care means that certain things should never occur on our watch. The never events that we have determined in health care are all clinically based. But imagine if we could apply the same concept to customer service and the patient experience. What if reimbursement was tied to certain events? What would we identify as the "e;never events"e; in the patient experience? I have pondered this a bit and come up with the Baird top 10 list of “never events” in the patient experience. Could these events be happening without your knowledge? What you don’t know, could be hurting you.
Like the Letterman top 10, the Baird list goes from least offensive to most offensive. Read more...
I love doing employee engagement workshops with leaders because it helps them to take an honest look at the organizational culture and the vital role that they play in fostering engagement as well as the bottom line impact. But one of the most telling parts of the workshop is when I ask the leaders to provide estimates of the engagement in their own organization. After defining fully engaged, engaged, somewhat engaged and disengaged characteristics, I ask them to determine what percent of the organization falls into each of the four categories. In most cases, their estimates will show some percentage of disengaged associates. I have had organizations as low as 5% and others as high as 35%. Inevitably, the conversation starts to drift toward how the disengaged people poison the environment, that they don’t pull their weight, that they create disruption. My next question is always the zinger. “e;Who do they (these disengaged employees) work for?”e; This question is typically met by an embarrassed silence before some brave soul speaks up and says, “e;Us. They work for us.”e; Read more...
This morning I took a long walk on the beach and watched as the surfers awaited the perfect wave. At first I marveled at their patience. Many of them treaded water without grabbing the opportunities that others seized. I watched for over an hour noticing that many of the surfers took multiple opportunities to ride the waves, while others treaded water letting one wave after another pass them by. I started to think about how often we wait and wait and wait for the perfect time to take action then wonder why nothing seems to get accomplished Read more...
