Salem Hospital Hones its Leadership Team for Emerging Strategic Opportunities

“The experienced IT Optimizer team led us through a process that included both analytical rigor and executive team involvement, and it significantly helped our leadership team grow.”

—Norm Gruber, President and CEO of Salem Hospital Regional Health Services

Client Challenge: Building Confidence to Face a Demanding Strategic Agenda

An Oregon hospital with resources, a rejuvenated management team and strong market position, Salem faced the blessing and curse of many simultaneous strategic options and demands. A strategic plan had been recently developed, and the leadership team agreed that each opportunity targeted was good. However, the team harbored strong doubts on whether the organization would find the strategic agenda overwhelming in sum. The CEO felt that the organization’s confidence in its own change capabilities was too low. He called for a process to assess the demands of planned strategic change initiatives against the organization’s capacity and, if needed, bring the two into better alignment.
 

Solution Provided by IT Optimizers: A Methodic Process for Aligning Capabilities and Confidence with Strategic Plans

The IT Optimizers consulting team assigned to the project represented insights from, in sum, over five decades of working with health care executives, and it included a former hospital CEO. The team employed the Fulcrum Organizational Change Methodology, which systematically facilitates management teams in managing and assessing their portfolios of strategic initiatives.

IT Optimizers combined successive iterations of analyses and senior management deliberations, with the resulting process designed to reverse a culture of low confidence and enthuse it with a realistic, yet optimistic view of its capacity for change. Assessments included quantitative measures of change initiative enablers and barriers, interviews across the organization, and detailed resource availability and demand calculations.

Initial assessments confirmed the CEO’s hunch that managers lacked confidence in the organization’s capacity to tackle their aggressive strategic agenda. Further, they uncovered weaknesses in the culture and structures around management that could severely impact needed collaboration levels and focus of top executives.

The assessments showed that strengthening two required elements would significantly improve the organization’s effectiveness in managing change: improving incentives for cross-departmental collaboration on strategic initiatives and focusing the Cabinet as a whole on monitoring fewer initiatives that more clearly required their ongoing attention, while distributing greater responsibility for other initiatives to individual executives or lower level managers.

The consulting team led assessments of resource demands across strategic initiatives. Ensuing executive team deliberations about the findings resulted in shifts in project timing for certain initiatives, as well as support for a few managers with excessive demands. More important, however, was the strong consensus that developed and supported the viability of the strategic initiative portfolio as a whole: Salem could succeed in driving its strategic agenda forward.
 

The Client Benefits: Confidence and Tools for Charging Ahead with a Demanding Strategic Agenda

The systematic analyses raised awareness in the executive team that certain aspects of organizational culture and practices needed change. Further the process generated agreement that the portfolio of strategic initiatives could be accomplished by the organization. Thus:

• The Cabinet grew more confident in the organization’s capabilities for strategic change,

• The top leadership gained focus on initiatives requiring their attention, while other management tiers were harnessed to increase leadership capacity,

• Incentive structure changes and discussions led to greater cross-unit collaboration on strategic initiatives, a prerequisite for their success,

• The leadership team, once presented with strong evidence that conflicts for resources across projects could be resolved, could agree that a set of projects with detailed timelines was attainable, and

• The project portfolio tools introduced through the project became available to aid the leadership in managing strategic change going forward.

 

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