Getting your Team on Board

If you work in healthcare today, you may feel like a sailor trying to chart a course when the wind keeps shifting. First, there’s the pressures of greater transparency and increased consumer pressures for service and quality. Then there’s the rapid pace of new technology, including the shift towards electronic medical records. New trends in financial services and payment reform are occurring on all fronts since President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordability Act into law in March, 2010.

Physician and nurse shortages also loom large. And the usual revenue that hospitals count on from outside sources—investment income, philanthropic donations, and favorable rates in the bond market—have evaporated.

In Leadership and Medicine, Dr. Floyd D. Loop (former CEO of the Cleveland Clinic and an accomplished physician leader) also predicts that consumers will become even more selective in the years ahead as they absorb more of the burden of their personal healthcare costs through payment reform.

In the end, of course, stiffer competition doesn’t come down to cost, but value…just as it always has. So what’s your value proposition? And how well do you communicate it to the people who matter?

Leave Them in Your Wake

Steven J. Spear, in his book Chasing the Rabbit: How market leaders outdistance the competition and how great companies can catch up and win, calls high-velocity organizations “rabbits,” because they perform so well that their industry counterparts are competitors in name only. Rabbits lead the race. They are constantly experimenting and learning more about the work they do; this is how they cope with the complexity they all face in one form or another.

Effectively communicating your brand has never been more important. It’s what you stand for. Your value proposition. What makes you unique from everybody else. And while it’s easy to see how this could take a backseat as you scramble to address all the other challenges in the operating environment, now is the best time to position yourself for success in the years ahead.

Living the Brand: All Hands on Deck

The fact is, your brand is carried by the people who work for your organization. Studies show that more than three-fourths of employees who interface with customers communicate inaccurate or incomplete information. Help your employees deliver on the brand promise with the tools and information they need.

One way to ensure you’re effective is to stand in your employees’ shoes for a moment. Ask yourself, “Does our message ring true?” In other words, is the experience you’re selling to your customers identical to the one they (and the employees who work for you) experience every day?

Ensure that your organization’s culture is aligned to the brand, because when you live your brand promise, employees know it. They’re happier because they understand the mission and work for an organization that makes a difference in people’s lives. Happy employees mean higher employee retention, which turns into bottom line savings through a productive, qualified workforce and lower recruitment costs.