Kim Cripe knows how it feels to be busy.
“The demands for your time are probably double the time — at least — that you have,” says the president and CEO of Children’s Hospital of Orange County. “The demands for your time and your energy, they just seem to exponentially grow year after year.”
Lately, Cripe has been busier than ever as she repositions CHOC from a community children’s hospital to a nationally recognized children’s hospital. The new vision has brought big changes, like building a new hospital and affiliating with UC Irvine.
However, she recognizes that her 2,432 employees face the same time pressures. Her job is to keep them focused on the right things.
“The things you talk to people about are the things they pay the most attention to,” Cripe says. “If we’re focusing and talking about something, I’m certain that people are paying attention to it. And if I don’t, there are many other things to fill that time slot.”
To get everyone concentrating on the same vision, Cripe learned she had to refine the organization’s focus and communicate it relentlessly. It took a lot of effort to reach all of the employees across a 238-bed main facility in the city of Orange, a hospital-within-a-hospital in Mission Viejo and 12 other clinics. It required a clear plan laying out the steps to becoming the kind of children’s hospital CHOC aspired to be.
“If you’re trying to move your company, you need to have a plan, and then you have to have tools to deploy the plan,” Cripe says. “You need to be able to develop the plan, communicate the plan and explain to everybody that works there what their role is in achieving the plan.”
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