Health & Medical
Bill Roderick
CEO, Barberton Citizens Hospital
By Matt McClellan
Smart Business Akron/Canton | June 2007
Bill Roderick treats all his employees the same, whether the person is a physician on the medical staff or a cook in the kitchen.
In his eyes, they are all his customers and his job is to get them whatever they need to do their job well. And if he can’t provide
them with those resources, he’s upfront and honest about it. Roderick’s approach has helped him earn the trust of Barberton
Citizens Hospital’s 1,200 employees, and the results earned the organization a 2006 Hospital of Choice award from the American
Alliance of Healthcare Providers. Smart Business spoke with Roderick, CEO of Barberton Citizens Hospital, about how to get
employees from all across an organization to buy in to your vision.
Build consensus, then get out of the way. Management is the practical application of
running a business. Leadership is instilling
a vision of the future, spending a lot of time
communicating that vision, facilitating
matter to put the resources in the right
hands so you can achieve your vision.
I’m a consensus-builder, so I work with
my team on how to best get to a vision.
Then, the best thing is to stay out of everybody’s way. I’ve got really talented people,
and once we’re clear on where we’re headed and how we’re going to get there, I get
out of the way.
Connect your vision to your employees’ goals. They have to understand what the vision is.
You have to involve them in developing the
plan to get to your vision.
They need to be involved; they have to
have a stake in it. It’s important to push
responsibility down to the level where the
skill is applied, so people feel empowered
to do the job they have the skills to do without being micromanaged.
Tie organizational success to their own
personal success through incentives and
rewards. It’s particularly important, especially in longer projects or long-range
actions, that you celebrate milestones
along the way so they stay engaged in how
the success is playing out. You want to
spend a lot of time rewarding good performance. That keeps them involved and
empowered.
Be reliable. You have to have a high level of
trust in the leadership. You have to be at a
place where you’ve developed that trust.
Demonstrating constancy of purpose and
action is key to developing that trust. Our
employees and our physician partners
need to know they can rely on me to move
the organization in a specific direction.
I don’t want to be saying one thing and
doing another. If I’m very constant in my
actions, they begin to depend on me to act
in a certain way, and that builds trust.
Tie it all together. It’s important in a strategic
sense that the vision you have is tied to
your mission. You need to make that clear when communicating with everybody on
how that tie-in occurs.
People generally are wed to the mission.
The mission of our hospital is the promise
that, ‘the care you want is here.’ Most people, especially in the health care industry,
are tied to a mission that involves service
to others.
So if you can tie your vision for the future
to your mission, your employees will better
buy in to it and understand it. If it isn’t, you
probably shouldn’t be headed in that direction.
You have to be very clear on what success is and what it means to people in their
jobs. What does it mean to me as housekeeper? What does it mean to me as a
physician?
They need to understand how their job
affects the success of getting to the vision,
and vice versa. What’s in it for me? There’s
always that question.
Inspire the younger generation. As a fellow
approaching 60, it’s been a process to learn
how to attract folks in their 20s. I have children in that age group myself. They’re looking for different things than I did as a young
manager moving into the organization.
It’s been clear to me that, that generation
is going to be very difficult to retain for any
significant length of time because they are
looking for different experiences. It’s not
just the money, and job security is not an
issue anymore. That generation is looking
for different experiences.
It really becomes important to give young
managers a lot of responsibility and a lot of
freedom, and yet mentor and coach them
so they learn the skills needed to be successful not only in their current jobs but
later on.
I look at it as, ‘When we bring people in,
are we training them for whatever their
next job is going to be? Are we helping
them grow and develop so they can see
pathways to the future?’
Are we going to keep them all the time?
No, we’re not. We’re not going to be able to
retain them all the time, but we are going to
prepare them, and they’re going to have fun
along the way. If they do, they’ll probably
stay longer than they would have, anyway.
Encourage, don’t command. We spend a lot of
time on training leaders to coach and mentor their subordinates. In the past year, our
departmental directors have been going
through a training series on coaching and
mentoring. Next month, we’re rolling that
training down to the mid-level managers
and first-line supervisors.
The idea is to positively influence your
subordinates in a way that encourages
them, yet they learn better ways to do
things. Instead of the old ‘command and
control’ kind of organization, like the way
companies used to be run — where there
was a hierarchal organization and the boss
ran things and everybody else did what the
boss said — now, it’s a much more coaching and encouraging type of organization.
You need to have that in place to keep the
young people interested, activated and
learning.
HOW TO REACH: Barberton Citizens Hospital, (330) 615-3000
or www.barbhosp.com
