Health & Medical
The big picture
How to get your employees to see the wide-angel reasoning behind your decisions
By Erik Cassano
Smart Business Pittsburgh | August 2008
Page 1 of 2
Paul Bacharach
President and CEO, Uniontown Hospital
Occupying the CEO’s post in
a company is supposed to have the same effect as the
energy drink Red Bull: It gives
you wings.
Paul Bacharach, president and
CEO of the Uniontown Hospital
system of health facilities —
which generated 2007 revenue
of about $125 million — says
that as the leader, you should
possess the capability to hover
at the often-referenced 30,000-foot level, taking in the big picture and basing your decisions
on what will help build the company as a whole. But the same
cannot be expected of those
under you.
Your employees have a
smaller frame of reference in
the work that immediately surrounds them on a daily basis.
When you make a decision
from high atop the company,
there is a good chance that
each employee will see the
decision refracted only through
the lens of how it immediately
affects his or her job.
Bacharach says that when
employees don’t understand
your reasoning, it’s your job to
show them why.
Smart Business spoke to
Bacharach about how to get
everyone on board with the
bigger picture.
Show your people the way. A lot
of times decisions are made on
an organizational basis that
might seem irrational or even
arbitrary because they are not
put in the broader context of
the entire organization. So I
think in any communication
that goes on, you do need to
spend time providing some
kind of concise, understandable
rationale of why the decision is
being made.
The staff in general is very
focused on their individual
responsibilities and specialties,
so you need to be able to
inform them of what the basis
is for various actions you are
taking and put it in the context
of the organization’s strategic
direction.
You have to understand the
direction of the organization
and each individual’s role in
making that happen. We recently developed a freestanding out-patient diagnostics center,
understanding that we needed
that for multiple purposes. (It)
was a significant investment for
us but provided some alternative locations for services.
If you looked at it on an individual basis, it might seem like
more of an extravagant project, but in a broader context,
it tied into a number of other
activities.
Solicit feedback. We do a survey
every couple of years with our
staff. One of the things we
learned was that we were not
doing an effective job in communicating the issues and challenges that the organization
faced and really made a concerted effort to try and improve
upon that.
We have a number of means,
apart from typical departmental meetings. We host information in every department in our hospital that gives staff a clear
picture of our performance in
areas like quality of care and
services quality of care and services we’re delivering, the volume of activities that are going
on, the human resources and
people-related matters, and our
financial performance.
We share the same financial
data with our entire staff in the
hospital as we do with our
board of directors, so that they
know on a quarterly basis how
the organization is doing in a
pretty challenging environment.
Apart from that, there are a
number of other opportunities.
For a number of years, I have
been spending time shadowing
in various departments. I block
a day a month and typically go
out and spend the day in the
departments to see what they are doing. It is very informative
in general and allows me to
understand what they do on a
day-to-day basis.
I have also carried over
from my previous employer,
16 years ago, a patient rounding program, where on a fairly
regular basis [I] go out and
round with the nursing staff
and visit patients. It is a good
opportunity for me to develop
an understanding with what
the patients are experiencing.
