Health & Medical
Covert’s operation
How Michael Covert got 3,800 employees tightly focused on the vision at Palomar Pomerado Health
By Erik Cassano
Smart Business San Diego | September 2009
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Shortly after taking over as president and CEO of Palomar Pomerado Health in 2003, Michael Covert performed an assessment of his health care system.
Two things immediately stood out to him: The organization had a lot of talented employees, but management was unable to leverage that talent to improve the organization.
“When I came here, I sort of did my assessment after 45 days, and what I saw was a group of employees that felt unempowered at all levels,” Covert says. “I saw that I had good people here who believed in what they were doing individually but not necessarily as a team.”
Palomar Pomerado was suffering from a lack of a central, unifying focus. Though the system had a stated mission to provide its patients with the best possible service, it was not a concept that drove employees to raise their collective performance each day.
In short, Covert had a good organizational philosophy and good employees, but the communication aspect of the organization needed work.
“That was our challenge moving forward — to get people to believe in themselves by focusing on a vision and a mission,” he says. “Early on, I tested out whether people knew our mission and vision, from the board, to the medical staff, to employees, to community groups associated with us. Truthfully, everyone was sort of all over the map, and when I started down this journey, I talked to our employees every three weeks about our vision and mission. I wanted to make it come alive — what is our purpose, and what values do we want to represent in the organization.”
But refocusing the health system was about more than just Covert speaking to employees every few weeks. It involved a great deal of brainstorming, asking questions, soliciting input from employees and putting their ideas into action. Once that was put into place, continuous rounds of mission and vision reinforcement from management became a top priority to make sure the more focused vision and mission stuck.
