Page 48 - The Power to Change Anything

Find Vital Behaviors 37

their families didn’t feel like they were being treated with care,
dignity, and respect.
The chief administrator called the executive team to-
gether. He shared the data and made a proposal. The question
he posed was this: “What do we have to do, all 4,000 of us, to
fix this?” Two teams of respected employees, six to a team, were
formed. Each team represented half the functions in the hos-
pital. The teams were chartered with finding positive deviance.
Locate those health-care professionals who routinely scored
high on customer satisfaction in areas where others did poorly.
They were not to worry about systems, pay, or carpet in the
employee lounge, but behaviors they could teach others—
behaviors that were both recognizable and replicable.
Each team interviewed dozens of patients and family mem-
bers and sought ideas from colleagues in their hospital. They
searched the Web and called colleagues in other hospitals. But
mostly they watched exactly what top performers did to see
what made them different from everyone else.
Eventually the teams identified the vital behaviors they
believed led to higher customer satisfaction scores. They found
five: Smile, make eye contact, identify yourself, let people know
what you’re doing and why, and end every interaction by ask-
ing, “Is there anything else that you need?”
The executives created a robust strategy to influence these
behaviors. The result? As 4,000 employees started enacting
these five vital behaviors, service-quality scores quit decreasing
and improved dramatically for 12 months in a row. The re-
gional medical center became best-in-class among its peers
within a year of the executives’ focus on these five vital
behaviors.

SEARCH FOR RECOVERY BEHAVIORS

To explain the next search principle, we return to the Guinea
worm problem The Carter Center tackled. In addition to