Page 140 - How America's Best Places to Work Inspire Extra Effort in Extraordinary Times

The Real Job of Managers C127

Lang: We’re a 230-bed hospital with limited financial resources. We
don’t have Ping-Pong tables and big lunchrooms. About 10 years ago,
we asked ourselves, “What can we focus on for the most dramatic
effect—to achieve great patient care and sustain a competitive ad-
vantage?” The CEO and I both had the same philosophy: it’s all
about leadership. We decided we had to focus on our leaders and do
everything we could to make them better. Making our managers and
supervisors better leaders became a key organizational priority.

Q: So, how did you go about doing that?
Lang: We built a leadership program designed to get every manager
to see themselves as leaders and recognize that our success as a hospital
is totally dependent on them. That meant that leaders needed to be
more aware of how they could improve and the training necessary to
be more effective at managing people. So, we started with our senior
leadership team. We had them take a personality self-assessment and
receive 360-degree feedback. But when we tried cascading the 360
process down to the next level of leaders, we found that they were
just unloading years of pent-up negative feedback on each other and
it was very destructive. We realized that many managers weren’t
giving honest feedback to each other because they just didn’t feel com-
fortable doing it.

Q: So, what did you do then?
Lang: Well, about two years into our leader development process, we
knew there were two reasons we weren’t getting traction—1. lead-
ers were still not as self-aware about their own leadership styles and
behavior as they should be, and 2. if your leaders can’t have dif-
ficult conversations with their direct reports, peers, and their own
managers, all this is pointless. So we started making every kind of
management training available, including a course called “Difficult
Conversations” conducted by the Harvard Negotiation Project. This
course had a big impact. Most of our current managers have attended
40 hours of leadership training and we plan to have them attend
8 hours of training each year. The training includes 2 hours on