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Building Bench Strength in Health Care
by Jim Kauffman, Senior Consultant, DDI
You can’t play hunches. And don’t even think about trusting your gut. In today’s high-stakes health care industry, you need more than lady luck on your side when it comes time to choose a CEO, COO, CNO or other C-level leaders for your organization. Especially if you’re committed to developing homegrown talent for top-tier positions. So why do so many health care providers still take risky gambles on unproven candidates?
Surprisingly, a small percentage of health care organizations don’t view succession management and leadership development as important issues. Often, they won’t spare the time to properly vet senior leader candidates. But in most cases, health care organizations and their boards say they didn’t have a method to reliably identify and cultivate talent for those most important roles. Until now.
DDI’s innovative Executive Assessment for Health Care provides a rigorous “flight simulator” experience that gauges the readiness of leadership candidates in a risk-free environment. Developed with enough flexibility to work for organizations of all sizes, the process provides a comprehensive portrait of a prospect’s strengths and areas of development—before they assume positions of greater responsibility.
Along with providing an unparalleled method for assessing talent, the Executive Assessment for Health Care increases the probability of successful on-the-job performance by your leaders and reduces the amount of time needed to deliver the maximum business impact. And it delivers an extra benefit in the area of developing an organization’s internal leadership bench strength.
CEO for a Day
For years, DDI has operated Acceleration Centers® where high potential leaders participate in structured “day-in-the-life” simulations that enable highly trained evaluators to objectively assess their personal attributes as well as business management, leadership and interpersonal skills. But now, with DDI’s latest innovation in executive assessment, prospects assume the position of a health care CEO (or other C-level position) for an entire day and tackle challenges ranging from employee issues and risk-management strategies, to community relations and a media crisis. During the eight-hour exercise, they demonstrate their decision-making abilities by confronting scenarios culled from real-life situations—and provide DDI experts with the information they need to generate accurate, in-depth profiles of candidates’ performance and readiness for senior leadership positions.
Another way to understand the logic of this high-level interactive business case scenario is by taking a look at the airline industry. Before aspiring aviators ever actually fly a planeload of passengers, they undergo hours and hours of training in a flight simulator, where mistakes don’t lead to catastrophe. Likewise, the Acceleration Centers® provide an atmosphere where missteps won’t lead to financial, public relations or clinical disasters.
While traditional interviews and multi-rater feedback tools offer insights into past and present behaviors, the Acceleration Centers® provide views into the future of how top performers will operate in positions of greater scope, visibility and risk. But that’s just one benefit.
Pump Up Your Bench Strength
Sometimes, the leaders you need are in your own back yard—and the Executive Assessment process can help you spot them. While it’s an invaluable tool for determining whether an external candidate can take the heat of a top leadership position, the Executive Assessment tools can also help you identify and develop future leaders who are already under your wing.
Though hiring from the outside often seems more expedient than cultivating homegrown leaders, promoting from within pays its own dividends. First, internal people already understand the organization’s culture and embrace its mission. The emotional buy-in and commitment is already there. On the financial side, advancing current employees into top positions can reduce the amount of time and money spent on searching for external candidates, not to mention keeping salary increases, moving expenses and other incentive to a minimum.
Another benefit of promoting your current leaders is higher retention rates of your top talent: they are less likely to look for better job offers if they feel they can advance from within. Filling senior positions with external people could send a message that the administration doesn’t value its own, which could cause a steady migration of talent to greener pastures.
In addition to developing individual talents, executive assessment services can provide insight into your top performers’ ability to work as a team. While they may excel individually, your premier people may have trouble meshing as a cohesive unit. The latest solutions locate any collective weak spots in your executive team and generate corrective actions.
One organization that stands out as a model for executive assessment is Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.
A Worthwhile Investment
With three freestanding hospitals and 16 satellite centers, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta employs more than 5,500 people. In the next three years, officials expect that number to increase to more than 8,000. As the overall personnel numbers grow, so will the need for qualified leaders—a challenge that Vice President and Chief Learning Officer Larry Mohl is confronting right now.
“The shear number of supervisors and top level leaders we’ll need in the near future is huge,” say Mohl, a former Chief Learning Officer for American Express. “We’re dealing with the need to not only fill our leadership pipeline with new talent for the future, but also fill current openings when today’s leaders leave. Our goal is to promote from within more often than we do now.”
At the moment, Mohl says the ratio of external to internal promotions is about 60 percent to 40 percent—a statistic he hopes to reverse and even advance to 70 percent for internal promotions.
“Certainly, it’s an issue of quantity,” says Mohl. “But we’re also looking for quality in new leaders. That’s why we turned to executive assessment.”
To ensure that Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta’s senior executives understood and were committed to this effort, they were among the first Acceleration Centers® participants. The next group included about 15 top vice presidents and directors, including administrative, clinical and physician leaders. This year, another 40 people will participate.
“We sent a strong message to everyone that the Acceleration Centers® were focused on development,” says Mohl. “That’s why we gave people roles that were a big stretch from their normal responsibilities. We wanted to provide them with an opportunity to succeed in a challenging environment.”
Though Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta instituted the process a little more than a year ago, the process is already yielding results.
“We’ve completed surveys with participants that show that more than two-thirds of them are reporting significant improvement in relationships with their direct reports and in the area of strategic planning and financial management. That’s a good start.”
While one drawback of developing internal talent is that they might leave for so-called greener pastures, Mohl explains why Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta is willing to take that risk.
“We believe that if you invest in employees’ futures, they’ll repay you by staying with the hospital longer,” he says. “We let people know we are investing in them and encourage them to fully leverage these opportunities to better themselves and the organization. As a result, they take this program seriously. We’re hearing that these individuals are more committed to the organization than ever before and can’t imagine going anywhere else. It’s fair to say that the improved retention rates alone among leaders is worth the investment.”
Reaping the Benefits
Your organization’s future is too valuable to risk on untested talent. The best in executive assessment tools generate in-depth evaluations of potential or current executives’ specific strengths and development needs—before they assume positions of greater responsibility. This enables you to increase the probability of successful on-the-job performance by your leaders and speed their time to contribution.
To learn more about how you can reap the benefits of a comprehensive talent management strategy, join us for an upcoming webinar on executive selection titled “Good to Great for Health Care: How Top Performing Hospitals Made the Leap” on May 3, 2006, from 1-2:15 pm Eastern. Click here for more information or to register.
About the Author
Jim Kauffman, Ph.D., Senior Consultant, DDI, designs and delivers programs that help clients identify, assess, and develop senior leadership talent. He has over 15 years of experience creating solutions for selecting, developing, and retaining personnel at all organizational levels. Dr. Kauffman has worked across industries with clients including Bank of America, Wachovia, Georgia Pacific, BHP, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, BP, Cingular Wireless, Sunrise Senior Living and Coca-Cola. Jim.kauffman@ddiworld.com
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