The Opportunity of Crisis
The Lessons of Disruption
“Where there is disruption, there is an opportunity. Where there is a collapse, there is an evolutionary opportunity.” - Maureen Metcalf, Forbes Council Member
The economic volatility, social injustices, and globally polarizing issues caused by the pandemic make it difficult for leaders to plan and strategize. This pandemic effect has been an even more disruptive force in healthcare. However, the pandemic crisis avails healthcare leaders of many opportunities. Urgency and necessity give leaders the latitude to prioritize and implement strategies and organizational changes in unprecedented ways.
Leading amid uncertain times is a skill that is not fully tested in many leaders and not fully embraced by others. The present circumstances provide leaders with a renewed opportunity to lead in a more impactful way. COVID is affecting all sectors of businesses but especially healthcare services. Shutdowns and social distancing are taxing normal flows of patient care. Employees are questioning leaders with unanswerable questions. In the face of inexact responses, employees feel ignored and undervalued. Employee engagement, in general, is suffering amidst the fog of uncertainty.
Among a sample of all employee sectors, of those employees who retained their position in late 2020, 40% felt they were not appropriately recognized for their pandemic efforts, thereby creating disengagement. This feeling of neglect is likely more pronounced among healthcare workers. According to Monster.com, 85% of currently employed individuals are actively seeking a new position. The questioning of one’s career decision is being seen among nurses and physicians as well.
Long-standing social contracts between healthcare institutions and stakeholders are being questioned. Continued erosion of trust in organizational devotions to zero harm for all, as a core value, is threatening clinician engagement. Healthcare stakeholders are questioning the executive commitment to previously espoused quality and safety values for patients and employees alike. Leaders struggle to preserve company values under pandemic pressures or, at best, are communicating their value-centric efforts ineffectively. While difficult decisions are necessary, many healthcare leaders fail to communicate how pandemic reactions are in keeping with espoused values such as patient and employee safety. Leaders are presently challenged to create and maintain trust through transparency, adult-to-adult conversations, and timely decisions.
Recognizing New Skills
The pandemic creates a widening gap between traditional healthcare leadership skills and those needed to navigate a crisis recovery. Organizational decisions must be made within an environment of employee disengagement and social unrest. Healthcare providers are experiencing fear. Empathetic healthcare leaders must address this fear by recognizing the source, admitting failure when appropriate, addressing the uncertainties if possible, and acting in a manner that instills trust.
Mutual trust and transparency allow stakeholders and leaders to effectively communicate, plan, and implement strategies during a crisis. Executives must admit to mistakes to regain lost trust and reset employee perceptions and sentiment considering pandemic failures. The prevalence of early missteps related to PPE supplies and the provision of vaccines will not simply vanish as a concern. Healthcare employees will hold tight to real and perceived reasons to withhold trust from their leaders. To rebuild trust, leaders must create an open and honest environment that acknowledges employee insights and protects their enthusiasm to share in the organization’s recovery.
Uncertainty and Communication
By the nature of a crisis, leaders will not be fully informed, but they can act and communicate to elicit trust and support from employees. This trusted environment is created by effectively communicating to all stakeholders the desire for open dialogue and demonstrating that information’s consideration in their actions. Clarity is key, especially during times of crisis. Brief but clear messaging that conveys the reason for decisions, changes, and goals helps keep healthcare employees engaged and informed. Clear communication should always be anchored in conveying organizational values and how they relate to the communicated information. Employee anxiety often results from uncertainty. In the absence of information from executives, stakeholders will create their own explanations and narratives regarding staffing ratios, supply shortages, and long-term employment prospects. Created explanations generally characterize the situation as more extreme than is required.
Uniting Disperse Teams
The pandemic has permanently changed the format of healthcare employment and delivery. The future will necessitate diverse work settings in healthcare, an industry known for its heavy physical assets concentration. New care environments will continue to emerge in the home setting, office, and online in a virtual setting. Employees will continue to be in-person and remote. Teams will be culturally diverse and geographically dispersed.
This new, decentralized construct of healthcare employment requires leaders to align and unite with their stakeholders in unprecedented ways. Failure to recognize the significance of dispersed workplaces will disengage employees and sub-optimize the organization’s performance. Hiring employees for organizational fit, as well as an aptitude for dispersed work, will be crucial. Leaders must quickly incorporate changes to the work setting to effectively manage profound changes in healthcare strategy, culture, and the evolving metrics of success. Being adaptive and flexible will be key skills for post-COVID healthcare leaders.
Building Transparent Relationships
Developing honest and transparent relationships with team members encourages leaders to be empathetic and engaging. Open communication will introduce a sense of security during a crisis, thereby improving engagement. While humility and candor may not be natural characteristics for some healthcare leaders, these skills must be developed.
Active listening will create stable relationships with team members and provide leaders with essential insights into organizational narratives. By listening, leaders demonstrate empathy and authenticity to stakeholders. Active listening is a crucial skill when managing remote and hybrid teams across the inpatient, outpatient, home, and virtual settings.
Leaders must be intentional in their decision making and clear about why the decisions are necessary. As organizational changes are made, ensure that stakeholders are clear about the new goals, metrics, and role changes required to implement the new strategies, and uphold a caring mission. Careful thought should be given to the most efficient way to communicate while recognizing unique stakeholder needs and locations.
Creating Future-Proof Leaders
“Contrary to popular belief, effective leaders are rarely authentic, and authentic leaders can be brutally ineffective. While we hate to admit it, the ability to fake it is a critical ingredient of leadership potential.“ - Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic
Many organizational failures will be traced to selfish misjudgments by healthcare executives refusing to set aside internal biases and convey authenticity during this crisis. An executive ego is often self-serving and self-preserving. Incorrect assumptions and overly inflated self-images lead to a discharge of power that abandons the organization’s and stakeholders’ value. Greater authenticity is required of all healthcare leaders to protect the alignment of values and work.
While authenticity is a skill generally valued among leaders, if not balanced with a desire to protect patient and employee well-being, authenticity can be abrupt and caustic. Upon reaching executive status, some leaders lose interest in caring for their team and care only for self-aggrandizement. Under the stress of the COVID pandemic, inauthentic healthcare leaders retreated into a self-preservation mode, turning authenticity into cold, authoritarian commandership.
To excel at genuine authenticity requires leaders to develop a high degree of self-awareness. Unfortunately, many leaders fail to develop authenticity through self-awareness. To be authentic, a leader must be consistent in word and action and maintain a professional and genuine demeanor across various settings. They must be devoted to the organization’s caring mission, the development of all stakeholders, and adopt zero harm for all as a core value.
Great leaders discern what is good for the greater purpose and follow that drive as a leadership principle. The pursuit of high reliability in healthcare does not always include what is best or easiest for an individual leader. Future-proofing organizations will require that leaders set personal ambition aside and work to benefit all organizational stakeholders. As healthcare organizations return to a new normal, leaders must resist status quo’s pull to revert to previous clinical and operational practices, but rather create a unique and improved future. The pandemic has provided an unprecedented opportunity for all leaders to create an organizational legacy of service, quality, and resiliency. Now is the time for healthcare leaders to step forward and learn from the past, stabilize the present, and future-proof their organization.