Leadership Requires Bifocals

Building a New $4B Hospital Around an Existing Level-1 Trauma Center

Construction of the new Indiana University Health downtown hospital in Indianapolis, Indiana is currently the largest healthcare construction project in the United States. The $4.3B project will not finish until late 2027 and includes three 16-story towers and 2.5 million square feet of space. This would be a daunting task to achieve under budget and on time if that was all that was going on across the 44-acre urban site that includes a current 1,000-bed hospital.

That current hospital, which opened in 1908, has immediate priorities that must be met in parallel with the coming years of construction. It is one of only two hospitals in the state of Indiana that can care for the most seriously injured adult patients and it's the 15th-busiest trauma unit in the United States. The rooftop twin helipads can receive two medical transport helicopters at the same time. Trauma injuries are the leading cause of death in the United States for those younger than 46. They are?the third-leading cause of death overall. Every year, more than 192,000 people die because of trauma injuries.

It's not one or the other, it's both. Operate nonstop 24 hours a day on critically injured patients. And plan for what the future will require years down the road. At the same time.

Leaders Must Manage The Near-Term AND The Long-Term Simultaneously

As leaders, we must calmly manage the crises right in front of us with little time to plan or react on the same days that we are building pro forma financials with equations that have more variables than can be solved for with the given information, resulting in an inability to find a unique solution because there are not enough equations to constrain all the variables. Essentially, there are more unknowns than known values.?

And our customers sometimes give us added challenges we wish they wouldn't. Back to managing crises at the trauma center. Many trauma patients wind up in trauma care because of choices they made. Perhaps they drove when they shouldn't have, decided to clean their gutters in the rain,?or found themselves on the wrong side of an argument. But the surgeons do not blame anyone for the injuries that landed them in the trauma center. Anyone can make bad decisions — or just have bad luck. So the hospital staff responds to their crises without judgement, while trying to find ways to reduce them in the future.

A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don't necessarily want to go, but ought to be. -Rosalynn Carter

Leaders are called upon to resolve today's current-quarter crises on the same day that we're planning for our next quarter and our next fiscal year. And we know we'll need to do it again next quarter. Thirteen weeks of crisis management, four times per year. We can learn from the trauma surgeons.

Nobody Said It Was Easy

After a long shift in the emergency room, emergency room surgeons will finish their midnight meal,?and wait once again. They will exit the trauma unit and?walk down an empty hospital corridor to a darkened call room. Here they will try to nap until their pager beeps again. Yes, they still use pagers.

Always be looking close and far. At the same time. Solve today's crises. Plan for less of them next quarter. And next year. Then do it again. There is no future if we don't solve for this quarter's committed revenue, profit, and growth. But there is also no future without taking time to plan for something different to respond to whatever created the challenging situations being faced this quarter.

Bifocals and courage required.

Scott Strubel is the Vice President of the Americas Partner Organization for Darktrace and author of the book Simple, but HARD (https://simplebuthardbook.com/ ). You can find more articles on leadership, sales, and partnering at Scott's blog scott-talks.com .