Role Model What You Want To See More Of
This article is excerpted from Five Frequencies: Leadership Signals That Turn Culture Into Competitive Advantage (Logos)
Dr. Reginald Eadie was lying on his back on a patient bed in the Hematology Department of Harper University Hospital, one of two urban hospitals he presided over as CEO*. He wasn’t sick. He was role modeling. And he wasn’t role modeling naptime, either.
He’d invited us to join him on his regular morning rounds, visiting not with patients but with teams of employees, engaging them around their current performance metrics and their efforts to continuously improve them.
The team was performing well, hitting their targets, checking the boxes on all the things the Joint Commission (the organization that accredits hospitals) would look at when they came out to evaluate the hospital. He’d offered the team heartfelt kudos before hopping on the bed and gazing at the ceiling.
“Looking at things from the Joint Commission’s perspective is not exactly the same thing as looking at what we do from the patient’s perspective,” Dr. Eadie said. And looking at the hospital experience from the patient’s perspective—and literally so—is what he wanted to role model.
Standing around Dr. Eadie, the Hematology team joined him in looking at the ceiling. “What do you see?” he asked. The answer came quickly: “There’s a ceiling tile that needs to be fixed.” The team readily agreed that “staring at a broken ceiling tile is not something we want for our patients” and they captured next actions for getting it fixed. That’s why, when he’s conducting his rounds to engage front-line teams on performance, he’ll hop up on beds and share what he sees. It’s also why you might see him being pushed on a gurney around the hospital.
But the point isn’t for Dr. Eadie to do all these patient-experience-based inspections himself. The point is to role model the behavior he wants to see more of. And it works. “Throughout the hospital, we see employees looking more closely at the patients’ experiences through their eyes and ears. And when that happens, patient satisfaction improves.”
That’s not the only time we saw Dr. Eadie role modeling the behavior he wanted to see more of. On another occasion, he decided he wanted his leadership team to give more candid feedback to one another about performance. He knew it was up to him to role model doing it right, which is why when the hospital got ready for the next round of performance evaluations, he said, “I’m going first.”
Over three years, this approach—and the behaviors required to make it successful—cascaded throughout the organization. “We got more honest about our performance,” Dr. Eadie said. “This led to lower but more realistic performance evaluations. Now those who get low scores are coached up or coached out.” This moved the needle on culture, as evidenced by safety culture, engagement, and physician satisfaction scores. “In turn,” Eadie says, “that helped us provide better care and service to our patients and their families,” as evidenced by increased patient experience scores and organic growth.
*Note: Dr. Eadie is now the CEO of Trinity Health of New England.
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