Four Characteristics of Today’s Successful Hospital Leaders

Hospital leaders are feeling increasing pressure to find ways to thrive in our changing healthcare system. A C-suite that is removed from daily hospital operations is a liability in this era of process improvement and hands-on progress.

Here are four characteristics hospital leaders need to move forward successfully:

1. Process-driven
Hospitals are very process-driven. Effective hospital leaders understand this and utilize processes to reduce waste and enhance patient safety, from cafeteria workflow to the complex treatment course of a patient undergoing open-heart surgery. In addition, quality-focused hospital leaders implement processes for continuous improvement that start on the frontline and feed back up to management.

Struggling hospitals often have difficulty devoting resources to process-driven quality improvement rather than expansion of services, additional salaries, and marketing campaigns. They have a hard time seeing the value of investing in sustainable internal quality improvement.

2. Focus on excellence
Leadership really does set the tone of an organization. Hospital leadership that either lacks vision or is unable to communicate it to their medical staff is culturally ineffective. Without a guiding shared purpose, the many moving parts of hospitals often don’t function at their optimal level. Silos pop up, competing for resources with their own gain in mind, not that of the organization as a whole.
Quality-focused hospital leaders have a presence and spread their vision to the teams that make their institutions great. They promote excellence rather than mediocrity and survival. They aren’t afraid to strive for a goal beyond “the way things are here.”

3. Respect for people
People want to do a good job. People in healthcare want to take good care of their patients. Leaders need to make sure their staff has what they need to do that. It’s easy for clinicians to become disillusioned with their jobs when they feel they’re not able to make a difference in their patients’ lives because of bureaucracy and red tape working against them. It’s leadership’s responsibility to remove these barriers.
Hospital leaders need to have high expectations of their team members, and that same high standard should be placed back on them.

4. Patient-focused
Effective hospital leaders understand that their operations need to focus on patients. They actually show up in places where patients are and speak to them. They observe patient flow with the intent to make it smoother. Every decision they make, in the end, should be focused on improving patient care.

Article Reference:Quality Digest