In early January, I received this email from one of our top project managers who had a baby in November:
“I hope you had a great Christmas and a happy new year! I was hoping to catch up with you for a few minutes when you have time over the next few days. If you could give me a call when you have some time to chat, I would appreciate it.”
Any manager who has been in this situation knows what’s coming. This employee had every intention of coming back after her leave. She was very torn and is worried about falling behind in the fast-paced healthcare IT market. Still, she made the decision to not return to work and I supported her fully. Then I hung up the phone and wondered how we could possibly fill the hole in our very tight Meaningful Use timeline. This project manager was essentially tag-teaming with another one who was to go out on maternity leave about the time this one was to return.
Sometimes I feel like everything I know about management I learned from Jack Welch during my tenure at GE. Welch is vaunted (at least by many) as one of the most successful CEOs ever. What a lot of people don’t know is that while many CEOs keep their CFO at their right hand, Welch kept his VP of HR. GE liked to fill leadership positions, even executive ones, within eight hours. They could do this because of their enormous investment in recruiting, training and giving diverse work experiences to the best talent. The philosophy was that they didn’t want to lose momentum in their business by floundering around for weeks or months deciding on a new leader. I’ve always wondered how I could ever do that with my IS departments that are fractions the size of GE.
Here are some things we’ve done at the local Newton-Wellesley IS department even apart from the overall Partners Information Systems group:
Expect a lot from people – our executive management team expects a lot from me and my leaders, and we need the same from our staff. Our applications analysts cover 50 departments, 120 applications and 85 data interfaces. They are on call every six weeks and get exposed to all kinds of issues across the infrastructure, fiscal and clinical domains. They have very hard jobs, but never boring. Our people are dedicated to the hospital mission and make an incredible effort. We’ve also asked them to help implement two very large enterprise applications in the past three years, all while keeping legacy systems running. We’ve done major construction projects and clinical process redesign to improve throughput. While we supplemented with contractors, we didn’t add FTEs. Our people got great experience and had the satisfaction of knowing they made great achievements.
Give more to those who rise to the challenge – sure, some people crumble under these kinds of expectations. They may be very good people, but just can’t meet the demands at a particular point in their life. Or maybe they had a good run and are looking to push hard again at another institution. Others, however, seem to get even more energized by a big agenda and somehow find time to do those extra little things that pay dividends for the whole department or hospital. One senior analyst took the initiative to develop and refine scripts with the Help Desk manager which increased same-call closure rates and limited triage to other teams. This has improved customer satisfaction and reduced 2:00 AM wakeups for those analysts on call.
Be willing to take risks and shake it up – it was a little more than eight hours, but we filled the project manager position the next day. Within minutes of learning that the project manager wouldn’t return from leave, one of my leaders suggested a person who could step into that role. This person had weathered the 2:00 AM experience of wondering which department, system or interface was broken and how to support our clinicians. She had shown initiative and jumped in to improve processes without being asked. Above all, she had a great attitude, got along with people and was passionate about contributing more.
This left a big hole in our analytic organization, but my Applications Manager came in beaming with an idea. She would promote another up-and-comer and this would leave enough lower-level and open positions to create separate teams for support and project work. This had been a recent recommendation from our hospital process improvement group, but we didn’t know how we could do it until the project manager’s announcement instigated movement in the whole group. We expect this will help us improve customer service and project throughput metrics, which are two of our goals for the year.
So I was able to put some Welch principles to work. The loss of a high performer brought opportunities for others, as well as the chance to reorganize to better meet our customer needs. The second project manager is about to take her maternity leave. In her transition documents she writes that she will be back in May. I sure hope so, because we need a little time to re-build our bench strength.
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