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The January issue of the McKinsey Quarterly includes a timely discussion on four common, avoidable mistakes companies make in the implementation of their leadership programs:
1) Overlooking context
2) Decoupling reflection from real work
3) Underestimating mind-sets
4) Failing to measure results
Each one of these pitfalls is addressed in the design and execution of the physician leadership sessions developed by the Physician Leadership Institute. Let’s examine each of these in detail:
Context
According to the McKinsey article, too many training initiatives rest on the assumption that one size fits all and that the same group of skills or style of leadership is appropriate regardless of strategy, organizational culture, or CEO mandate.
Here’s how the authors frame the context debate:
In the earliest stages of planning a leadership initiative, companies should ask themselves a simple question: what, precisely, is this program for? If the answer is to support an acquisition-led growth strategy, for example, the company will probably need leaders brimming with ideas and capable of devising winning strategies for new or newly expanded business units. If the answer is to grow by capturing organic opportunities, the company will probably want people at the top who are good at nurturing internal talent.
Focusing on context inevitably means equipping leaders with a small number of competencies (two to three) that will make a significant difference to performance. Instead, what we often find is a long list of leadership standards, a complex web of dozens of competencies, and corporate-values statements. Each is usually summarized in a seemingly easy-to-remember way (such as the three Rs), and each on its own terms makes sense. In practice, however, what managers and employees often see is an “alphabet soup” of recommendations. We have found that when a company cuts through the noise to identify a small number of leadership capabilities essential for success in its business—such as high-quality decision making or stronger coaching skills—it achieves far better outcomes.
Our approach takes context into account in its very design. Our physician leadership model is purpose built around the observed challenges in the field. And to make sure the focus is on the right topics, participants have too undergo a 360-degree assessment before they start our programs. The assessment is used to tailor sessions for each participant, ensuring that the team curriculum is balanced with individualized dimensions.
Decoupling from Work
The authors view is presented as follows:
When it comes to planning the program’s curriculum, companies face a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, there is value in off-site programs (many in university-like settings) that offer participants time to step back and escape the pressing demands of a day job. On the other hand, even after very basic training sessions, adults typically retain just 10 percent of what they hear in classroom lectures, versus nearly two-thirds when they learn by doing. Furthermore, burgeoning leaders, no matter how talented, often struggle to transfer even their most powerful off-site experiences into changed behavior on the front line.
The answer sounds straightforward: tie leadership development to real on-the-job projects that have a business impact and improve learning. But it’s not easy to create opportunities that simultaneously address high-priority needs—say, accelerating a new-product launch, turning around a sales region, negotiating an external partnership, or developing a new digital-marketing strategy—and provide personal-development opportunities for the participants.
Our physician leadership academy approach does both. We start by first building up the foundational attributes of physician leadership, using our physician leadership model. This is followed by action projects where cross-functional teams embark on their challenge projects – fixing some of the organization’s most pressing concerns. The impact of these “action learning” projects allows the physician leader to “be, know, and do” in ways tied directly to business performance.
Mind-sets
Change won’t happen if minds don’t change. Here’s how the issue is described in the McKinsey article::
Becoming a more effective leader often requires changing behavior. But although most companies recognize that this also means adjusting underlying mind-sets, too often these organizations are reluctant to address the root causes of why leaders act the way they do. Doing so can be uncomfortable for participants, program trainers, mentors, and bosses—but if there isn’t a significant degree of discomfort, the chances are that the behavior won’t change.
In healthcare, the issue is no different. A common response is as follows: “I am already a leader, why do I need leadership training?” Our physician leadership programs are designed to change minds. The “expert” individual-contributor culture of the medical profession fosters individual leadership, but fails at building organizational leaders. We help these “experts” step beyond their comfort zones to become organizational leaders.
Measuring Results
The final obstacle to change is lack of accountability. Here’s how the article states the issue:
We frequently find that companies pay lip service to the importance of developing leadership skills but have no evidence to quantify the value of their investment. When businesses fail to track and measure changes in leadership performance over time, they increase the odds that improvement initiatives won’t be taken seriously.
Too often, any evaluation of leadership development begins and ends with participant feedback; the danger here is that trainers learn to game the system and deliver a syllabus that is more pleasing than challenging to participants. Yet targets can be set and their achievement monitored. Just as in any business-performance program, once that assessment is complete, leaders can learn from successes and failures over time and make the necessary adjustments.
The article goes on to suggest an important way to measure the efficacy of leadership training: “One approach is to assess the extent of behavioral change, perhaps through a 360 degree–feedback exercise at the beginning of a program and followed by another one after 6 to 12 months.”
At the Physician Leadership Institute, we use this 360-feedback approach, coupled with another performance-based metric – the actual ROI of the action-learning projects commissioned through our programs. This allows all involved to see the impact of physician leadership at both individual and organizational levels.
Finally, we make sure that our physician leaders understand that the transformation is a journey that never ends. All our programs include an ongoing leadership component that ties back to the organization’s strategy and purpose.
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