Over-promising and under-delivering: A prescription for disaster
For years, marketers have created tag lines and brand identities promising consumers the best, friendliest, and most compassionate health care. Often disconnected from the end product, the brands were created for the advancement of business without engaging staff, and holding every employee accountable for living the brand promise. As we prepare to enter the Fourth Generation, organizations are becoming more aligned to living the promise. Engaged employees, standardized systems, and ongoing staff development help to maintain this necessary standard. Transparency in pricing and reporting are two additional elements that have raised the bar for health care. For the first time, through HCAHPs, hospitals will be rewarded financially for their transparency in reporting patients' opinions of their services.
I have spoken to representatives of hundreds of health care organizations across the country, and at times have asked them to call to mind companies best known for their stellar customer service. Predictably, Disney, Nordstrom, The Ritz-Carlton and Neiman Marcus frequent the list. But in the hundreds of times that I have asked this question, no one has ever mentioned a health care organization. How appalling! If service is at the very core of our business, why are we not among the best-of-the-best?
The very essence of our work is the ultimate human service. When people turn to us, they are at their most vulnerable. They are often frightened, under stress, and in need. During our encounters, these customers want nothing more than to be able to trust us with their very lives. When they cross the thresholds of our hospitals, clinics and long-term care facilities, they are placing their trust in us. How often do we meet or exceed their expectations? Even more importantly, how often do we disappoint them?
My hope for all of us who are striding confidently into the Fourth Generation of customer service is that we can make the changes necessary to earn the consumers’ top-of-mind position for service excellence.
Patients don't just bring us their business. They honor us with their trust each time they engage in a provider/patient encounter. Building that trust is essential. It is an honor to care for our patients during their most vulnerable times. In order to raise the bar on service excellence, we need to create and foster a culture that engages every person in a unified mindset that makes patient trust a top priority.
Every time a patient comes into contact with a health care organization, he has dozens of moments of truth, deciding if we are who and what we say we are. Everything a patient sees, hears, feels and experiences while in our care should instill trust. This requires that we consciously take charge of the patient experience pathway, managing every moment of truth along it to create a predictably positive patient experience.
I have found that the health care leaders whose organizations are among the best in customer service share the “5 Ps” - five consistent principles in their leadership approach. These five principles are Priority, People, Process, Purpose and Passion. The remaining chapters explore the 5 Ps in more depth, but for the sake of an overview, the following is a synopsis of these principles:
Priority
The best leaders will not only recognize that service must be a top priority, they will be able to communicate that message and put enough energy and resources behind it to successfully gain a loyal following committed to the cause. Even though most leaders will tell me they set customer service as a top priority, there are relatively few organizations where I find that to be true. Making an occasional statement about priorities and actually living those priorities are two different things. Good intentions aren't enough. In Chapter One you will review some of the most important steps in establishing service as a true priority and putting specific actions into place that support that intention.
People
Successful organizations know that their work force, not the items that show up on the balance sheet, is their greatest asset. Leaders often claim this, but does the core of the organization really feel it? Hiring right, developing talent, and holding people accountable are among the common denominators found in the most successful organizations. But we often miss some of the most obvious opportunities for preserving the human asset in the work force. Chapter Two provides insight and tools for hiring and developing your work force into a high-performing, mission-driven and patient-centered team.
Processes
Are you who you say you are? Are the patient experiences consistent from day-to-day, person-to-person, and department-to-department? Successful organizations have mastered the art and the science of putting systems in place that create a predictably positive patient experience but give enough latitude so that employees can exercise some degree of discretion when problems arise. These systems standardize some of the most common situations and give structure to the service initiative itself. In Chapter Three, you will learn how to assess the patient experience pathway and determine where you might need to improve processes and systems in order to ensure a consistently positive patient experience.
Purpose
High-performing organizations have an engaged workforce in which each individual is crystal clear about how his or her role contributes to the mission and to the customer experience. Leaders who can help individuals form a strong connection to purpose will have one of the most essential elements in place. When each person feels that his or her contributions are for the good of the whole, the organization is more unified under a global purpose. Chapter Four gives examples of how to foster a sense of purpose among the members of your team and shares valuable insights from best practices.
Passion
There's another adage that states, “Love what you do and you will never work a day in your life.” Although the subtitle of this book promises to help the reader to put passion into practice, I intentionally left the chapter on passion until the end. Leading with passion helps everyone to stay connected to the heart: the human side of health care services. The words “courage” and “encourage” have the same root meaning : heart. When I think of passionate leadership, I think of leadership that emanates from the heart. It takes courage to lead from the heart because passionate leaders put themselves “out there” every day, allowing themselves to be bit vulnerable by putting their hearts on the line. Passionate leaders also encourage others. They speak to others' hearts by encouraging them to be at their very best.
But passionate leadership alone is not enough. A leader can be passionate in his or her beliefs and in the quest for excellence, but without the other four fundamentals, will not have the tools necessary to raise the bar to the next level. It is only when the passionate leader can set priorities, foster efficient processes, and engage the grassroots, that he or she will see measurable and sustainable results. In addition to all of these essential traits, the health care leader must be committed to taking an honest look at himself and setting goals for personal development. For this reason, I have concluded each chapter with a series of questions for personal reflections along with some action steps to help set personal goals.
These are tough times in health care. But the path to a brighter future is paved with challenges. As leaders, we must rise to the challenges at hand and refortify ourselves with new tools and new strategies to strengthen the future of health care for our work force, our patients and ourselves.
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