Leadership: Gaining Alignment and Making Change

“There’s two buttons I never like hittin’, and that’s panic and snooze.”

- Ted Lasso

Meet them where they are, not where you are

Way back in the early 2000s Clayton Christenson, the Harvard Business School professor and strategy guru, published a wonderfully insightful leadership framework. His Tools of Cooperation and Change described in simple terms the leadership tactics most likely to be effective based on the level of alignment across an organization on the goals and how to achieve them.

This framework a useful lens through which to view the current disfunction across the healthcare industry. Leaders and innovators at both traditional healthcare organizations and healthcare start-ups could benefit from keeping this framework and tactics in mind as they work to build adoption of new products, services and innovations.

Utilizing the tactics appropriate to the end user’s combination of goals aspired to and perceived path to achieving those goals will greatly improve the likelihood of adoption and success.

Levels of (dis)agreement in today’s healthcare industry

Spend a little time listening to providers, patients and healthcare leaders and it doesn’t take long to conclude there is limited agreement on both what their goals are and how to achieve them. These groups are steadfastly in their perceptual corners, hunkered down and either panicked about what the other groups are going to do or pretending nothing is going to happen at all.

Physicians and providers of all types are driven to help their patients achieve better health and positive outcomes. They use leadership tactics to share evidence backed advice and encourage to their patients to stay healthy. They do not respond well to lots of metric tracking or process standardization unless they can be clearly shown to drive health outcomes for their patients. Otherwise, metrics and process improvements are usually viewed as busy work dictated by “leadership.”

Healthcare executives and health insurance companies are typically aligned around a stated mission, but at there is not usually a consensus around how to deliver on that goal while achieving profitability. They use management tactics on the ground like financial incentives to providers, lots of training, performance metrics (HEDIS, CAHPS, NCQA, etc.) and process standardization. While these companies believe these tactics will deliver on their goals, the misalignment with the providers doing the actual work and the patients seeking care often results in unhappiness all around.

There has been growing investment in healthcare by private equity in recent years, along with steady acquisitions by national for profit healthcare corporations. These groups will often issue reassuring messaging at the time of the investment, but since they are laser focused on delivering returns to their investors, they lean into power tactics via reorganizations, dictating financial targets, and replacing leaders who do not buy into their objectives.

It is important not to ignore the large number of internet based health and wellness influencers producing voluminous information and advice on every topic imaginable. These folks use culture tactics to build a patient audience via storytelling, online communities, and affinity groups. While it is easy for traditional healthcare professionals to write off these influencers, their name says it all. Many have been extremely successful in gathering very large audiences of consumers who are aligned with their messaging. Traditional healthcare providers and organizations largely ignore these folks’ success, while at the same time struggling to engage their patients. There are lessons to be learned from these influencers for those with an open mind.

What does this all mean?

Getting business buy-in is always a challenge, particularly for new market entrants and smaller companies trying to get their foot in the healthcare door. Healthcare leaders struggle to mitigate “provider burn-out” but often use tactics that do not align with the provider’s goals and belief in how to achieve them.

It is critical to adopt an approach to cooperation and change that aligns with the goals and perceptions of the core end users. Applying Christensen’s framework with an open mind makes it pretty simple to identify misalignments and select the set of tactics most likely to result in increased levels of agreement.

Copywrite 2itive 2024

2itive is a Portland based consultancy founded by Erik Goodfriend, offering a unique combination of market intelligence, knowledge of healthcare payment systems and creative business strategy insights. Feel free to contact us at info@2itive.com