When "Stretch" Challenges "Strategy"

I met recently with the CEO of a relatively large integrated health system. We had just finished a meeting with her leadership team reviewing our strategies for growth and performance improvement. There was concurrence around the table that the strategies provided a clear path to future success; the meeting ended with the senior leader of the physician group voicing his enthusiasm for the plan.

Moments later, behind closed doors, though, the CEO said what others in the meeting had left unspoken. “This is a real stretch for us,” she said. “I’m not sure we can do this.”

Give her credit for raising the question. Designing a strategy without developing the competencies to execute it is a common malady facing many health systems today. The competitive demands on systems in terms of performance improvement and market growth are increasing exponentially. Many top leaders are highly skilled at working in the business, but less ready to work on the business. As a result, many organizations underperform and lose faith in their leaders and strategy.

At Navvis, we are purposeful about evaluating leadership competencies as we build a strategic plan – not with an intent of building anything less than a state-of-the-art strategy, but to ensure that we also build a state-of-the-art leadership team to execute it successfully. Along the path of strategy development, we continually test whether leaders:

• Can articulate in a few brief sentences not simply “what you are going to do” but “how customers will experience that difference” in the years ahead;
• Understand specific things they must do differently in order for the organization to succeed;
• Demonstrate the ability to have critical conversations and build collaborative solutions across management disciplines and service lines.

Is your organization underperforming relative to your strategic plan? Is the Board of Directors pressing for accelerated results? Before concluding that you have the wrong plan, you need to determine whether your leadership has the right competencies to execute the plan. Even the best teams need to refresh their skill sets to meet the changing demands of a highly competitive health care market. The mark of failure as a CEO is not acknowledging your team needs help, but in ignoring the reality that keeping pace means staying a step ahead on the learning and leadership curve.