Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Baptist Healthcare Journey to Excellence

The Baptist Healthcare Journey to Excellence by Al Stubblefield is an outstanding book about the Baptist Health System’s journey from poor performance to excellence. The book offers great insights and practical tools that any business leader, in any industry, can use to improve results and impact the bottom line. Below are some of my favorite ideas that Baptist utilized and embraced in order to propel them to success.

WOW Philosophy

The WOW philosophy is at the heart of Baptist’s turnaround. The WOW philosophy is empowering Workers to become Owners and Winners by creating and maintaining a great organizational culture. Baptist’s success story begins with the belief that employees can and should be just as happy at work as they are at home. They determined that when employees feel empowered to make good decisions at work, they act like owners of the company rather than simply employees, which results in greater job satisfaction. If employees are then rewarded and recognized for their contributions, great things happen as a culture of job-fulfillment is created. Establishing a great culture with the WOW philosophy was at the center of Baptist’s success story.

Passion for Service Recovery

The mark of a great business is its ability to exceed customer expectations especially after a service failure. During their turnaround, Baptist Health realized the importance of service recovery and began a concerted effort to improve in this area by developing the acronym ACT. ACT stands for apologize, correct plus, and trend. This acronym ACT helped establish the idea that fixing a customer problem is not enough, and instead, encouraged employees to go above and beyond to make amends for a failure—thus correct plus. By paying attention to and emphasizing service recovery, Baptist won the trust of many customers.

Three Keys to Leadership

Another important piece that contributed to Baptist’s success was their focus on leadership. They believed that to improve employee satisfaction and results they needed to improve the leadership, coaching, and management Baptist employees received. For this reason, they developed the three keys to effective leadership which included top management commitment, real-time measurement and accountability, and ongoing leadership development. By focusing on these three keys to effective leadership, they were able to develop great leaders and in turn recruit and retain great employees.

Tight, Loose, Tight Management Style

Baptist managers learned to embrace the tight, loose, tight management style which helped in their turnaround process. First they strive to be tight in communicating goals and objectives to ensure everyone is aligned and working toward common goals. Next, they are loose in how employees achieve these clearly established goals. And finally, they try to be tight with results and outcomes. By developing this style of management, Baptist was able to see great results.

This is a very brief summary with only a few of the many great insights and tools the Baptist story provides and that leaders can use to develop their organizational cultures and improve the bottom line. Ultimately, the Baptist experience teaches us that focusing on engaging employees through developing a strong organizational culture works. If you are a business leader, I very highly recommend you learn from the Baptist Health System's turnaround experience through this book.

See how I ranked this book

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