Courageous Leadership

The Missing Link to Creating a Lean Culture of Excellence

Sumeet Kumar

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351591508
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Courageous Leadership: The Missing Link to Creating a Lean Culture of Excellence is one of the firsts of its kind to wade through the confusion among leaders on selecting the type of change approach that will get the best results in their organization. It educates the senior executive leaders and organizational excellence practitioners on the different characteristics of change and answers why the approach to incremental and transitional change cannot deliver the results expected from a transformational change. The author shares his experiences from leading several small and large scale organization transformations in multiple industries across different countries on how to establish a robust foundation for an excellence journey and integrate strategy into daily operations. This book elaborates on the types of courage and what it means to be a courageous leader while leading change in difficult situations, and what leaders do differently for putting the organization on a path to excellence and culture transformation.

This book shares an innovative design, a methodology and an approach that combines best practices and principles from Malcolm Baldrige, Shingo, Lean, Six Sigma, Balanced Scorecard, accreditation, change management, patient and family-centered care, the Competing Values Framework, the LEADS framework, and the project management body of knowledge. The implementation of this model at a hospital in Canada propelled the organization further ahead on their transformational journey compared to other organizations that started much earlier. Sensei in Japanese means Teacher and Gyaan in Sanskrit means Knowledge. Brief sections on 'Sensei Gyaan' have been interspersed throughout the book to provide valuable tips to the readers based on author's experiential learnings over the past two decades.

This book serves as a practical guide for senior executive leaders and organizational excellence practitioners, who wish to embark or are in various stages of their organizational excellence and culture transformation journey. Readers will be guided through 26 elements necessary for establishing a robust foundation and an additional set of 22 Management System elements required to create and sustain a culture of quality across the organization. For leaders in healthcare, the book provides a framework, guiding principles, and associated practices that support the implementation of the 4 core concepts of patient and family centered care namely, dignity and respect, information sharing, participation and collaboration. Included in the book are several examples with creative visuals, ready-to-use templates and standard works, models, guiding principles, and strategies based on best practices to assist leaders in their organization excellence journey.

D

Make Change Last

Chapter 10

Develop the Organization Report Card

Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.

—Peter Drucker

According to a recent McKinsey survey, transformations with clear, unambiguous metrics and milestones were over seven times more likely to succeed than those lacking such elements.

In Chapter 4, I talked about the importance of integrating business excellence into an organization’s strategic plan. In Chapter 5, I shared a model to integrate an organization’s desired culture with strategy. With the strategic plan created, the task now at hand is to deploy the strategy throughout the organization from the boardroom to the frontline, as well as to monitor performance in relation to the strategic directions.

While there are many frameworks to deploy organization strategy, the popular ones include Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and Hoshin Kanri. The Balanced Scorecard’s four perspectives, namely, financial, customer, process, and learning and growth, are comparable to Hoshin Kanri’s cost, quality, delivery, and education (CQDE). Between the two, I prefer the Balanced Scorecard methodology for two reasons: one, the terminology of the four perspectives resonates well with organization strategy, and two, it is easier to understand and communicate to the frontline than the X Matrix used in Hoshin Kanri (Figure 10.1).

Figure 10.1 The logic of the Balanced Scorecard.

Let me explain the methodology for strategy deployment through a real case implementation. Hospital Heal used the BSC framework for strategy deployment since the four strategic directions of its new strategic plan aligned more closely with the four perspectives of the BSC. The strategic deployment at Hospital Heal was undertaken in two steps:

1.Organization strategy cascaded to develop the hospital’s “Health Report Card.”

2.Hospital Report Card cascaded to develop department-level performance scorecards.

In this chapter, I will only focus on the first part, i.e., the process implemented for cascading the organization strategy to develop the hospital’s Health Report Card, which was completed in a period of twelve weeks. The following activities were undertaken in the sequence listed below:

Twenty hospitals across Canada in various stages of implementing Lean were randomly selected to understand the metrics they used for public reporting on their website (Figure 10.2).

Malcolm Baldrige award winners in U.S. healthcare were approached to learn about metrics chosen by them for measuring organizational performance.

Industry research was conducted on metrics used by the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI).

Internal teams brainstormed possible metrics to support all twenty objectives of the new strategic plan.

Inputs were sought from the senior leadership team on key process and outcome metrics.

The hospital board approved the final metrics chosen for the report card.

A detailed metric sheet was developed to outline the formula, definition, data owner, baseline, and target, all in layperson terms, to support each metric on the report card.

An attractive, easy-to-understand layout of the Health Report Card was designed.

A web portal for posting the Report Card for sharing with the general public was developed.

Finally, the Report Card was published on the intranet and the hospital’s website.

Figure 10.2 Metric selection for creating Health Report Card for Hospital Heal.

Sensei Gyaan: Be very selective in terms of choosing the metrics for the organizational report card. Keep the key metrics to a manageable number of sixteen or less. Identify a mix of process and outcome metrics that ar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Author
• Introduction
• SECTION A: CREATE A SHARED NEED
• SECTION B: SHAPE A VISION
• SECTION C: MOBILIZE COMMITMENT
• SECTION D: MAKE CHANGE LAST
• SECTION E: MONITOR PROGRESS
• SECTION F: LEADERSHIP AND COURAGE
• Annexure
• Bibliography
• Index