From Our Latest White Paper: How Employee Development Can Help You Manage Your Health Care Talent Crunch
Health care leaders have to deal with change every day. As they face the challenges posed by retiring providers, an aging population needing more care and more people with coverage accessing health insurance, they still need to prepare employees for next-level roles. Our latest white paper, “How Smart Health Care Leaders Are Facing the Talent Crunch,” provides tips for health care leaders to use change-management principles as they build a strong system to hire, retain and develop employees effectively.Developing the talent you have is an important part of managing these challenges. Only 20 percent of health care organizations say they know the current leadership capability of their organization and have a process to identify talent for future business success, compared with a third of organizations in other industries that have both. Here’s how to cultivate key leaders and secure your organization’s future.
Identify Risk and Need
Making sure the organization’s people strategy supports the business strategy is imperative. Woman’s Hospital in Baton Rouge periodically assesses critical positions and looks into what those positions require, says Wendy Singleton, the hospital’s director of nursing administration and magnet program director. The organization identifies positions that are at risk of going vacant as people retire or that are held by people who may take their talent elsewhere, and looks at potential successors for development.“This allows for purposeful planning,” Singleton says. “We can look at individuals, find gaps and start developing. The key is to be proactive.”
Align Development with Organizational Strategy
Whether the aim is to help the organization achieve financial goals or operational ones, a strategy is needed. For Woman’s, that meant participating in the Magnet Recognition Program, which requires organizations to hit certain metrics in patient care, nursing excellence and nursing innovation. “When we first started looking at Magnet, we did a gap analysis and felt like we could achieve it with some change,” Johnson says. “We’ve had a hospital strategic plan for some time, but didn’t have a nursing professional model or nursing strategic plan. We used those components to guide our future work in nursing to a higher level.”
Build Leaders
Building meaningful, sustainable leadership-development programs and processes for every level in the organization can help people gain the skills they need to be leaders. Woman’s Hospital implemented a leadership program with several best practices — including technology that automates 360-degree feedback reports, and development discussions with bosses and coaches to review feedback, discuss career objectives and create customized development plans for leaders and emerging leaders. “If you’re doing leadership development, you’ll be able to rapidly improve your outcomes,” Johnson says. “We’ve focused on developing transformational leaders who can improve outcomes for patients. If you have an effective leader who can also inspire the front-line nurse and have that nurse be engaged, you’ll have better outcomes.”In addition, mentoring and knowledge-transfer activities can help pass on knowledge from veteran employees to young leaders. In fact, recent graduates find it difficult to transition into nursing without mentoring and orientation, says Mary Jo Assi, director of nursing practice and work environment at the American Nurses Association. Studies support the implementation of robust nurse residency programs that are at least three months long, Assi says.For tips on how to attract and retain employees in order to manage the talent crunch in health care, download our white paper. Success Labs is a leadership-development and management consulting firm in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. For more than 25 years, our expert team of consultants has worked with hundreds of companies to explore their business potential and improve their company and cultural performance. Contact us to get proactive about your people strategy.
