NNEAHE and CHHS host conference

I had the chance to moderate a panel for a joint conference we hosted yesterday at UNH. The College of Health and Human Services and the Northern New England Association of Healthcare Executives produced "Shaping the Future: Leadership and Public Policy in Healthcare". It was a great conference and we had a very nice turnout of NNEAHE members, as well as students, faculty, and staff.

I moderated the panel, Talent Management for Bench Strength Development, and I have to say it was a really great experience. I had three excellent executives to work with: Kevin Callahan, CEO of Exeter Health Resources; Samantha O'Neill, VP of HR for the Elliot Health System; and Warren West, CEO of Littleton Regional Healthcare and North Country Healthcare.

This was my first time moderating a panel like this, and the my panelists were giving me a hard time because they said my questions sounded like they were written by an academic. But they were great, and rolled with my exam-like questions. I wasn't able to get them all to say "Googleyness", but it still went well.

We recorded the event and we'll be publishing it on the Health Leader Forge next week, so you can listen for yourself when it comes out. Looking forward to doing it again next year.

power of listening

As I go along doing interviews with senior leaders, one of the things that comes up in one way or another is the need to be a good listener. Many of the senior leaders I talk with make explicit mention of this skill. Listening, rather than directing. Listening is the key to leading, rather than managing.

yay! we got a hit!

My co-author Lee Bewley and I just received an acceptance for our paper, Mentorship Mediated by Life-Career Seasons: An Analysis of a multi-dimensional model of mentoring among career groups of United States Army Officers.

It will be in an on-line, open-access journal so I'll definitely post a link here when it comes out.

RWL #6

this week's RWL newsletter reproduced here:

Happy Friday! Here are this weeks recommendations for your reading, watching, and listening pleasure!

Read

What: in the HBR, To Get More Out of Social Media, Think Like an Anthropologist by Susan Fournier, John Quelch, and Bob Rietveld

Why: I've been thinking a lot about listening. It comes up frequently when I talk to executives about leadership. In this article, listening is applied at the macro/market level. According to the authors, "Social listening promises the Holy Grail in business: superior understanding of customers." What is "social listening"? The essence is customers/consumers/patients are online talking about your firm and your firm's products - whatever those might be. In a sense, your users are giving you unfiltered access to their feelings about your product. So you should listen (or read) what they are saying. But... you should listen like an anthropologist: "Anthropologists and the culturally sensitive analysts who think like them specialize in meaning management. Their function is to take complex bits of data and develop a higher-order sense of them." It is a qualitative approach to research that I am fond of - the authors' point is this approach keeps the data grounded in its context, and does not purify it in a way that quantitative approaches often do.

https://hbr.org/2016/08/to-get-more-out-of-social-media-think-like-an-anthropologist​

(you should be able to get 4 free articles each month from the HBR even if you are not a subscriber)


Watch

What: MakerBot and Robohand | 3D Printing Mechanical Hands

Why: This is a short, inspiring video about a South African carpenter who, after losing his fingers in a work-related accident, set out to make his own artificial hand. In collaboration with an American puppet maker, they together developed a low-cost, 3-D printable prosthesis that is changing people's lives. It's really an amazing story of technology and innovation.

https://youtu.be/WT3772yhr0o​


Listen

What: The latest Health Leader Forge interview was with John Fernandez, the President and CEO of the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary.

Why: Mass Eye and Ear is a world famous specialty hospital focused on ophthalmology and otolaryngology. During the interview, John surprised me by recommending the One Minute Manager. He recommends the book because it has some basic advice - give people feedback and follow up (here's that listening theme again). According to John, this is a fundamental management task, and it's one that even senior executives don't always remember. Along with planning, feedback and follow up were central themes we came back to repeatedly throughout the interview.

http://healthleaderforge.blogspot.com/2016/08/john-r-fernandez-president-and-chief.html


OK – those are my suggestions for this week. If you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here:https://tinyletter.com/markbonica

notes on recruiting from "Winning the War for Talent"

I just finished reading Mandy Johnson's Winning the War for Talent. I wish I had read this when I was a hiring manager. Even though I worked in the federal government and had very little control over most of the variables she talks about, her tips on screening for attitude are insightful.

She talks about evaluating an applicant's past history on three factors: attitude, skills and qualifications, and practical fit (p. 80).

I've spoken with a lot of executives for my podcast, and one of the things I try to ask about is how they go about selecting leaders. I've heard a mix of answers about how they select, but when I ask them what their hardest lesson learned was, it was almost always hiring the wrong person and/or waiting too long to get rid of a poor performer, often the person they shouldn't have hired.

Skills and qualifications refers to formal qualifications like licenses (if required). It also refers to things like the quality of school the person got their degree from (or if they have a degree). So pretty straight forward and relatively objective.

Practical fit sounds a bit squishier, and has to do with whether the person is a good fit for the organization. I just released an interview with John Fernandez, the President and CEO of Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, one of the world's leading specialty hospitals, and he talks about having a good fit for leaders in his C-suite. His comment is that at that level, it isn't about skills and qualifications (which are necessary, but to get to that level, everyone is skilled and well qualified). His focus was on a good fit for the team. Most of us are never going to work in the C-suite, so Johnson's focus is more about being a good fit for the organization's mission and culture. If you don't like to travel, you're probably not a good fit for a sales job with a big territory. If you don't like sitting behind a desk, you probably don't want to be an accountant.

These latter two are pretty simple. It's attitude that is much harder to judge and Johnson spends a lot more time talking about how to try to evaluate it objectively. All of the executives I have interviewed have talked about attitude in some way, shape, or form. Johnson talks about how most of us think we can articulate what attitude is, but often we don't really have objective criteria. I agree - operationalizing attitude is challenging, especially if you are trying to do it from a resume or CV.

She offers the following five measures of attitude:

measure                            operationalization
positive work ethic          job stability
                                         early workforce participation

perseverance                    job stability
                                         completion history (broadly measured - e.g., completed levels of schooling,                                           programs)

achievement                    pattern of demonstrated achievement

works well with              job stability
people                             community involvement

commitment                    job stability
                                        targeted cover letter
                                        speed of application
                                        targeted CV

Do you think she values job stability? One of her big themes is good recruitment doesn't just mean filling the job, but filling it with someone who will stay. So job stability is a good indicator of that. But it also is a good indicator for a host of other problems. Not particularly interesting in itself, but interesting to see how important it is. Some other items interested me. I once hired a woman based on her volunteer work. She was a Navy spouse so I knew she didn't necessarily always have the opportunity for meaningful work. But she took on the family support group leadership for an air craft carrier - a ship with 5,000 crew members. Her job was to help coordinate the families and help them work through problems when their husbands and wives were off on the ship somewhere and couldn't help. And she did that as a volunteer. She was a great employee when she was being paid. Early workforce participation is another interesting point. Learning the value of work early is probably a good trait, though I have to say I never thought to ask about that. Targeted CV and cover letter are obvious to me, but I guess not to everyone.

How would you operationalize attitude? I think it's an interesting exercise.

RWL #4

reposting here my weekly newsletter:

This week’s focus is on death and dying. I know, just in time for the weekend. But you can’t work in healthcare and not think about that topic. There is a grace in it, and part of our job as health leaders is to ensure that the people entrusted to our care are treated with dignity. This week's suggestions look at how we can help people at the end.

Read

What: From the WP, “Dying is hard. Death doulas want to help make it easier.”

Why: My father volunteered as the medical director for Home Healthcare Hospice and Community Services for many years as part of his mission as a Catholic physician. I used to see him head off into the woods of rural New Hampshire with his black bag to check on patients on the weekends like a character out of some 19^th century novel, except he was driving a pick-up rather than a buggy. As a former hospital administrator, I have seen my fair share of patients who passed while I was on duty over night, escorting their bodies to the morgue, but I’ve never sat with someone who was actively dying. As an economist, I read this article and thought about specialization, but also how utility maximization does not always mean more money. As the great economist Adam Smith said, “Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/dying-is-hard-death-doulas-want-to-help-make-it-easier/2016/07/22/53d80f5c-24f7-11e6-8690-f14ca9de2972_story.html


Watch

What: Dr. BJ Miller “What Really Matters at the End of Life”

Why: Really, most TED Talks are self-recommending. But Miller's personal journey is fascinating. He runs an organization called The Zen Hospice Project, which he talks about in the video. You can read about him here.

https://www.ted.com/talks/bj_miller_what_really_matters_at_the_end_of_life


Listen

What: Health Leader Forge interview with the Rev. Frank Macht, Director of Chaplaincy, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center

Why: On the theme of death and dying, Frank and I had a great conversation about what it is like to be a hospital chaplain at one of the country’s top teaching hospitals. Frank’s story is really interesting as he traveled from Germany to San Francisco and all over the United States learning his trade, which is to journey with people who are in crisis. One of my favorite interviews.

http://healthleaderforge.blogspot.com/2016/06/rev-frank-macht-director-of-chaplaincy.html


OK – those are my suggestions for this week. If you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here:https://tinyletter.com/markbonica

I' d love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line by e-mail, or you can tweet to me at @bonicatalent .

Book: "How Google Works" by Schmidt and Rosenberg

How Google Works is a quick and easy read (I am a slow reader and I plowed through this book over the weekend), but packed with some interesting perspective and specific tips.

The book highlights the fact that Google operates in the manner that Google manages human capital for talent. It is almost straight out of the pages of The War for Talent published back in 2001. Hire the best talent, take your time to get the best talent, help the best talent develop, manage under-performers out.

The book emphasizes the importance of culture, and the importance of preserving that culture by bringing in the best.

What can we learn as talent managers in healthcare from How Google Works? I've had a number of conversations with executives on the Health Leader Forge, and many of them, really a majority of them, say that the leadership lesson that they had to learn the hard way was around hiring and managing under-performers. So even though the dynamics of healthcare delivery are quite different than the frothy, ping-pong table, nap-nook filled world of internet start ups, the problem of talent management and finding the right people is still the main problem leaders face.

Schmidt and Rosenberg have some interesting recommendations - like creating a hiring committee where the hiring manager has a veto, but not the final decision to hire - makes a lot of sense. There needs to be a focus on slowing down the process to ensure organizational fit and appropriateness. Hiring by committee makes sense because as the authors point out "Hiring decisions are too important to be left in the hands of a manager who may or may not have a stake in the employee's success a year later" due to corporate movement of either the manager or the new hire (p. 121).

That's an interesting prescription and it ties back to The War for Talent, which argues that the single most important thing an executive can do is build their team.