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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Rewiring Leadership Development and Embracing the Multi-Generational Workforce
00:19:02
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- [00:00]
Scott Becker
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Healthcare Podcast. Today we're going to talk about rewiring leadership development in healthcare. We're joined today by the co founder of Healthcare plus Solutions Group by Dan Collard. And Dan is someone that we've known for a long time who's a wonderfully authentic leader and just a fantastic person and leader. Dan, as we talk about sort of leadership and changes in leadership in the multi generation operational workforce and a lot more, can we start off by first telling us a little bit about yourself, your role and about Healthcare plus Solutions Group?
- [00:39]
Dan Collard
Well, yeah, you bet. It's great to be back with you, Scott. I was trying to count up the other day how many years we've known each other and it's just one of those wonderful relationships. So I'm a hospital operator, a healthcare operator by background and still really an operator by heart. I think keeping the operator's lens has always kept me grounded in all the work that we did. So I had the opportunity to be part of HCA in the late 90s and the spin off of what is today LifePoint Hospitals. And then along the way, I happened to meet a fellow named Quint Studer who was running an organization called Baptist Pensacola down in Pensacola, Florida. He and I went on to become friends and then later colleagues as Quint founded the Studer Group and invited me as one of the early members of that team as we had that organization for a number of years. After we exited that organization, he and I both sort of went our separate ways, did some really fun stuff, operations kept calling me back and I ended up back in an operational role with my friends and colleagues over at Team Health, very large physician practice. And then a couple years ago, Quint and I just decided there was more work to be done in that space that we had enjoyed for so many years with so many great relationships. So we created a new organization called Healthcare plus Solutions Group and for the last couple of years have just had so much fun sort of being back in a space that we were so comfortable and so familiar and it's been wonderful to have felt the welcome that we felt from the industry.
- [02:19]
Scott Becker
It's really amazing how well received what you're doing is. I tell you, we are on this podcast on audio, but for the record, I could see Dan and Dan looks younger and healthier than he's looked ever. So I don't know what he's doing, but whatever it is, it's working well. Dan, Dan, let's talk about leadership development in this changing world. Talk about why Leadership development is so critical. Why is it so important to be developing leaders? Aren't leaders just naturally born? They really need development. Talk a bit about why leadership development is so critical.
- [02:50]
Dan Collard
You know, we wish they were. And as we came back in, we wanted to make sure that we weren't just redoing everything we had done, just sort of out of habit. We also knew that the pandemic had really just changed things forever within the industry. And one day, almost on a whim, we asked a CEO what percent of leaders in his organization were new, meaning new to the organization or new to leadership. And, you know, it's kind of funny when you talk to CEOs about new leaders, oftentimes they sort of underplay the number. And there's a really good reason. When you think of, for instance, new hospital orientation, you typically think of the frontline folks that come in in larger numbers. And when you think of leaders, they sort of come in onesie, twosie, smaller numbers at a time. And so we asked the CEO if he just have his HR department go run the numbers. And he was a little shocked that 35% of all of his leaders were new. So we felt like we were sort of onto something. You know, we had gone through these this time of the great resignation from frontline folks leading healthcare, and no one really paid a lot of attention to the fact that there was a big churn in leadership. So it became a standard question to ask. And we've seen it run from anywhere, on the Good end of 25% of leaders being new, all the way up to an extreme example of an organization that opened a hospital in 2020 not knowing what was coming down the pike two months before the pandemic. And when we first met them a couple years ago and they ran those numbers, they realized they had had 117% churn in their leaders, which meant there wasn't a single leader there that day. That was there when the organization opened. And so then you take a step back and you think, as you said, the challenges we face in healthcare, you know, every day can be a new day in our industry. And yet we sort of sometimes take for granted, well, these leaders have been here a while. They know what to do. They sort of have this down. And so we ask the question, what if I'm a new leader? Does that mean I'm gonna be constantly three or four years behind the curve? And then some would say, well, can't you just get us back to basics? It's a good question. But what we also say is well, what if I wasn't here when the basics were introduced? And more importantly, what if the basics have changed? What if there are some new way that we need to approach facing the headwinds of healthcare? And, you know, today is a perfect example. As we think about the legislation that is, you know, fast tracked to become law, the financial impact on healthcare, just when we think we might have a breather, we're not going to have a breather. And so the question is, are we giving the leaders that are here the skills and the tools and the equipment they need to be successful? The skills and the tools and knowledge they need to be successful. And I think it just puts an even greater spotlight on why we can't assume that these great leaders were born with it, that we've got to make sure, and even more so on a more individualized basis, making sure that leaders have what they need to be successful.
- [06:15]
Scott Becker
Thank you, Dan. And you mentioned part of this. There are so many new leaders since the pandemic. When I go into health systems and talk to health systems, you see this very clearly in the nursing area, where there's nurses that have been around for a very long time, there's very new nurses, and there's a huge sort of gap in different spots in the workforce. And that gap's very important because that gap, that middle sort of management or leadership, is what used to do so much of the teaching of the younger nursing staff. The younger leaders talk a little bit about with all the new leaders that have begun since the end of the pandemic, is there a way to identify what their needs are in terms of training, in terms of growth and development?
- [06:58]
Dan Collard
Yeah. And that's really. If there's something that's new or different in the way we're approaching this, that's really it. If you think about, I have a dear friend who has a special needs child and, and every year that special needs child has an iep, an Individualized Education Plan. And it's a plan that's designed for that child specifically. And that's one of the things that makes it so special. And as we came back into the work that we were doing, we thought maybe, just maybe, putting all the leaders in one big room for a day, it's good from a consistency standpoint. But if you've got a leader that's been here for 30 years and a leader that's been here for 30 days, there's bound to be nuances, there's bound to be differences in what they need as a leader. So we decided we would take a very diagnostic approach. We wanted to make sure that we could diagnose before prescribing a leadership development plan. So we happened onto this term and it really is a play off of our clinical colleagues over in the oncology space. You know, today if you're a cancer patient, if you've got a family member that's a cancer patient, chances are you hear the word precision medicine an awful lot. And that means your intervention for your cancer goes all the way down into your genomic makeup, your DNA, an N of 1. You have to think of yourself as a cancer patient, as an n of 1. And we asked the question, could we do that in leadership development? So we went about creating, piloting, sort of testing a set of diagnostics that could identify a skill set not only for a larger group of leaders, but all the way down to an individual leader. So what are the one or two skills that I need based on my tenure, based on, am I clinical, am I non clinical, am I back office and am I front facing there? What are those one or two skill sets that I need and something really important? A lot of times organizations have really good OD departments, organizational development departments, or learning and development departments. And over the course of time, what we found is that a lot of organizations sort of just punted everything to them. You know, let OD be in charge of learning and development. We've taken a little bit of a different stance to say if you're in healthcare today and you lead leaders, part of that unofficial part of your title is as a chief development officer, it's your job as a leader to help develop those in your downline, so to speak. So we created a diagnostic. We allow leaders to self assess, but then we also look to their one up leaders, if you will, to assess. We use the output and then we help them prioritize. So let's not take on 10 things today, everybody's plates are already full. But let's take on one or two skills that a leader can concentrate on in their regular one on one meetings with their one up leaders, identifying what's the outcome they're being held accountable for, what's the skill set as a result of that outcome that they should develop? What actions should they take to develop those skills? And the most important one, what are the resources? Because it's not like we have a shortage of resources, but let's not make them do a scavenger hunt for resources. What's come out of that is what we call precision leader development. So again, sort of taking the lead from precision medicine. Right skills, right leader, right time. And I gotta tell you, it has landed so well. And it's just been so fun to watch leaders sort of rediscover the value of developing others there. And it's part of. When I said we've just had so much fun being back over the last couple of years, this precision leader development is part of the sauce there.
- [10:59]
Scott Becker
No, simply amazing, truly. And talk about this, we talk a lot about increasingly the multi generational workforce. What are some of your thoughts there and how do you deal with and view the dynamics of working in a multi generational workforce? Probably one like more so than we ever seen before. The different levels of ages and vintages in the workforce. Talk a bit about that.
- [11:22]
Dan Collard
Yeah. On any given day, on any, on any given nurses station, in any given radiology department, you're likely going to find up to four, four different generations present in our front line. But we also began again with leadership to say, what about these different generations of leaders that we have here as well? Because as you see, the boomers begin to retire, the Gen Xers coming in, and then of course these millennials and Gen Z sort of coming into their own. We thought, you know, this is a topic we've been talking about for forever. So number one, can we get really good at a diagnostic? So what are the skills that leaders need to be better at managing the multigenerational workforce? How do we really ignite the intergenerational impact? That's really the question we asked. So a couple of things. Quint happened to publish a book last year called the human margin with Dr. Kathryn Mies. And ache was nice enough to want to pull published that book. And it was around building trust. And a little bit of that trust topic, if you will, has to do with, you know, trust between the generations, trust between an employee and the leader, a leader and the employee, even our patients and our, and our employees, you know, with some of these, these new, these new caregivers looking like they're probably 12 or 13, sometimes patients wonder, you know, if I can trust them because they look so young. So Dr. Meese and I have put our heads together and we are in the process of finishing a book that ACH is going to publish again. And the, the title is sort of a mashup. We, we talked about what it is to be an influencer. So if you think of social media today and the word influencer comes up, everyone kind of has a sense of what that is. But I wanted to ask the question, what would it be like to be a professional workplace influencer? What would, what would that be like? Not TikTok, not Instagram, but how could we bring a positive influence to the workplace, no matter what generation that I happen to be in? And of course, Dr. Meese brings such wonderful value in the evidence and the research. So we've got this book coming out called Gen Fluence Igniting the Intergenerational Impact. And what it's designed to do is two or three things. Number one, it's designed to be a myth buster because you can go into any hospital today and if you have the boomers over in one corner and you ask them about these millennials and Gen Z's, you know, these stories come up, you do the same thing, you put the Gen Zs and the millennials over in the corner and you ask about the boomers and those stories come up. And we thought, wouldn't it be great to bust some of these myths around each of the generations? And so that's a lot about the first part of the book. But as I said at the beginning of our time together today, I'm an operator at heart. And so I wanted to take a real operational view of what it's like to really unlock the potential of having all four generations, traditionally four. We have one hospital that actually does have some members of the traditionalists generation there. But the four generations, the boomers, the Gen Xers, the millennials, the Gen Z's, what's it like to unlock operational value there? So the book's going to be providing a solution and, you know, part of it is getting each of the generations to understand why they are like they are. You know, so much of our formative years really are what become our generational personalities. If you think of the Gen Xers, they were the first latchkey kids, they were the first kids that came home from school and mom and dad were both at work. And now we see the impact of that in their professional life. Another part of the solution is to think about how do we position the next generation? Well, not just age old HR succession planning, but how do we position that next generation? And a funny little story I like to tell in this realm. I was at a concert, my wife and I went and saw Cheap Trick in concert. And what's really cool about Cheap Trick to today is that two of the bandmates are actually the sons of the original band members. So Robin Zander, the lead singer, has a son that's playing guitar and doing backup vocals now. And Rick Nielsen, the lead guitarist, the guy that Wears the cap, kind of the wacky guy. His son Dax is the drummer. And I'm sitting there and thinking, only a healthcare nerd like me would watch this stuff. But I watch the dynamics between the fathers and the sons. I watched sort of that fatherly pride look from Rick Nielsen over to Dax when he was doing a drum solo. And then at one point, Robin Taylor, Xander, the son, was over doing kind of some impromptu tuning is in his guitar. And he sort of turned his back to the audience because he obviously need to get get the guitar in tune for the rest of the concert. And Robin Xander, the dad, just walked by him and just very casually gave him sort of the old dad squeeze on the shoulder. And I thought that speaks such volumes. And do we do the same thing in healthcare? Because I think sometimes we tend to sort of make up stories about the other generations and that's got an impact on operations. So how could we sort of give the old dad squeeze to that next generation? So they're feeling good. And then the final thought on it brings us back to trust. We coach an organization. It's part of Ardent Healthcare, Hillcrest Medical center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And this is going to be one of the stories in the book. There they were struggling on one of their nursing departments with participation in something as basic as department meetings, team meetings. And they were struggling for a number of reasons. One, I got to come in on my day off, might not be the right time. Maybe I worked the night shift. And they had sort of watched the participation rate decline pretty significantly. And the leader is one of those great leaders that gets this multi generational dynamic. And so instead of just going to the boomers or the Gen Xers, she actually went right to the youngest members of the team. And she had two charge nurses that she said, can you come up with a solution? And so these two charge nurses went out and did their homework and they found out that there is a safe and secure closed Facebook Live platform that you can use. And they totally reinvented their team meetings. It's called chatting with charges. And their participation rate now is in the high 90s, all because they met people where they were. They'll have nurses in the park with their kids joining the team meeting. They'll have nurses in the grocery store pushing a grocery cart down the aisle and joining the team meeting. Now they'll still have folks that want to show up and be there in person. But imagine going from a place where only half your team shows up to now 96, 97% of the team shows up and it's all because we trusted, you know, these, these newer, younger generations to come up with solution. So it's a long answer, but I think there's such value operationally to be able to bust some myths with these generations and really get everybody on the same sheet of paper.
- [18:43]
Scott Becker
Dan, what a fantastic pleasure to visit with you again. Dan Coward, one of the co founders of Healthcare Plus Solutions Group, founded it with Quint Studer. It's like bringing the band back together. Two of the greats of all time. Thank you so much for joining us today on the Beckers Healthcare podcast. Thank you.