Consider this truism: Your facility outcomes will never outperform the effectiveness of how your leadership team leads.
As you focus on 5-Star ratings, clinical indicators, resident satisfaction, workforce engagement and financial outcomes, keep in mind that it is the individual and collective capabilities of your leadership team that drive your ability to stay competitive and to achieve operational excellence. To sustain high-quality outcomes, an administrator or executive director must be able to:
Establish a unified commitment to facility goals, and
Build a cohesive team among facility leaders to advance those goals.
Leaders are ultimately responsible for establishing a system of leadership that drives high levels of performance. A system of leadership may sound a bit obscure, but think of it as a combination of your formal leadership structures and processes (how you set and deploy your vision and values, how you make decisions and communicate with employees, how you select and develop leaders and managers) as well as your day-to-day leadership presence, such as how you personally demonstrate and role model the values of your organization.
In the senior care business, we are deeply dependent on a motivated workforce capable of providing high-quality care and service.
Therefore, it’s imperative that facility leaders recognize that they set the tone for their organization through their system of leadership. Leadership processes, and the personal actions and behaviors of leaders, provide visible and tangible messaging to employees about organizational priorities.
Here are a few real life examples of concrete practices that leaders use to convey what’s most important: