Empower Healthcare Transformation with a Dedicated Strategic Partner
August 24, 2023 •Level Ten Healthcare Advisors
As a healthcare executive, you’re tasked with elevating the health, sustainability, and viability of your organization across the board. You’re responsible for ensuring operations are running smoothly, the financial budget is on point, staffing challenges are prevented and addressed, and patient care is being provided with excellence.
In today’s landscape, you’re also navigating industry sea changes that are rapidly shifting payor mix, changing employee demands, accelerating the rise of consumerism, and creating fierce competition from new markets and means of care delivery.
Leading your organization through these challenges and effectively addressing key metrics that will impact your success is even more difficult when you’re stuck fighting the fires of everyday operations, attending to staffing issues, dealing with economic setbacks, and triaging urgent demands on your time, attention, and resources.
It's Not Uncommon for Transformation INitiatives to Stall
Though you may know exactly what needs to be done to continue to build your health system’s long-term vitality and success, it can be easy to become frustrated, burned out, and defeated that you’ll actually be able to affect that change. With so much to do to improve your health system and so much of the daily chaos taking up your time, even the most competent and capable healthcare leaders can begin to feel resigned to the reality that their best laid plans may never be accomplished and their strategies and tactics for greater evolution and growth will wind up in one more old, dusty binder on the shelf.
Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way forever. You can begin to restart your momentum, build on your best ideas for growth and change, and start gaining traction on your most important organizational goals with the help of a dedicated Strategic Advisor.
Just as the best athletes have coaches to guide them to victory at the height of their game, organizations can also engage with a dedicated consultant and Strategic Advisor to help them break through barriers, overcome challenges and obstacles blocking them from success, and achieve their goals with more efficiency and ease.
How a Strategic Advisor Can Help You Achieve Your Organizational Goals
Strategic Advisors can be an excellent addition to your team, coming alongside to listen to your challenges, hear your plans and hopes for the future, and create a simple path forward to help you achieve success.
The most effective Strategic Advisors don’t usurp your plans or charge into your organization set in their ways and determined to do things on their terms. Rather, they become your biggest advocates and strategic and operational support helping you accomplish everything you’ve been hoping to get to, but simply haven’t had the time to tackle.
Great Strategic Advisors should become your true partner in transformation, providing customized solutions to help your health system navigate change effectively and achieve impactful, sustainable growth.
Here are five ways a Strategic Advisor can help your health system win with organizational transformation:
1. Strategic Advisors are Integrated With but Not Inside Your Organization
Strategic Advisors should be fully integrated members of your team to help you achieve effective organizational transformation. Your partnership should be so comfortable and connected that having your Strategic Advisor join your senior leadership team meeting or monthly department huddle should be part of your regular rhythm. Your team should all be on a first-name, friendly basis with your advisors and feel confident reaching out with any issues or concerns, working to implement your plans as a united front.
However, even though your Strategic Advisor should be just as integrated into your workflow as any member of your staff, they do have the advantage of being fully in-the-know, yet not inside your organization. The Strategic Advisor won’t be bogged down by the same operational fires that your team will have to address and can remain focused on helping you achieve your long-term goals, despite whatever chaos may come your way.
The ability to function as one, yet not be slowed down by unexpected interruptions can ensure you maintain momentum and your organizational transformation initiatives stay on track for success.
2. Strategic Advisors Can Help You Maintain the 10,000ft View
Leaders and executives should spend most of their time operating at the 10,000ft view of the organization—setting the vision for what could be possible and helping to ensure everything at the organization ultimately serves your bigger mission and loftier goals.
The work of a leader should ultimately be oriented toward a forward focus, shaping the culture, innovating and designing a better way, developing employees, and planning for what’s ahead. Unfortunately, most leaders routinely get pulled into lower levels of leadership sometimes managing their team and directing resources from a 1,000ft view—churning out reports, building schedules, and executing plans. And, all too often, leaders are living even more on the ground level, firefighting and navigating urgent, unplanned events, handling complaints, and solving issues and problems.
Thankfully, a Strategic Advisor can stay focused on that highest level of leadership and hold the vision for what you’re hoping to accomplish, see how your initiatives all fit together, maintain the birds-eye view, and work toward achieving your bigger goals. This perspective is invaluable and allows you to relax knowing you’re not losing ground on what’s ultimately most important while you’re being called into what’s urgent.
3. Strategic Advisors Can Help You Prioritize Your Efforts to Maximize Success
When time, energy, and attention are beyond limited, a Strategic Advisor can also help you prioritize what’s most important and help you focus on which initiatives are most vital to tackle first. Like most leaders, you probably have many things on your “Leadership Bucket List” that you’d like to accomplish during your tenure, but unfortunately know you can’t get to all your great ideas at once.
A Strategic Advisor can help you create an attainable game plan for making the most progress in the shortest amount of time and ensure you’re hitting your biggest targets for operational improvements and building the bottom line. With their expertise and guidance, you can rest assured that you’re starting with the most important projects and taking the next, right steps to have your biggest possible impact.
4. Strategic Advisors Can Connect You to Best Practices from Health Systems Across the Country
Stellar Strategic Advisors may have been in your shoes at before, leading health systems from the inside, so they fully know what you’re up against and the struggles and challenges you face as a leader.
However, from their unique vantage point as advisors, they also are privy to the inner workings of many health systems and hospitals all throughout the country. They are invited into the biggest challenges and initiatives in health systems of all sizes, in different markets, and can bring a wealth of knowledge from how other leaders have navigated similar challenges and come out ahead.
When you engage with a Strategic Advisor, you are gaining the benefit of a broader perspective. You get real-time updates into emerging best practices and you can put new processes into place far ahead of your competition who don’t have access to that same insight. Working with a Strategic Advisor can give you a leg up and invaluable advantage allowing your health system to be more creative, innovative, and achieve your success more rapidly than others in your region.
5. Strategic Advisors Are Experts Who Are 100% Focused on Your Initiative’s Success
While you’re working as a leader to tackle these big organizational transformation initiatives, you’re also running operations, leading your department, meeting your KPI metrics, and planning for the next budget cycle. Especially in a smaller health system, you may be required to operate as a generalist, focused on many things, but never getting to truly go deep in one, main thing.
Strategic Advisors, though, spend every day 100% devoted to driving organizational change. They get to hone their skills, get intimately acquainted with the latest research and trends, attend conferences and trainings to improve their processes and approach, and focus every bit of attention into mastering their craft. Leading organizational change and impacting the most mission-critical objectives like increasing employee engagement, improving the patient experience, and inspiring operational innovation is all they do.
Don’t let their ability to focus on leading these big strategies for change—when you’re stuck dealing with the issues of the everyday—discourage you. As a leader, your organization needs you to make time for attending to everything that comes your way.
Instead, embrace your partnership with your Strategic Advisor and let your time with them lift you up out of the daily grind and bring you back into that hopeful, aspirational, what-else-could-we-accomplish state of mind.
Enjoy the process of working through these initiatives and trust your advisors to take the wheel and drive. When you’ve got a great Strategic Advisor by your side, you can rest easy knowing you’ve got top experts on your team working to help you achieve your big vision and dreams.
How Could a Strategic Advisor Help You Power Your Organizational Transformation?
In healthcare we simply can’t afford to let the tyranny of the urgent overcome what’s most important. Finding the right partnerships so we can truly focus on our organizational transformation initiatives is imperative when our biggest organizational goals and outcomes are oriented toward improving patient care.
If we don’t take the time to cultivate a better employee experience, our employees will continue to suffer from overwhelm and burnout and they’ll be less able to embrace positive change and make crucial life-saving innovations. Patients—those who come to us vulnerable in their biggest time of need—won’t get the best-in-class care they most certainly deserve.
We know you’ve chosen this role as a healthcare leader to serve these patients and providers to the very best of your ability. A Strategic Advisor can help you quickly overcome challenges and obstacles so you can serve them better as you move forward with your biggest plans for operational improvement and positive change.
To explore how engaging a Strategic Advisor can help you achieve your biggest organizational transformation goals, schedule a call with our team today.