As a healthcare leader, it’s far too easy to get swept up in what we call “firefighting” where you’re constantly putting out the next urgent crisis and dealing with the issues of each day rather than operating from a more stable, strategic position and steadily working your plan.
When we get sucked into the urgent and chaotic matters on a regular basis, unfortunately the important initiatives we’re tasked with as a leader all too often fall to the wayside.
Even though these priorities—like improving customer lifetime value, innovating operations to find streams of recurring revenue, improving the patient experience to deepen loyalty and referrals, and increasing employee engagement to decrease turnover—are non-negotiable if we want to survive and thrive as a health system, on a day-to-day basis they don’t scream as loud or burn as hot as the run-of-the-mill crisis of each day.
We often don’t see their importance until it’s far too late and we’ve let them go unattended long enough that now the repercussions have caused our newest crisis—staffing shortages that threaten our ability to offer great care, patients who are underserved and choose to seek care elsewhere, financial crises that lead to difficult operational changes and budget cuts, etc.
Our role as leaders demands that we fight against the current and push back against the chaos in order to bring our health system into a more orderly and strategic means of operating. We must find a way to set a clear and compelling vision for the future, create a strategy for accomplishing these vital initiatives, and systematically execute our plan to create truly transformational change.
As the year comes to a close, we may find that we simply didn’t accomplish all we needed in 2023. We may have been overcome by the whirlwind of changes and crises and these important endeavors never took off for us and our teams.
While everyone in the healthcare industry is dealing with a rapidly evolving and changing landscape, if we don’t find a way to take back control and get back to our strategic vision, we will not continue to thrive as an organization and will face even more difficult challenges in the years ahead.
To make 2024 our best year yet and get back to bringing our greatest strategic contributions to bear, we must stay focused on our goals and work everyday toward improving vital functions like recruitment, retention, leadership, and innovation.
We can make traction on these essential initiatives even in the midst of the chaos of everyday leadership. It is possible to get back on track and reroute our teams to be more effective and strategic in the year ahead.
Here’s an inventory and checklist to guide you to that strong and strategic start:
1. Reviewing your quarterly and annual goals for 2023
Before we can make new goals for 2024, we must revisit what we hoped to accomplish this past year. Look back to the annual goals you may have set at your yearly offsite and any quarterly initiatives you hoped to accomplish.
As you’re reviewing your plans, be sure to celebrate anything that was a success. Note what you and your team were able to accomplish and who you grew to be in the process. You may have grown through difficult challenges as a leader, overcome a big crisis as a leadership team, or hit an audacious metric that helped you improve patient care.
Where things didn’t go as planned, take a moment to dissect what didn’t go right.
Don’t get discouraged if your goals are still a work in progress. You get a fresh start in 2024, and we’re going to do everything we can to get you to a better strategic position where you can move these key initiatives forward and make your desired impact.
If everything had worked out the way we hoped it would and the year was everything we wished it could be, we may be thriving and operating at our fullest capacity while closing out 2023.
Realistically, things may not have gone 100% according to plan, so let’s take a moment to assess where things are at and detail our current state.
EXERCISE: To uncover what’s at the heart of how you’re really feeling, you may find it incredibly powerful to pull out a piece of paper and some markers and draw out your current state. Work through how it feels and what it looks like as you wrap up the year.
While it’s hard to get our highly intelligent CEOs and executives to put pen to paper and draw things out, when they finally give it a go in our workshops, their results are incredibly telling.
We’ve seen all kinds of visual depictions of carrying a far too heavy load, being overworked and short of resources to get the job done, and we see leaders trying to put out fires and struggle to get things under control.
Your subconscious can help you get to deeper truths if you allow yourself to explore through creativity and drawing your feelings out in this way.
If you find your outlet through journaling and reflection, consider:
Don’t self-edit as you work through your inventory. We want to have a fully honest assessment of where things are at so we can truly get you to a place where you’re thriving and living out your mission and purpose through your role.
Once you’ve seen where things are at now, you can get a better idea for where you’d like things to be.
Think through your immediate environment—your role, your team, and your department—and then think broader to your entire organization, all the patients and customers you serve, and your organization’s impact in the community.
Don’t hold back on these future state visions. Within healthcare, our possibilities to improve the lives of others are almost endless. We get to impact others within some of their greatest moments of joy and excitement and support them through some of their deepest trials. Really dig deep and envision what could be possible if we took that great calling and privilege more seriously.
We encourage you to spend all the time you can in the visioning and dreaming stage. This is where all of the magic really happens—where we unlock our most audacious goals and dreams and reconnect with what drew us to this profession in the first place.
With our ideals and aspirations in mind, our last step is to dig in and make a plan. We must take the lofty hopes we have for the future and bring them down into our daily reality with a smart and strategic path to achieve them.
We’ve all heard the old adage that “failing to plan is planning to fail.” When the stakes are as high as they are in healthcare, we cannot afford to let our strategic initiatives stall.
As healthcare leaders, our plans for 2024 must take into account key focus areas that will help us make the biggest possible impact and address the biggest challenges at our health systems.
We suggest building your strategic plan in at least four key areas: recruitment, retention, leadership, and innovation.
Finding great talent for your health system must be a foundational focus for all healthcare leaders—for without a strong and capable team, we can’t achieve any of our important goals. The recruitment focus can no longer be the sole responsibility of the HR department, rather, every single leader must be working to grow and improve our recruitment machine.
Challenge yourself to consider how you and your team can improve recruitment to your organization: How can your department increase clarity of expectations, more clearly define roles and responsibilities, improve communication with new recruits, and promote your organization as an attractive employer?
How can you and your team increase awareness of your organization as a great place to work, help enhance engagement with potential candidates and recruits, improve your organizational reputation, and drive growth?
Set aside a few minutes at your department meeting to discuss how your team can make an impact and then build your strategies into your 2024 plan.
Once we’ve found and begun to train and invest in new talent, it is essential that we build a solid strategy for continuing to engage and inspire these employees. We want to work through how we can better serve our teams at each of seven key stages of the employee journey: hiring, welcoming, connecting, balancing, rewarding, inspiring, and serving.
Within your team and department, how can you improve communication, provide more opportunities for connection and team building, offer more recognition, and deepen your team’s sense of purpose, fulfillment, and meaning?
As the leader of your department and business function, you have unparalleled access and influence over your team and can create a ripple of impact within your organization by intentionally investing in your team’s connection, commitment, and well-being.
Get ready to win in 2024 by building in these great habits and practices into your yearly plan.
The best leaders are those that are continually developing and equipping the rest of their team to become great leaders.
No matter your department or function, your role as a healthcare leader is to continue to develop those around you and help build a stronger web of leaders who can continue to transform the organization from their unique vantage point. This web of great leaders can also help you achieve your goals faster and easier than trying to go at it on your own.
To simplify the process and help ensure your team is always aiming to do the work of a leader, we recommend aligning all work around the four focuses of a leader: resilience, engagement, experience, and innovation.
Building all strategic plans around these four focuses, distilling all meeting agendas around these areas, planning around these focuses, and measuring accountability against these standards helps ensure your team is continually working to gain traction on high-impact, mission critical initiatives.
If every member of your team was committed to building and maintaining personal resilience, increasing employee engagement, improving the patient experience, and inspiring operational innovation, your department and organization would become a powerhouse for transformational change.
As you work to build your plan for 2024 and make more meaningful progress next year than this last, be sure to include how you and your team can make traction in each key focus area. Strive to identify small behaviors and habits you can adopt that will help you live out these focus areas and be sure to schedule frequent check-ins around each focus area to measure your results.
Every plan we make as leaders should be built around an innovation-first mindset.
We must continually ask—how could we make this process better? If we iterated and improved our approach, how could we have even more impact?
When we've looked back and seen where we fell short in 2023, a focus on innovation can allow us the chance to begin again, to try something new, and to keep refining our work to finally get to the result we seek.
Globally, our health systems are depending on our ability to innovate as a means of surviving within an ever-evolving healthcare landscape and continuing to improve and give our organizations a leg up among increasingly tough competition.
When you meet with your team to build out your 2024 priorities, review every process, procedure, and plan and ask how you can possibly be more innovative. Push yourselves to come up with three alternate routes to reaching the same goal and let the best ideas guide your strategies for this coming year.
You'll find that your team is a treasure trove of great ideas. You can be sure they'll have innovative approaches to working around what held you back in 2023 and can provide solutions for how to stay on track and on target to help you succeed.
Building your plans around the four key initiatives of recruitment, retention, leadership, and innovation isn't meant to overwhelm you or make gaining traction on your key goals even more difficult. Rather, providing these initiatives as a guideline for Creating Your 2024 Plan is meant to help streamline all of your efforts into the key strategies that will matter most to your team and your health system in the year ahead.
If your key goals are not serving these areas, take some time to thoughtfully consider if they need to be on your list of to-dos or if they could fall away in place of more important things.
With this clear path to victory established, our team at Level Ten Healthcare Advisors wants to help give you systems and frameworks that can help you stop firefighting, take back control, get back to doing the work of a leader, build out your strategic plan, and make time for what matters most.
Starting November 9, we'll kick off a free, five-part webinar series developed especially for busy healthcare leaders who didn't see the gains and movement they wished for in 2023. We'll help you evaluate where you're at and create a plan for winning in each of these key areas in 2024. Then, each quarter, we'll dive deep into one of these strategies and give you the tips and tools you need to start gaining traction.
Let 2024 be the year you make great gains in your leadership. See you on November 9!