September 19, 2023 •Level Ten Healthcare Advisors
To stay relevant and competitive in the marketplace and survive in today’s rapidly evolving healthcare landscape, organizations must continually grow, advance, and improve.
To help your health system stay healthy, every single leader should be committed to increasing employee engagement, improving the patient experience, and inspiring operational innovation—three pillars that are foundational to building a vibrant and thriving culture.
While each member of your senior leadership team will offer great value in the organizational transformation process, we believe one leader—your Chief Marketing and Communications Officer—has a unique set of traits that can make them your secret weapon in driving effective transformation.
The Chief Marketing + Communications Officer’s Commitment to Transformation
As the keeper of your organization’s brand and reputation, your Chief Marketing and Communications Officer (CMCO) will be deeply invested in advancing organizational transformation.
CMCOs are tasked with promoting the strengths of your health system to both internal and external stakeholders—communicating your organization’s value to patients, customers, donors, vendors, strategic partners, and employees.
The CMCO will be responsible for extolling the benefits of your organization in good times and bad, and when your organization isn’t actively pursuing transformation and working to improve, they’ll be tasked with leading your health system through crisis, repairing broken relationships, and rebuilding trust.
KEY IDEA: The healthier your organization becomes, the easier the CMCO’s role will be.
When the CMCO is able to advocate for an exceptional organization with a consistent and inspiring brand, impeccable reputation, and proven track record of providing best-in-class care with outstanding outcomes, they’ll be able to maintain their passion and excitement for their work and feel deeply fulfilled while maintaining the utmost integrity.
Simply put, a top-notch organization that’s made the commitment to invest in the wellbeing of its staff, deliver transformational experiences for its patients, and is passionate about innovation is an easier product for them to sell.
But, preserving your reputation, mitigating risks, and avoiding PR nightmares don’t paint a complete picture for why these leaders will be sold out for leading organizational transformation. These enthusiastic, passionate, and charismatic leaders will find great joy in flexing a host of strengths and skills while leading your health system towards greater health and wellbeing.
How CMCO's Are Uniquely Skilled to Lead Organizational Transformation
Let’s take a look at the unique traits and skills of a CMCO and how this mix of talents can make them your secret weapon in leading effective organizational transformation:
1. Human-Centric, Empathetic, and Understanding
First and foremost, great marketers, strategists, and communicators must be deeply empathetic, well-versed in psychology, and attuned to the needs of their audience.
This human-centric perspective will make them a powerhouse in organizational transformation because they will be able to deeply understand your employees’ and patients’ greatest pain points and motivations and ensure your organization is pursuing transformation initiatives that deeply connect, are incredibly meaningful to your stakeholders, and have a profound and lasting impact.
2. Natural Connectors and Relationship Builders
Leveraging that heart of empathy, CMCOs are often natural connectors and relationship builders. They know the value of building strong alliances with vital strategic partners and of nurturing strong bonds with patients, customers, and employees.
These relationships will be essential when your organization pursues transformation as these system-wide initiatives will often require cross-departmental engagement and a spirit of collaboration to succeed.
3. Clear, Confident, and Capable Communicators
Leading transformation in a health system can be a massive undertaking that will affect thousands of employees, occur across multiple locations and campuses, and impact countless patients and customers throughout your region.
With so many moving parts, you cannot succeed without a clear focus, concise direction, and frequent communication to multiple audiences, through multiple channels. Your CMCO can be a game-changer in leading transformation because they’ve honed and refined their ability to clearly, quickly, and consistently communicate with all stakeholders, and they have access to all major methods and means of reaching their intended audience so they can easily and effectively get the message out.
4. Demonstrated Ability to Sell the Vision
One of the most important tenets of change management is understanding that people need to know change is happening through them, not to them.
No transformation initiative can succeed if our stakeholders believe they are being forced to make a change. Rather than feel they’re being pushed, our patients and employees need to feel pulled toward a higher vision of what’s possible. Inspiring change will always be more effective than insisting on a different way.
CMCOs are masters at crafting an ideal picture of what could be, casting the vision for what we could achieve, and stirring up curiosity, excitement, and a willingness to give the new way a try.
They repeatedly present new offerings, new campaigns, and new practices within our health system and can use their experience to help gain buy-in on what will be required to accomplish our organizational goals.
5. Skilled at Moving People to Action
Marketers and communicators are change makers and are trained in moving others to action.
These leaders have deep experience in nurturing their audience through the stages of awareness, consideration, and conversion—inspiring curiosity, changing perceptions, and cultivating new behaviors.
In the midst of implementing a major transformation initiative, your top marketers can help increase acceptance and adoption of new policies and practices, ensuring your strategies gain traction.
6. Tactical, Strategic, and Data-Driven
CMCOs aren’t just experts in the soft skills of human behavior and psychology, many are also very analytical, tactical, and data-driven.
To be successful in their role, marketers must continually test, measure, and refine their approach to ensure they’re reaching the right people, meeting their budget, and getting a great return on their investment. Messaging campaigns and ad strategies can include very detailed lists of tactics that must be meticulously followed to gain the desired result.
This systematic and strategic approach will be a great benefit to your organizational transformation initiative as you’ll need the discipline to build out and diligently execute your strategic master plan and then polish and perfect your process along the way.
7. Systemness and Strategic Ubiquity
When your health system spans multiple cities, counties, or states, even top-level executives can get siloed into their own ecosystem and unable to keep a high-level awareness of what’s most important for the entire organization.
As the guardian of the corporate brand, CMCOs must unite all factions of the organization under one umbrella and provide system-wide guidance and direction on how to preserve a consistent look, feel, and message no matter how different each location may be.
With that global role, CMCOs also maintain a certain strategic ubiquity, representing everyone's interests and charting the course for all locations like a great coach who sees the bigger picture and can call plays that create alignment for all players within the team.
Their unique role representing the whole and vast experience in uniting so many diverse parties will give them great access and influence when implementing strategic change and will help your organization become stronger and more cohesive as you enter your next phase.
Leveraging These Catalysts for Change
CMCOs are innovative and creative leaders who know how to identify their audience's problem, see connections and opportunities for improvement, develop a meaningful solution, and compel others to join their cause.
They are great candidates for spearheading organizational change because they can rally your team to get on board, effectively communicate what needs to be done, can passionately advocate for why your transformation initiative is so essential, and are connected to both internal and external stakeholders, so they have the access and influence needed to help large-scale transformational initiatives permeate throughout the culture and stay in effect long term.
When you're looking to launch a system-wide organizational initiative, be sure you've got your top marketing leaders, strategists, and communicators at the table.
Their empathy, communication expertise, strategic vision, and ability to forge connections can be the driving forces behind lasting and sustainable positive change. Harnessing the power of your CMCOs will assure you're not merely surviving as an organization, but truly thriving.
If you're looking to launch an organizational transformation initiative at your health system, grab your CMCO and schedule a call with our team today.
