Transforming Health Practitioners
into Leaders:
Massachusetts General Hospital Case Study
By J. Tracy Russell
Originally published in Hospital & Health Network Online,
July, 2006.
Reprinted with permission.
With all the focus on business financials, it's sometimes easy to forget that an organization's most important asset is its people. It's not only the caliber of people that distinguishes one organization from another, it's also how well the organization is leveraging its talents. Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, with 18,000 employees, routinely faces the challenge of transforming healthcare practitioners into leaders of people. These highly educated, internationally known, top professionals are not necessarily experts at managing a diverse workforce and motivating it to reach its full potential. When internal feedback showed that teams were not functioning with maximum efficiency, the hospital's human resource department was charged with the task of bringing its healthcare experts up to speed quickly on people management skills.
Understanding What Makes People Tick
The effort fell under the auspices of MGH Leadership Academy, a comprehensive management training program created to help good managers become better managers and new managers become good managers. Jeff Davis, the hospital's Senior Vice President for Human Resources, explains, "In the course of establishing the Academy we conducted extensive research to identify the competencies necessary for a manager to be successful in our environment. They included people management, financial management, communication, process management and leadership. Once these competencies had been identified, the next step was to develop curricula to develop them."
"In the area of people management, an effective manager has to understand both his or her own personality, as well as the personality of others. Secondly, effective people management requires high emotional intelligence, the ability to perceive and manage one's own emotions and those of others. Research suggests that emotional intelligence is one of the most important qualities of a leader," Davis adds.
The hospital looked for a tool that could help assess and develop emotional intelligence. One of the requirements was that the effort take as little time as possible since busy clinicians have little time to devote to assessment and training of support staff. They needed to develop a greater understanding of how to get the most out of people with a minimum investment of time.
"One of my colleagues serves on the board of another organization that had success with a personality assessment instrument," says Davis. "I looked it up on the web and took an online personality test. When the results were mailed to me, the unanimous reaction from my wife and five managers who report to me was that the assessment was right on the mark." But Davis was skeptical. Was this a tool that could help someone become a better manager? He shared his report with peers, subordinates, the president of the hospital and the president of the physicians' organization and asked for their help in evaluating the tool. They all agreed to complete the survey. When Davis received the results, he was amazed at the accuracy of the assessments. "I was given color graphs and descriptions of these people's personalities that were 100-percent accurate. That's when I realized this assessment could serve as the foundation for understanding people at a much deeper level than one would get to know them from working with them on a daily basis. It accurately identifies what makes people tick and could be used as a basis for increasing emotional intelligence," Davis says.
Different Strokes for Different Folks
First the president of the hospital, the president of the physicians' organization and the VPs went through a training program on how to apply the personality assessment tool in the workplace, and then other members of the staff were also trained. In less than two years, over 300 people completed the program and everyone, including highly skeptical clinicians and scientists, were impressed with the instrument's ability to identify personality traits and predict behavior in a way that would make it much easier to manage talent. "We know different people expect to be approached and managed in different ways," says Davis. "Once we can see graphically and understand each individual's unique requirements and how they differ from our own, we can increase productivity," he adds.
The hospital's leaders and managers learned how to interpret the graphics to understand the different styles people bring to performance and their specific roles, as well as each person's underlying motivations that drive commitment, foster trust and enhance teamwork. They can now position training to get people up to speed quickly, target it to individuals' optimum learning styles and build top-performing teams based on insights into the perspectives, strengths and values different people bring to the table. "Our leaders now have a better understanding of what specific individuals need and what concerns them most," says Davis.
Foundation for Developing Emotional Intelligence
A better understanding of people's personalities is the foundation for developing emotional intelligence. People can understand their own emotions and those of others in order to manage both. Understanding others better also makes it much easier for leaders and managers to move people to action. They know how to get buy-in at the outset of a project. They can set clearer expectations, build and sustain cooperation and create empowerment. They can also quickly identify symptoms of stress and conflict, diagnose the root cause of defensiveness and proactively implement solutions to change unproductive behavior.
Organizations are about the mix of human interaction, and that's where the greatest challenge lies for leaders and managers. It's easy to become irritated or impatient with subordinates, peers and bosses because there are such vast differences in how people look at the world, learn, solve problems, process information and deal with conflict and change. Personality assessment opens the door to objectively understand oneself and others and it makes the similarities and differences between individuals apparent. The assessment tool used by Mass General depicts behavior objectively and graphically by assigning four primary colors – yellow, red, green and blue – to personality styles. "Most people have tendencies towards two colors," Davis explains. "The colors give us a neutral set of words we can use in discussion to avoid emotionally charged language. For example, I can say, 'Help me leverage your 'blue' perspective on this,' to a subordinate who keeps asking what-if questions. He understands that I'm more 'green,' which means I've already figured out the critical data and costs to address his what-if questions and I'm ready to move ahead. Rather than becoming irritated with one another, we can refer to each other's colors and no one is offended. People understand that some of our leaders are very 'red.' That means they have an urge to get something done quickly. Then when leadership is pushing them to make a decision before they're ready, they don't become frustrated." A greater understanding of personality differences means fewer judgments, better communication, less conflict, higher morale and more productive teams.
A Tool that Works
Uniformly, the leaders and managers at Mass General who have been trained to apply the personality assessment tool have reported that they feel more skilled and able to deal with problems of personality and emotion, Davis reports. The hospital is currently at the first stage of measuring results based on this type of direct feedback from managers who are applying the new interpersonal skills. Within the next year, it plans to obtain feedback from the superiors of these managers to measure the impact of increased emotional intelligence on efficiency and productivity.
The key to a successfully functioning healthcare system is its people. A personality assessment instrument is a critical first step in building emotional intelligence because it lays the foundation with a better understanding of self and others. Highly trained medical specialists are not always natural-born leaders of people, but with a personality assessment tool, anyone can quickly and easily build interpersonal skill.
About the Author
J. Tracy Russell is Vice President, Personalysis Corporation. Headquartered in Houston, TX, Personalysis has worked with national and international companies since 1975 to help them achieve higher productivity and performance through the application of scientifically based personality assessment tools. For further information visit www.personalysis.com or call 713 784-4421.