Wednesday, September 6, 2017
What do you do when you’re the leader of a company and a major capital investment isn’t turning out as planned?
Revenue is not coming in as projected. Expenses are higher than they should be. And the industry itself is unstable at best. Everything has stakeholders and staff worried about the potential fallout.
Recently, I shared a LinkedIn post about a strategy one of my clients used to engage with staff when the company was facing budget cuts and layoffs. The overarching goal of the strategy was to elicit the help of staff for ideas for resolving the budget challenges. Senior Executive and Consultant John Wipfler engaged in the conversation as he was reminded of his own similar experience and its very successful outcome.
At the time of the project, John was the CEO of a large Orthopaedics system and the company had just invested in developing a Sports Performance Center. There were glitches with revenue upon the start-up of the center. In fact, John said they were looking at a bad year. Meanwhile, healthcare as an industry was going through major changes from a regulatory perspective and dealing with many consolidations and mergers. John and his team faced the challenge of trying to stay independent and strategically realign the business, and the challenge of ensuring the physician group, board, and staff were not worried about what was happening in the industry.
John joined me for an Energy Bar Tool podcast this summer to share his strategy for success. The backbone of the strategy was the promise to be open and transparent with stakeholders and staff. A reminder to all of us that leadership can never be one person and great leaders inspire those around them.
As any leader of a large organization will attest, the larger the company the more competing interests. During our conversation, John shared how he brought the team of more than 230 employees, plus board members and other key stakeholders together. He also reveals the one key ingredient for gaining the staff’s full engagement and squashing their fears of suggesting creative approaches to solve the problem.
I hope you will take the time to listen to the podcast. It’s a remarkable story.
Rick Maurer is an advisor to leaders in organizations on how to Lead Change without Migraines (tm)
The Energy Bar (tm) is a new tool that he uses to help clients get at the heart of what it takes to build support for any type of change almost instantly. (www.energybartools.com) He is author of Feedback Toolkit (Productivity Press 1994, revised 2011) Beyond the Wall of Resistance (Bard Press 1996, revised 2010) and Why Don't You Want What I Want? (Bard Press 2002)..