Advantage Success Case: Premier
What you need: Get everybody moving in a new direction.
We know it’s a challenge leading people from nodding heads to true buy-in. We make sure that executives, senior managers, and key talent understand and get aligned with your new strategic direction.
Issues You’re Facing
- Executives expect the new message to trickle down on its own
- Current management development and leadership training doesn’t help senior talent execute on the new strategy
- Coaching is inconsistent and managers don’t have a process for holding people accountable for changing behavior
- Employees don’t understand their role in the new strategy or why they should act differently
How We Can Help
- Align culture around company strategy
- Bridge communication gaps between managers and workers
- Create buy-in for change
- Manage in times of uncertainty
- Achieve on-target performance from individuals and teams
- Compete in a challenging and evolving marketplace
ADVANTAGE SOLUTIONS: BTS Healthcare Business Acumen Simulation, Symphony
Premier Has the Prescription for Understanding Hospitals
Challenge
Premier is a performance improvement alliance of more than 2,400 U.S. hospitals and nearly 70,000 other healthcare sites working together to achieve high quality, cost-effective care. Owned by not-for-profit hospitals, Premier maintains the nation’s most comprehensive repository of clinical, financial and outcomes information, and operates a leading healthcare purchasing network.
Leaders across the organization articulated the need for a better understanding of hospital financials and improved financial acumen overall.
First, Premier’s field teams across the country needed a better understanding of their members’ business. The company’s strategy was to help hospital C-level leaders reduce costs and patient risk while increasing quality of care. To achieve this goal, field leaders needed to better understand the complex issues involved in running a hospital, the decision pressure points, and all the interrelated drivers within the extremely complex healthcare arena.
Second, the field teams needed an enhanced understanding of their own business – the true value Premier offered its members, the client relationship opportunities, and all the drivers of the competitive healthcare services market.
Success Story
Jill Lewandowski, senior director of organizational development and learning, headed the Premier Learning Institute. The institute is organized into three colleges: leadership, professional development, and business.
This would be a Business College offering and Lewandowski sought a best-in-class learning solution. “Our employees are high-performing and high achieving,” she says. “They are also extremely busy. To take time out of their day for learning, we need to make sure that experience is truly valuable.”
Advantage Performance Group partners Dan Terry and Sean Murray had a learning solution that would uniquely meet Premier’s learning objectives: the BTS “healthcare simulation.” This one-day experience is based on a board simulation. Participants work in teams to move through three years in a large healthcare facility, developing insights by actually putting themselves in the shoes of the hospital leadership. Participants are required to evaluate business situations, apply sound decision-making, and analyze the results. They experience business flow, functional interrelationships, and how making a decision in one area ripples across the entire business to eventually impact the bottom line.
The Premier version, called Understanding Hospitals: A Hospital Simulation, was particularly powerful basic learning for Premier employees who had never worked in a hospital. “But it also gives you something much broader,” confirms Lewandowski. “It gives insight into the magnitude and complexity of decisions that hospital leaders have to make. Insight into the ramifications of the strategic decisions made by hospital executives.”
Understanding Hospitals helped Premier’s managers deepen their understanding of key company financial levers and the consequences of their own decisions on Premier’s bottom line. But more importantly, the program dramatically improved managers’ understanding of issues affecting their alliance members’ decisions.
Lewandowski says, “It showed what’s going through the customer’s mind when they have to make complex strategic decisions. The outcome we were seeking was for our employees to have a better understanding of our members. If they can leave the room at the end of the day having more insights about the financial struggles and complexities that our hospital members face every day, then we’ve been successful.”
During the first year, Understanding Hospitals was delivered to more than 500 Premier employees. “Feedback from our senior leaders was extremely positive. So much so that we are requiring everyone in the organization to experience it over the next two years,” she adds.