Service Leadership Assessment Project

Most health care organizations have embarked upon a journey to service improvement and excellence.

Sometimes they get stuck.

The Service Leadership Assessment Project is a terrific way to help an organization assess what's working (and what's not) and return to service excellence work renewed, refreshed and better able to achieve organizational results.

A typical project involves the following:

The project starts by understanding the current status of the organization's approach to service excellence via interviews (usually one or two conference calls), reading existing materials, and reviewing client's H-CAHPS/patient/employee/physician satisfaction results.
Conducting a e-mail survey of the entire leadership group (including supervisors, managers, directors and senior leaders). The 10-12 open-ended questions are intended to elicit ideas about what is working, what isn't working and what changes the individuals believe are essential to moving the organization forward in achieving service excellence.
The results are collated and shared with everyone that was invited to participate in the survey. (Transparency is a requirement).
Conduct an full day of on-site meetings. This could take the form of several workshops for different leadership groups or a full-day workshop for the entire leadership team. Depending on the available time, the workshops are designed to cover:
1. What do the results suggest about the strengths and weaknesses of the organizations's current approach to achieving service excellence.
2. What do Best Practice organizations know and do differently to achieve the highest levels of patient-inspired excellence?
  1. Leadership practices and organizational infrastructure
  2. Improving patient experiences
3. A facilitated discussion: ased upon we just heard and what we know about our current efforts – what are we doing right and where do we need to improve?
4. Develop next steps.

At the end of a Service Leadership Assessment Project clients have the ability to get unstuck - and redirect their efforts within their journeys to service excellence.

After most projects, clients decide that they are on the right path – and that it just needs some "tweaking" based upon the input from the survey results and the workshops. Mary is available to provide ongoing coaching support for these clients or to share her expertise, perhaps in developing a specific program such as implementing service recovery, energizing reward and recognition programs or conducting inspirational continuing education for the staff.
In other cases, clients learn that they need a much more dedicated effort to make the desired improvements. Perhaps they need an organizationwide intervention from a full-service operational consulting firm. Mary can provide a referral to consultants who provide these services and often works with them on large-scale projects; but she does not provide this work herself.