AAMI: Groom next-gen CE leaders now or lament lost opportunities later
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“I would feel horrible if I retired and moved on, and everything that I had helped build fell apart,” said Alan Gresch, assistant vice president of capital equipment services for Alexian Brothers Health System of Arlington Heights, Ill. “That wouldn’t speak well of me, because what that says is that I did not do a good job of leading. If I had, I would have made sure that I had people behind me to pick up the ball.”
Gresch said the schoolyard taunt “It takes one to know one” carries some weight when applied to succession planning. “If you aren’t a good leader yourself, how are you going to identify [leadership] characteristics in others?” he said before adding that it also “takes one to make one. It takes a good leader to develop a good leader.”
“If somebody doesn’t have the makeup to be a successful [leader], then, no matter how much training you provide, they’re not going to get there,” said Gresch. “There are certain fundamental traits an individual has to have to be successful.” He acknowledged a kernel of truth in the belief that “you can train anyone on anything,” but countered that, to build a leader, you have to start with an individual who has “a strong foundation.”
To explain what he believes creates such a foundation, Gresch ran down traits from leadership writer John C. Maxwell’s “21 indispensable qualities of a leader:” character, charisma, commitment, communication, competence, courage, discernment, focus, generosity, initiative, listening, passion, positive attitude, problem-solving, relationships, responsibility, security, self-discipline, servanthood, teachability and vision.
Gresch said leadership development should consist of approximately 70 percent on-the-job training, 20 percent mentoring and 10 percent book learning. He encouraged practicing “meaningful delegation”—hint: having someone fetch coffee wasn’t in his definition of the term—and urged one-on-one meetings, shared readings, attendance at professional-development seminars and the like.
Dave Dickey, corporate director of CE for McLaren Health Care, the 10-hospital system based in Flint, Mich., began by telling attendees that almost 60 percent of his clinical engineering staff has more than 20 years of experience and 50 percent will be retiring within 10 years. A show-of-hands poll showed many attendees to be in the same boat.
“As managers retire, can you promote from within?” Dickey asked. “Have you planned for this, and started cross-training potential candidates on management skills?”
Dickey said that, for leaders who value the ideal of promoting from within, as he does, it’s best to identify internal candidates one to two years in advance and initiate a plan. In his case, that meant tapping into the McLaren Leadership Academy, which originated based on a needs assessment in 2001. Today the endeavor employs a director, three leadership-development consultants and an administrative assistant. Subject-matter experts at each McLaren facility teach performance measurement, finance, performance management and strategic hiring, while the institution’s labor-relations attorneys teach classes in employment and labor law. The academy’s overarching goal is to provide a “structured forum for personal and professional development for leadership employees,” explained Dickey.
Dickey fleshed out the particulars of the program before taking another quick poll. Do CE leaders need technical skills to be successful, he asked, or just good business sense? The response showed the audience overwhelmingly in favor of technical skills as a necessary attribute for leaders-to-be—and a follow-up question found attendees also big on certifications yet curiously cool on college degrees.
Marcia Wylie, director of biomedical engineering at Scripps Health in La Jolla, Calif., said she believes in taking a practical approach to the problem of succession planning. “Obviously we have problem-solving skills in our profession; that’s really our forte,” she said. “We crunch the problem and come up with a resolution. We’re technology experts with a wide range of technology-based experience in our organizations, and that makes us very valuable because of the expansion and rapid acceleration of technology that we heard about in the keynote presentation.”
CEs also have the benefit of “bedside knowledge,” continued Wylie. “We know the clinicians. We know how the process of the workload is at the bedside, so we have a lot of skills in that area, along with customer service, which is really a strong point of our work because these are valuable throughout healthcare.”
Wylie suggested capitalizing both on the technical and problem-solving skills where they’re needed in future leaders—not just within CE departments but also in other departments, including IT. “That’s a logical [source] because there’s a lot going on there with integration, and probably many of you are working with your IT people to a great degree. I know we are.”
Wylie also recommended encouraging participation in such programs as Toastmasters to build confidence in presentation skills—not only for formal talks but also spontaneous, day-to-day interactions with members of other departments—as well as actively listening to staff members.
“Have time where people can talk to you about anything,” she said. “Talk to your people about what they see as their purpose [within the organization]. What do they think their work is? You want to promote from within, so you have to create the environment for your people to have autonomy, mastery and purpose,” she added, suggesting that personal and professional development is best driven by a mixture of supervisory guidance and self-motivation.
After the session, Dickey shared a personal reflection on the subject at hand with Healthcare Technology Management. “The realization is just now hitting for those of us who have been in the field for a long, long time,” he said. “We are now talking about retirement, where we hadn’t really ever talked about it before. All those hands that went up when I asked how many people have been in this field for 20, 25 years—that’s a scary thing to see in this audience.”
What grade would he give the field on succession planning to this point? “We’re at a ‘C,’” he replied. “There’s a lot of work to be done. A lot of work.”
Dave P. has worked in journalism, marketing and public relations for more than 30 years, frequently concentrating on hospitals, healthcare technology and Catholic communications. He has also specialized in fundraising communications, ghostwriting for CEOs of local, national and global charities, nonprofits and foundations.