Healthcare and Science thomsonreuters.com

I literally fell in love with Silver Cross when I interviewed. My family and I were not looking to move, we had two young kids, we were living in a house that we had built, we were very happy with our community. We were pretty set, but professionally I felt so comfortable that I was uncomfortable. The COO role here caught my eye at a pivotal time. The description of Silver Cross in terms of its level of performance, one of the fastest growing counties in the country, the very externally oriented and high-performing executive team, was impressive.

It's all about culture here at Silver Cross, that's what I think is really fundamentally different from any other organisation I have worked in. There are definitely aspects of our culture that have to do with being family-like; welcoming, caring about one another, lending a helping hand. 

And then there is the business side, where we aim very high and care passionately about all aspects of organizational performance. There are other organizations where if you talked with nursing staff about productivity or operating margins, that they would think you cared less about patient care. But they see and hear our commitment to patient care and customer service so they know that to be true, and they understand the importance of being fiscally responsible too. Everyone demonstrates concern about all aspects of our performance.

That's how business owners feel. 

Silver Cross has a long history and a successful one at that. So I certainly felt that I had a lot to learn at first. What led me to start to look at goals was my early perception that goal-setting was very strong; lots of rigour around it at the senior management level, but it didn't really go much deeper. My first suggestion was to implement a management incentive plan for every management position, and to have a component of that tied to organizational results and a component of that tied to individual results. Furthermore, leaders share key goals when cross-departmental commitment is needed. That was the first step. Subsequently, we've extended goal alignment to front-line staff and to the medical staff as well.

Our employees tell us that they feel very informed about strategy. That was one of the things that was on our employee opinion survey. So there is definitely discipline that our Chief Strategy Officer, Ruth Colby who leads up our internal and external communication efforts will point to. But it doesn't rely on that alone, it doesn't rely on Paul (our CEO) alone, it's very organic. 

We always wanted to perform excellently, but now our motivation is to be one of the elite.

Achieving this is manifested in how we set our goals. We benchmark quite a bit. We want to be the organisation that others emulate in terms of the results we are seeing on customer service, on our clinical outcomes, and on our financial performance. There are always areas of opportunity where we are not in that ballpark and they get a lot of attention because there are other high performing organisations out there and others that are improving at a very high pace. We are committed to bringing the very best to our community.

By and large people are drawn to healthcare because of the impact that they can make on people's lives, either individually or collectively. I have daily reminders by seeing patients, family members in and about our hospital that, for me, keeps me very clear on why we exist.

There are some aspects of our culture that have a connection to the rich history of the hospital where we have employees whose mother was born here, they were born here, their kids were born here. I have been really curious about the culture here because it is so powerful. It has been here a long, long time but I have seen cultures change quickly and, as we plan the move to our new hospital, that's really the thing that keeps me awake at night. We must bring our strong culture with us.

I know it's probably a cliche, because it's what everybody says when they are being interviewed for a job, but my passion is to make a difference, to make a positive difference. For me, my thoughts around that are that I like to try to do so in unique ways, in ways that are beyond average and to do so in collaboration with others.