Leaders At a Hospital Allow a Solution To Emerge, and Have High Hopes for Successful Change
I just spoke to Mary Uhl-Bien, a Professor at University of Nebraska who chairs the Leadership Scholars group of the Academy of Management. Mary and colleague Russ Marion wrote the book Complexity Leadership: Conceptual Foundations. Mary plans to talk briefly about her research on the Complexity Theory of Leadership at our Global Leadership Congress, and she’ll describe the evidence she’s seend of her theory in practice. She found that evidence when reviewing people’s leadership programs that were submitted this year to the Corporate University Xchange Annual Awards for Excellence and Innovation. Mary was one of 24 independent judges who evaluated leadership and learning programs to identify best practices.
Yesterday, Mary had the opportunity to observe a team at a hospital creating a new process for medical records. The team include a mix of physicians, nurses, medical records experts and other other administrators. The group was given an opportunity to start with a blank slate to propose solutions. Various people within the group spoke about the challenges of keeping patient’s medicines in synch when considering what they take before they enter the hospital, what they take while in the hospital and what will be prescribed to take at home after leaving the hospital. Senior leaders purposely stayed out of the meeting entirely but simply created the environment that would allow a solution to emerge from the team. As complexity science demands, there was rich interaction among agents and eventually many new concepts began to emerge from the group. They are now going to pilot the concept of a “living list” of meds that’s managed for each patient that will consider input from the patient’s pharmacist, nursing team, doctors and others to reduce the confusion patients have the potential for drug interaction problems.
To casual observers, the process didn’t look much different than a typical brainstorming session. But to senior leaders at the hospital, they saw a new dynamic that allowed lower levels to propose and own the solution. The group was not looking to senior managers to make a decision and issue an edict. The team owned the problem, they owned the success of the solution, and senior leaders have a high expectation the solution and change will succeed more quickly and definitely than it would have had they decided what to do and issued directives to people.
CorpU Award winners in leadership are finding new methods and new approaches to help leaders understand how to create these rich, dynamic and complex environments, and to create the best conditions for innovation. The work of the Global Leadership Congress is going to be step 1 in defining how we develop leaders to manage the complexity and change in a highly dynamic global marketplace.
