Ask This Question at Your Next Staff Meeting

At work sometimes we think the solution is to add more work onto what already needs to be done when often the most productive choice is to reengineer the work to eliminate useless tasks and combine others into streamlined processes. This requires a big step back to see the entire picture and not just the finite goal at hand - cause and effect. 

 

Sometimes we need to start over. That isn’t failure. It’s setting ego aside for innovation. 

 

In my two-decade career as a hospital executive I have watched new regulations bury front line workers as management teams tack on new regulations as one more thing to be done at the bedside by the nurse or professional. When my father was in a hospital across town it made me sad to see the nurses lined up at computers in the nurses’ station when I knew they would rather have been at the bedside.

I’ve also seen wise leaders reinvent processes so there aren’t more forms to fill out but one form...

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Impossible is Nothing

If I believed anyone who told me it was impossible to go from being a single mother of four children under seven-years-old on welfare to getting hired as a CEO it might have dragged me down. So I didn’t ask anybody if they thought I'd succeed. I just went about my work and goals as if I could not fail.

Over the last 20 years I have led organization with up to $26 million in assets. I increased trade show attendance 150% my first year as executive director of a trade association. I led a campaign to add a patient pavilion and healing garden when people said, “That will never happen.” And I led a $10.4 million capital campaign for a heart center, new ER and Women’s and Infants' Center on the heels of the largest hospital bankruptcy in U.S. history.

“Impossible” is just a lofty word thrown around by people who play it safe. It is a notion to believe that just because something isn’t mainstream or the norm it cannot be done. More significantly -...

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