As Warren Buffet said, “it’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked.” By proactively building an enabling foundation and common language to lead change up, down, and across the system, University Hospitals of Ohio set itself up for success in weathering the COVID-19 crisis far more effectively than many healthcare systems, emerging stronger than before.

How? University Hospitals’ Change Intelligent® learning journey started in 2016, when the members of its Organizational Development & Learning Team participated in the CQ® Certification Program. From there, we collaborated to design a customized CQ workshop, which the team used to launch their new Leadership Institute that fall.  Since then, the team trained has over 1,500 leaders-at-all-levels, collaborated with the leaders to leverage their learnings with their teams and on the job, and are reinforcing for sustainment.  When the pandemic struck, while no one had the instruction manual on how to deal with the unprecedented crisis, UH leaders weren’t naked in the storm.  Instead, they were armed with knowledge and ability to lead through the massive changes.

Join me and the Mitzi Vazquez-Long, Manager, OD&L at UH, for the Association of Change Management Professionals (ACMP) webinar on October 27, where we’ll be speaking about “Leading Change in Healthcare: How We Built Individual and Collective Change Capability to Survive and Thrive through the COVID-19 Crisis, and Beyond”.  We will share results, which range from leading through the COVID-19 crisis, to measurable progress on specific change initiatives, to furthering the mission of the organization by improvements in patient satisfaction, to fostering a more agile and collaborative culture. You’ll learn how to complement and extend your current focus on “managing change” and “developing leaders” by adding the missing ingredient – that is, concerted focus on “leading change” and “developing change-capable leaders.”  Moreover, you’ll discover how “learning to lead change” promotes not only more effective change outcomes, but also facilitates the achievement of bottom-line business goals and organizational mission/values.

Can’t wait for the webinar?
I invite you to read the UH case study, which describes their pre-pandemic change challenges that all healthcare organizations are bombarded with ranging from mergers to shifting governmental regulations to digital transformation, the first steps they took to develop their leaders and culture, and bottom-line results achieved.  Actions taken and lessons learned are broadly applicable across industries. I hope they inspire you with a vision of what’s possible for your team and organization to lead through these turbulent times, and beyond.