As hospital and health systems navigate workforce changes, AI disruption and a post-pandemic trust deficit, a clear theme has emerged among leaders: The largest gaps in leadership aren’t technical, they’re human.
Executives at the front of healthcare leadership say their organizations are battling with a new type of pressure, and it’s one less driven by clinical or operational complexity and more by the speed and uncertainty of actual change. From trust, change management and the challenge of molding the next generation of healthcare leaders, the industry’s ability to adapt may be in jeopardy without attention to these issues.
At Becker’s 16th Annual Meeting, four executives joined the panel, “What Tomorrow’s Healthcare Executive Teams Need to Thrive,” to tackle those very questions. Becker’s connected with David Ohm, chief strategic development officer of Tacoma, Wash.-based MultiCare Health System; Egondu Onuoha-Nwaokorie, vice president of special programs business development and real estate at The Brooklyn Hospital Center in New York City; Rhett Stover, president of the Northwest Arkansas Communities, part of Chesterfield, Mo.-based Mercy; and Michael Antoniades, president, UChicago Medicine’s Ingalls Memorial Hospital; to discuss the most pressing capability gaps in healthcare leadership today, and what it will take to close them.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: As the healthcare executive landscape rapidly shifts, what is the single biggest capability gap you see in leadership teams today? What can be done to close it?
Rhett Stover: What I come back to is trust, and the extent with which you develop trust as a capability and not just a condition, that creates a new framework for breakthroughs, performance and culture. Trust is something that you just assume oftentimes in your workplaces. What I’ve found is, particularly on the backside of COVID, there’s a lot of skepticism in our industry and I think in society in total. That skepticism and conditional trust is given out differently. That period of time has also invited a lot of dosing of adrenaline in our leadership teams where we’re having to move quickly. We’re having to move and make decisions quickly with scarce resources, … and you feel like you’re managing ROI, maybe by the day, hour and minute, versus something that is a little bit more smooth and feels progressive.
Dosing on that adrenaline creates pretty impulsive decision making. An unintended consequence of that can be decisions that are more driven out of self agenda, self interest and that starts to erode conditions of trust that I think are really important. I’m a fan of resource value-based management theory and it treats trust as a strategic asset to establish a sustainable competitive advantage. As it relates to how we go about exercising capabilities that advances as an industry, if you can’t build that on trust, you’re going to be highly limited in your ability to be effective and successful.
Egondu Onuoha-Nwaokorie: I think there’s a workforce challenge and building a strong leadership pipeline due to the fact that we do have a lot of leaders who’ve been in the field for a very long time and are aging out. Then we have new people coming in. I think it’s a different mindset. How do we engage the younger generation and keep engagement and retention, and be able to navigate change in a very complex healthcare atmosphere today? How do we position the leaders that we have to be able to effectively change in a very short time frame and still be able to maintain the momentum, trust, keep people engaged and keep people also in the job so that we can prevent employee burnout and keep operational efficiencies. I think that’s part of one of the things that we struggle with. Even though we are in New York City, where we have, you know, the breadth and width of a lot of people with lots of experience, we do struggle with finding the right people for the right positions, especially in leadership.
David Ohm: We do have a strong pillar of trust that’s built kind of within the fabric of our organization. I think the most significant gap that we see is leading with structural ambiguity. Healthcare ecosystems are no longer a stable operating model. They’re constantly in flux. A lot of leadership teams are still wired for linear planning and siloed execution. So maybe we can adjust our thinking a little bit to learn to lead with imperfect information and be able to make decisions more on the fly. Because we’re going to need to make those adjustments and kind of adapt a little bit as we go along.
Michael Antoniades: It’s hard to not have trust. You have no trust, you have no organization. Change management is such an incredibly understated need. I think there’s a huge gap today, and it ties into everything you’ve heard when it comes to the talent capabilities that we have around artificial intelligence and the knowledge that we’re going to need to know and have in order to deal with what is potentially a tsunami of change. It’s very different from what we have dealt with before. For those of us that have enough gray on our heads … what’s coming down the line is very different. It fundamentally will change our world, not just healthcare; the whole world will change. It’s already changing. The trust and the change management skills are going to be incredibly important for us to drive and implement the changes at the scale of the entire healthcare industry.
That’s going to affect the workforce; it’s going to affect the recruitment. It’s going to affect development. It’s going to affect and … question the trust that exists between executive teams and frontline management, as well as frontline staff. As we look into the future, we may have to go back to old school because our geographies have expanded … the more distance, the bigger gap of communication, understanding and connection to where you’re trying to go. … There’s an opportunity for leadership teams to reconnect with the organizations.
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