Just led our leadership team through a year-long, comprehensive strategic planning process, following these 7 steps:

#1. review, revise, re-broadcast vision statement

#2. SWOT analysis

#3. Scenario planning for strategic options

#4. Smart Goals and Action planning for top 3 strategic levers

#5. Strategic Execution Plan

#6. Resource mapping and allocation to support execution plan #7. Review, reflect, revise strategy.

As usual, my leadership team began rather skeptical and annoyed with me as we are short-staffed and a bit exhausted by Covid disruptions over the last couple years (which I then pointed out was because I as the strategic leader had completely missed Covid coming and how it would impact our brand new program—we were highly adaptive once it hit which was awesome, yet at a cost that now had exhausted our team and made us vulnerable to deterioration, burn-out, etc.).  I told them that is what happens when only 1 person is in charge of strategy—we miss more things because of our blind spots. Leadership teams make it much more likely we will cover each-other’s blind spots by challenging each other and digging deeply into where we need to go.

I had each leader volunteer to lead one step in the strategy process—and, as usual, they performed beyond my expectations (I coached each of them, yet they made the steps their own) and we now have developed a strategy that has changed the way we think and work together already.

So, I have now coached, coaxed, guided, persuaded, nudged, pulled, pushed and driven my leadership team to outperform me in strategy which is a truly rewarding and remarkable experience.

I can say with utter confidence now that the program no longer needs me.

As conveyed in these personal reflections, the two of us believe that the complex challenges facing contemporary heath care systems in the United States (and elsewhere in the world) require that we “not go it alone.” Navigating and learning on a warped place requires diverse perspectives. Living on a dancing landscape requires shared support and safety. Understanding is unlikely to take place in an isolated professional silo. Neither prediction nor forecasting will be effective when we are sitting alone at our desk–even if we have a computer to assist us. Teamwork becomes the key ingredient in successful working and living in our mid-21^st Century world of health care.

Teamwork

The dynamic nature of team-decision-making can be challenging to maintain and reconvene with each emerging challenge found in complex dilemmas. Complexity has a timeframe that is beyond the control of the decision-makers. It requires teams to engage repeatedly over a span of time, rather than simply a single node of decision. Healthcare is highly complex yet lacks teamwork—so in the polarity of individualism and teamwork, it is distorted too much in favor of individualism, particularly within the physician and leadership cultures.