Healthcare Leaders: The 4 Essential Skills Of Personalization

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Healthcare Leaders: The 4 Essential Skills Of Personalization

By Glenn Llopis | Forbes Magazine | July 31, 2024

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Healthcare leaders need to know how to lead with personalization, meaning they have to see patients and employees in their full humanity.  Personalization requires diversity of thought, and diversity of thought requires personalization. So, what skills do you need as a leader, to foster an organizational culture that promotes personalization?

This article is the part of weekly series, during which the author shared insights from the recent 2024 Healthcare in the Age of Personalization Summit. The big themes that emerged from this conversation included:  

1. Agility.  As board member for MGH Institute of Health Professions and president of Western New England University, Dr. Robert Johnson is charged with preparing the leaders of the future. He said all leaders need to be able to adapt to change. Patients and employees are looking for agile organizations and agile leaders who have the ability to get things done in real time and meet the needs of individuals.  “People want leaders who have the ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn as a steady state,” said Dr. Johnson. “They want people who have essential human skills that cannot be replicated by AI or an algorithm. They want individuals in their workforce who have the ability to create value as a continuous mindset as they go forward throughout their organizations.”
2. Active Listening.  To build a culture of personalization through diversity of thought, we have to be able to listen to one another.  Jeannie Virden, enterprise chief HR officer at Central Health, agrees that the only thing that is constant is change.  She said it’s common in healthcare to have hierarchal decision making, where the leaders in the C-suite are the ones making decisions and pushing them down. But we have to rethink those rigid workforce models.  “We need to ensure that our leadership teams at every single level are diverse in terms of background, experiences, perspectives, and even industries,” said Virden.  But that’s just the first step.  “Once we have that in place, we need to make sure that we have active listening and feedback loops,” said Virden, “and once those are established, we need to make sure that we’re actually utilizing them to make decisions, to foster open communication and dialogue before decisions are made.” 
3. Relational Mindset.  The third skill is being able to shift from a transactional mindset to one centered on relationships.  Mark Dooley is CEO of Gadsden Regional Medical Center in Alabama. He acknowledged that the transactional nature of healthcare is another obstacle to personalization in the industry. You can have some success short term being transactional. But if you want true strategic long-term success, you need to have a relational mindset.”
4. Tolerating Healthy Tension.  Practicing the first three skills requires another bonus skill: the ability to embrace healthy tension. Why? Because agility means we have to change, active listening means we can’t turn away when we hear something we don’t like, and relational mindset means we have to make an effort to see and understand someone in their individuality. All of these things will generate tension.  But it works both ways: embracing tension requires the first three skills. They all depend on each other.

2 key takeaways from the article

1. Healthcare leaders need to know how to lead with personalization, meaning they have to see patients and employees in their full humanity.  Personalization requires diversity of thought, and diversity of thought requires personalization. So, what skills do you need as a leader, to foster an organizational culture that promotes personalization?
2. A recent 2024 Healthcare in the Age of Personalization Summit offers the following four themes on this topic:  skills related to being more open to change, less rigid about our own ways of thinking, active listening, relational mindset, and tolerating healthy tension.

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Topics: Leadership, Healthcare, Active Listening, Agility, Relationship