Multi-site Healthcare Services Companies Should Rethink the Importance of This Pivotal Role
Originally published in Modern Healthcare, May 2021
Aligning front-line managers of individual sites can help unlock growth potential.
Addam Marcotte
Executive teams at multi-site healthcare services companies often struggle to balance focus on strategic priorities and operational challenges. They’re compelled to work on granular issues because the company hasn’t successfully integrated a change plan across every level of leadership. As a result, critical levers are neglected, creating pressure for executives to step in. This creates a cascading effect that risks impeding even the best-conceived growth plans.
Mitigating this requires attention from the C-suite, but unless top leaders can identify the underlying problem, they will not succeed in solving it. What’s more, they must not overlook one pivotal leadership role that has outsized influence on their change plans and the company’s growth potential.
For multi-site care delivery companies to address this issue – or better yet, avoid the problem entirely – they must rethink the criticality of the managers and administrators running the individual sites that comprise the company’s growing network.
The importance of the site manager
Consider front-line managers’ or administrators’ unique level of influence. They are the direct conduit between individual sites – their staff, patients, operations and culture – and the company itself. Moreover, their actions directly affect the company’s ability to drive both profit and positive outcomes.
Organizations that don’t align and develop these individuals shouldn’t be surprised when managers view top-down mandates with resentment or cynicism. It’s not unusual for them to unintentionally sabotage plans by ignoring directives and instead do what they think makes sense for their particular locations.
On the flip side, these individuals can offer pivotal help accelerating growth and driving results when companies create alignment and environments that allow them to thrive and develop.
Best practices for site manager alignment
To begin to see these improvements, top leaders should embrace established best practices, shown to effectively align healthcare site managers. These include:
Connection to Mission. Site managers need to feel a sense of purpose and connection with the broader organizational mission. It’s vital they can articulate this purpose when recruiting and onboarding staff, as well as reinforce behaviors that create the ideal patient experience.
Multi-level relationship-building. Too often, site managers have only a transactional working relationship with their regional managers. Investing in the partnership between these specific roles builds trust and camaraderie, and smooths the flow of communication to and from the field.
Peer Networking. Site managers are in the advantageous position of sharing a role with numerous others across a region or the country. Facilitating these peer relationships provides managers with a network to help problem-solve recurrent issues and share best practices.
Access to Development. Recognizing that few individuals show up equipped to lead in new, rapidly changing, fast-paced growth environments, companies can identify and encourage specific skills and leadership behaviors to help site managers succeed and drive value. This pathway to professional growth is meaningful to them, part of the calculus behind joining a larger organization.
Managing potential pitfalls
Of course, pitfalls await many companies seeking to make such human capital investments. For one, the distributed nature of the care network means that communicating often resembles a game of telephone, with the message becoming increasingly distorted along the way. Excellent, consistent communications – often tailored to account for regional differences – are required to prevent this frequent phenomenon.
Additionally, many C-suite leaders misunderstand the motivations of their site managers, not recognizing those at the ground level are typically more concerned with local impact than corporate metrics. These individuals need help connecting the dots between the organization’s overall strategy and how their specific role can drive positive local outcomes and the company’s success.
While understanding these nuances is a key first step, it’s often beneficial to bring in outside partners who are expert in the dynamics of multi-site healthcare services companies and can craft actionable roadmaps that align site managers with strategy, culture and goals.
Companies that make these investments in a thoughtful, strategic manner often discover that their disparate, distributed networks can create exponential momentum for overall growth. With the right playbook, the cascade effect becomes galvanizing, improving engagement, retention, quality, and results at sites everywhere.
By embracing an integrated approach that aligns site managers to the company’s strategic goals, top leaders improve individuals’ effectiveness and sense of purpose. But bigger picture, they create a culture that empowers multiple leadership levels to execute on their unique responsibilities, which ultimately accelerates value creation.
About the Author:
Addam Marcotte, a Principal at the human capital advisory firm FMG Leading, brings more than 20 years of experience managing organizational operations and leadership development initiatives. He focuses on helping healthcare services and private equity backed healthcare companies enhance strategic alignment, lead change, build internal trust and improve leadership effectiveness.