What leaders think

What is the most important skill that health care leaders need? In a recent survey, NEJM Catalyst invited 495 health care clinicians and leaders to answer that question. Their answer: building culture.

Building culture is more important than the long valued skills of delegation, financial acumen, leveraging data, and decision-making.

Why is building culture top of mind for so many? Thought leaders pointed to several factors:

1. The shift toward team and value-based care delivery.
2. The need to satisfy differing and sometimes competing priorities of patients, payers, providers, and employers in delivering what each defines as value.
3. The ever-expanding body of external measures of success (quality and outcome measures) in the delivery of care, combined with the pressure to consistently improve performance.
4. The need to empower problem solving at the front lines of care delivery.

How Utah builds culture

With these changes (and more) colliding in health care delivery, the need to build culture is clear. But how does one actually do it? Building culture is spoken of abstractly, with specific skills difficult to nail down.

At Accelerate, we see individuals building culture everywhere. Culture builders are in the trenches actually trying, failing, and trying again to lead change. Experience is gained in real time. The challenge is to translate that experience into knowledge and spread it.

* The 4 principles of Vision, Team, Patient, and Measure are drawn from Utah's Vision Summary (outlined in Dojo #2). The Vision Summary is list of 13 questions that guide value improvement leaders through 4 common cultural drivers of improvement success.