When Leadership Alignment Doesn?t Work

When Leadership Alignment Doesn?t Work

There are times when even when Leadership Alignment activities have been planned and executed with precision, they fail. And in my experience, they fail not because the activities were faulty, but because the real resistance, the real issues were never discovered. Why? Because leaders can be a very tight-lipped bunch, and wary of those not officially in their ranks. Let me give two examples. When I was working at Deloitte we were creating the HealthCare?s Clinical Information Systems Toolkit to compliment The Heart of Change methodology that was co-written by a partner at Deloitte. We were doing this work because at the time there were a few spectacularly failing implementations occurring throughout the industry at world-famous hospitals. And we felt we could help. The implementations had failed because the doctors has not been adequately involved in the process and were categorically refusing to use the systems. Deloitte was not involved in any of the failed implementations, but was looking at them as an opportunity to learn and prevent similar issues occurring with their own clients. So I created a list of reasons why I thought doctors would want to support a CMS implementation which included better customer service, and better patient care. This list was then given to the partner on the team who was also an MD. He took this list to his colleagues and they rejected all of my reasons. They told him, what they and others like them, had not been willing to tell non-doctors. So they told our MD why they were opposed to CMS systems in very honest terms. For example, most doctors not...