Success story

Top 3 School of Medicine Prepares for the Future by Hiring Internationally Recognized Bioinformatics Leader

Washington University School of Medicine Coaching

Industry: Healthcare: University Medical Center

Key Challenges

To be successful, the new leader needed to establish relationships and create buy-in with leadership in both the school of medicine and the health system. Reaching across departments and into the health system was inconsistent with the organizations’ long-term culture that historically rewarded and recognized autonomy, success within silos, and protection of internal resources.
The organization needed to develop and execute a strategic onboarding process to leverage the opportunity that the onboarding window of time presents. If the new leader and his sponsors, the Dean of the School of Medicine, and the Chief of Clinical Operations were unable to gain alignment across the two organizations within the first year, stakeholders would not engage and invest in the new leader’s vision.

Solution and Services

Craft a purposeful, strategic onboarding plan that includes:
- 1:1 stakeholder interviews to understand expectations for the new leader and why he was chosen for the role
- Stakeholder alignment working session to gain agreement on priorities for year one and how each will support the new leader and his vision
- Plan for building the right team and culture
- Measure progress through feedback discussions and outcomes
Bi-monthly coaching meetings focused on:
- Preparing for and responding to stakeholder interactions
- Crafting a vision that incorporates stakeholder input
- Navigating the organizational cultures
- Building and implementing a recruitment strategy for staff and faculty consistent with the leader’s vision for his team culture

Milestone check-ins with key stakeholders to gather feedback and review progress

Solution Highlights

Engagement of stakeholders right from the start allowed for alignment, engagement, and the ability to manage expectations
A strategic onboarding plan gave the leader a roadmap that allowed him to focus on what was important at each timeframe, celebrate milestones, and adjust as needed
Stakeholder feedback surfaced through Connect the Dots early feedback survey, are you connected? The quantitative survey results were 4.6 on a scale of 1 (not effective) to 5 (highly effective)
Representative Qualitative feedback examples:

In the year that Matt has been at our organization, he has built relationships across campuses and the health system. If he doesn’t know the background behind the resource, he knows who can provide the information.

Matt is extremely collaborative and works alongside his team and partners across the university and informatics community to achieve research and operational outcomes.

The environment is very complex! He seems to do extraordinarily well. He certainly has helped place our university on the map.

Key Benefits

The broad organization benefited from a structured approach to onboarding a new leader with a mission that required broad support and new behaviors.
The leader had strong support from his sponsors and key stakeholders, as well as an external strategic partner with whom he would confide and use as a sounding board.
The leader was able to implement a strategy that has enabled the institution to make significant progress in applying bioinformatics and positively impacting patient care.

The Impact and Outcomes of Strategic Executive Onboarding

Organizations make significant investments in recruiting and hiring new leaders, generally about 2.5 times the executive’s annual salary. That typically adds up to at least $1 million. To protect that investment, wise organizations and hiring managers ensure new executives have a strategic and purposeful onboarding process and experience. Without this protection, organizations risk a 60% failure rate.

Academic Medical Centers are comprised of clinical and non-clinical functions that exist to develop and deliver patient care. Bioinformatics and Data Science functions support the fields of healthcare and life sciences that are experiencing a fundamental shift toward transdisciplinary, integrative, and data-intensive approaches to research. These developments, coupled with the use of information technology platforms, are helping transform healthcare, achieving enhanced value alongside improved outcomes and safety.

The complex data, information, and knowledge needs associated with these changes require a comprehensive approach to biomedical informatics, data science, and biostatistics research, education, and practice.

The Challenge: Onboarding of a New Leader Whose Role Success was Dependent on Organizational Change

Executive leadership at a top-tier school of medicine and associated medical center knew that it had a significant gap in its ability to capture and analyze data from its electronic medical record. This gap had a direct impact on both the delivery of care and data analytics that would enable the health system to make decisions that impact patient care and clinical operations. To address this need, leadership worked together to recruit a recognized leader in the Bioinformatics space who possessed strong leadership skills and a proven track record of cross-campus and multidisciplinary relationships.

Once that leader was secured, executive leadership understood the importance of supporting him with onboarding and transition support. This support was particularly important given the culture and dynamics of the institution–executive leadership knew they were placing the new leader in an environment that was not designed for collaboration that reached across traditional boundaries. Decision making, resource allocation, and powerbases needed to be disrupted for the endeavor to succeed. At the same time the disruption needed to be approached in a way that was respectful of the organizational culture, requiring the new leader to strategically navigate the dynamics.

The Solution: Strategic Onboarding Plan with Stakeholder Alignment and Support

Connect the Dots’ proven executive onboarding methodology provided a strong foundation to support the new leader’s transition into this pivotal role for the organization. Through discovery discussions and stakeholder alignment sessions, we were able to customize our methodology to provide a roadmap for the new leader to leverage as he embarked on his first year in his new role. The process also provided a vehicle through which stakeholders could share insights and feedback with the new leader and get support from the coach to navigate dynamics through the first year.

Our methodology is built around three pillars: Knowledge, Relationships, and Feedback. Feedback is gathered both formally and informally. Our early feedback survey “are you connected?” is a 360-based survey that collects both quantitative and qualitative feedback.

A Strategic/Purposeful Onboarding Process Provides Key Engagement Tools that Enable High ROI

This new leader participated in the survey as he was nearing the 1-year mark. The survey results validated the leader’s successful approach to establishing himself in the broader organization and his specific role. In addition, it gave the new leader an understanding of how his stakeholders were perceiving him and how well he was navigating the complex culture—and allowed him to know what he should start, stop, and continue.

The investment made in hiring and promoting leaders into executive roles is significant. Data continues to show that 60% of new leaders fail–that’s a staggering hit. If the organization does not provide strategic and purposeful onboarding support to protect their investment, the likelihood of a return on investment is drastically reduced. This case demonstrates the positive outcome that can be realized when a leader and his/her stakeholders are aligned around a purposeful onboarding experience.

“In the year that Matt has been at our organization, he has built relationships across campuses and the health system. If he doesn’t know the background behind the resource, he knows who can provide the information. Matt is extremely collaborative and works alongside his team and partners across the university and informatics community to achieve research and operational outcomes. The environment is very complex! He seems to do extraordinarily well. He certainly has helped place our university on the map.”

Key Stakeholders