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