“When It Comes To Selecting Your Value Team
Members The Challenge Is Finding Members with The Right Attributes,
Skills, talents, and traits.”
If you would
honestly look at your value team’s performance you will find that
80% of your value team’s success depends on finding the right
fit for your value team members. Then you need to have the
leadership and discipline to stay the course.
Why is the
selection of your value team members with the right attributes,
skills, talents and traits so critical to your value team’s
success?
Over the
years I have seen value teams fail due to the fact that they
selected their members based on their titles (director of
surgery, infection control manager, director of finance, director of
material management, etc.) or their influence in the
organization (director of nursing, medical director, director of
laboratory, etc.) or just because someone likes them.
Winning value
teams select their members because they have a combination of
attitudes, skills, talents and traits, matched with the right
leadership which gives their value team the vision, goals, and
objectives and “Can Do” attitude, a team that takes
responsibility for its actions and pride in its accomplishments.
Attributes, Skills,
Talents, Traits That Are A Natural Fit
To this end,
we have documented and observed the ideal competencies or
what outstanding value team leaders and team members do more often,
in more situations, with better results. Here are just a few of
them:
·
Analytical thinker
It’s important that your members are
logical
so they can organize, separate, dissect and analyze a large
amount of data into their constituent elements in order to study or
examine them, draw conclusions, or solve problems
·
Organized
Your members need to be
organizers (careful, concentrated and correct) vs.
disorganized (chaotic, confused and disorderly), so they can
structure their value studies in a thorough and systematic manner.
·
Reliable
They also need to be highly
dependable, responsible and trustworthy, so that you don’t need to
worry about whether they come to meetings or finish their value
studies on time, and on target and or whether they are true to their
word.
·
Enthusiastic
It’s critical that your members
have great excitement and interest in saving money and
improving the quality of the products, services and technologies
that you purchase vs. pulling down your team with their negativism.
In addition
to these examples, we have identified 5 additional ideal
competencies for team leaders and 6 for team members that
when used as the criteria for the selection of value team members
and leaders have supercharged our client’s value team
performance.
360 Degree Feedback Will
Significantly Improve The Selection Of Your Value Team’s Performance
Just knowing
what your ideal characteristics are isn’t enough! Now you
need to identify those individuals in your healthcare organization
who exhibit these same competencies. We would suggest that the best
system to search out these individuals is to employ a 360 degree
feedback mechanism in assessing your team member’s qualifications
prior to membership on your value team.
This can be
accomplished by selecting candidates for your value team that you
think have these ideal characteristics then have their direct
report, customers and colleagues rate them on a scale of 1 to
10 (10 being the highest rating) against your ideal
characteristics. The candidates with an average rating of 8 or
above (using a list of 10 characteristics) would be your ideal value
team members.
The reason
for doing so is that you only see one face of these candidates, but
by having them assessed by numerous individuals who know them
and interact with them in many different venues, you can truly
identify who is the right candidate to be on your value team.
The selection
process for your value team members can’t be overemphasized. From
my experience, if the right people with the right
competencies aren’t carefully selected for your value team you
will never have the leadership and skill level that is required to
maintain and sustain your value analysis program over the long term.
So, let’s get
it right the first time…
by
Robert T. Yokl, President