Part 6 of 6, Full Interview
John S. Toussaint is CEO emeritus of ThedaCare, and CEO of the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value. As a strong proponent of applying the lean methodology to rooting out waste across the healthcare industry, we asked John about his experience at ThedaCare, specifically how he measured the return on their lean initiatives.
The key is to get the management team engaged, from supervisors to the CEO.
It does take some leadership risk taking. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. I think today it’s different. I spend a lot of time in many different organizations now, and we can be very confident that if you stay committed, if you do these few things that work, you’re going to get through it. Back then we didn’t really know that because no one had really done it in healthcare.
Most CEOs get to be CEOs because of their autocratic, control freak nature. That’s not compatible with this journey…. That’s how doctors are trained. That’s part of the problem with the training, both as a physician and as a healthcare executive…. In fact most business leaders are trained the same way. If you go to most MBA schools around the country they’re teaching autocratic control methods. It’s all about pushing the buttons. And that’s the opposite of what’s going to drive this new culture of getting everybody to be a problem solver and identifying the defects in your product.
My leadership style over the eight and a half years that I was CEO was 180-degrees different from day one to the last day because I had to learn to be facilitator/mentor/teacher versus an autocratic control guy.
We spent a lot of time together trying to understand what the true north metrics for the organization were. But in terms of the day-to-day work, it was much more about me becoming a facilitator and mentor.
Having a very supportive board at a critical time was important. I think that having mentors that I could talk to who would tell me that [three years into this was] a fairly typical time to get frustrated and quit. I’ll never forget a conversation I had with George Koenigsaecker about that. George basically said you have to hang in there because it’s going to get better and just make sure you’re talking to your board so they don’t fire you.
If you in any way shape or form … create any kind of negative consequences for those people who spent a week working their butt off improving something, you’ve just destroyed any opportunity you had to change the culture. That’s [what happens] when you have a very rigid ROI mentality… You’ll never achieve results and you’ll think that lean failed when in fact lean failed because of you.
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