CREATING HIGHLY PRODUCTIVE EMPLOYEES FOR YOUR AFRICAN HEALTHCARE BUSINESS: PART TWO

Hamza Asumah, MD

In my last post, I addressed how to effectively apply situational leadership in all of its forms to your workplace in order to get the most out of your people at all stages of their development in a company. This establishes the groundwork for providing your team with the tools and structure they require based on their degree of expertise.

Employee productivity is thus heavily dependent on the sustainability measures you put in place to guarantee that you continue to explore their skills and utilize them effectively in the circumstances. Many businesses and executives achieve this by implementing performance evaluation models. Unfortunately, the success of these tools is highly contingent on their design.

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First, we must resist the urge to always catch employees doing the wrong thing and shift our attention to catching employees doing the right thing. As a leader, your default setting is to detect and correct what is broken. What we fail to see is that by shifting our attention to capturing individuals doing good, we create a culture that guides everyone in the direction of what they should be doing rather than what they should not be doing. This has shown to be far more successful than telling individuals what not to do.

Second, Keith Lee highlights performance development interviews as the driving force behind a successful performance management system in his book. It is critical to conduct performance development interviews at regular intervals, with a design and frequency that reflects how much change is required in that specific area.

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The goal of PDIs is to discover what employees are doing well and get them enthused about it, while also identifying areas of potential challenge and exploring solutions with them. The goal of these personal development interviews is for an employee to explore solutions 80% of the time while you, as a leader, help them 20% of the time. In a personal development interview, you don’t want to come across as arrogant. This method lowers the employee’s barriers against feedback and keeps them motivated to execute any adjustments advised during these sessions. Only when dealing with a brand-new employee who knows nothing about the firm does the know-it-all approach perform well.

If you learn how to execute things efficiently, it should only take 10 minutes. These ten minutes will save you several hours of reactive leadership behavior in which you are continuously putting out flames.

Third, there are personnel who manage themselves. That’s simply their nature. You tell them what needs to be done, and they come up with incredibly creative methods to make it happen. This set of persons builds their career and expertise nearly entirely on their own. Unfortunately, this is a relatively tiny fraction of people in every business/organization. The concern for this group is that while in positions of leadership, they do not see the need to train others in the company since they believe they must work things out for themselves.

If you can identify these people within your healthcare organization (both clinical and non-clinical teams) and give them some insight into their special ability and the need to pass that on to the larger percentage who are not as self-managing but are highly motivated to learn, you will be able to focus on other bigger things as a leader. This will generate many levels of leadership and instill effective coaching throughout the business. You do not have the capacity to coach everyone.

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Finally, define goals for everyone/every department in the company and apply KPIs to track success. Many times, corporations set goals without strong follow-up mechanisms. As a result, even the employee does not recognize the importance of such objectives. Goal setting is an exercise that requires effort and persistence to guarantee that it does not come out as a box to tick but as a step toward reaching your company’s vision. You should also make certain that your objectives are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound). If this is not done, your objective will become just another sentence that your staff must read.

Productive staff are one of the most important tools you can have for your African healthcare business since they will provide the best basis for your firm to expand and become sustainable.

Please leave a comment below with any comments on how you make your staff more productive.