Critical Component 4: Performance Management Culture

The fourth critical component of Performance Management is to transform the organizational fabric or "culture" so everyone in the organization works as a team toward the enterprise strategy. 

A Performance Management Culture is one where the culture is aligned with the strategy, and is both responsible and accountable.

Performance Management Culture in Healthcare
The most ignored yet lethal ingredient of performance is an organization's culture.  Simply dictating that your organization will improve or worse, buying a computer system or training program from a consultant and believing that everyone will get in line to achieve improved performance, is a fantasy that continues to play out in the healthcare industry.

The culture of healthcare is centered around the patient.  Reducing cost and improving throughput to improve patient care conflicts with every principle and belief system in the healthcare industry. This is why ExactCost incorporates cultural change management as part of our framework. Our tools can only work if the people who have the ability to achieve performance improvements use the tools.

Characteristics of a Performance Management Culture:

• Common vision / group cohesion.
• Willingness of medical and hospital staff to contribute their time and resources in an equitable fashion (i.e., a sense of sharing).
• Commitment by individuals to the success of the group.
• Good communication from leaders to others and back - an appropriate balance of "democracy" and delegation of responsibility by leaders.
• An internal sense of "community".
• Everybody wins - at least, no big losers; everybody shares in the sacrifice; a common understanding that there is a compelling group interest.
• An aversion to treating every issue as either "life or death" or "make or break" issue.
• An acceptance that resistance to change is not bad - it's natural.