Better Healthcare Leaders = Better Healthcare Teams

At the heart of successful healthcare teams are effective healthcare leaders — inspiring, understanding, empowering, and a whole list of other superlatives. This year’s Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) Leadership Summit in Nashville drove that point home again and again. Industry thought leaders and other motivational speakers focused like a laser on facing current challenges head-on and equipping leaders with the tools to cultivate thriving teams and drive impactful results. The Medix team left Nashville inspired to help healthcare leaders build better teams. Here is a collection of our favorite lessons we learned during the three-day summit.

Optimizing Workforces: Act, Accelerate, Achieve

Getting the most of their healthcare team is a challenge every healthcare leader must overcome. To do that, create a clear framework for optimizing workforces and developing skilled talent. One version of this is the “act-accelerate-achieve” model for building high-performing teams.

Act: Building Emotional and Team Awareness

Observation before action: Start by understanding the emotional environment of your teams, considering the energy, mood, and overall atmosphere. This requires a period of observation before taking action, focusing on comprehending your team’s various personalities, stress reactions, and methods of communication. Acting with intention means discerning when to intervene, when to allow space, and the skill to interpret both spoken and unspoken signals. In healthcare settings, this level of emotional intelligence is vital for establishing trust and fostering cohesive teams.

Accelerate: Leading Through Awareness and Growth

Understanding team dynamics is key for healthcare leaders to enhance their effectiveness, which accelerates through self-awareness, self-management, and situational adaptability.

• Self-awareness — recognizing one’s own triggers, strengths, and blind spots — enables authentic leadership and informed decisions.
• Self-management — regulating emotions, managing stress, and modeling resilience — fosters composure and resilience.
• Situational adaptability — adjusting leadership style to fit the context allows leaders to tailor their approach to different team needs.

This accelerated leadership creates positive momentum, boosts motivation, and celebrates small wins. The progress can be contagious; motivated teams perform better, communicate more effectively, and stay engaged.

Achieve: Driving Purposeful, Impact-Driven Results

Clarity and momentum pave the way for achievement. For healthcare leaders, achievement extends beyond simply meeting targets. It involves minimizing friction, such as turnover, and enhancing alignment within the team. In the healthcare context, this translates to tangible benefits like reduced employee turnover, which in turn lessens burnout, improves the consistency of patient care and promotes cost efficiencies through retaining skilled talent and optimizing operational processes.

Ultimately, achievement cultivates a culture of intrinsic motivation in which healthcare professionals feel a strong connection between their daily tasks and the overarching mission of the organization. High-impact healthcare leaders play a pivotal role in fostering this sense of ownership by effectively aligning key performance indicators and individual productivity with a shared organizational vision.

Actionable Insights for Healthcare Leaders

For immediate results, the summit offered actionable advice that can be deployed right away.

The power of small wins: Don’t always try to take on the biggest problem in one bite. Break it down into multiple tasks and focus on the smallest problem first, considering its ripple effect. Building momentum from small wins can help overcome larger issues.

Embrace a growth mindset: Always be hungry, humble, and smart. Take initiative, be a lifelong learner, and don’t be afraid to try new things.

Take control: Navy SEALs are trained to focus on the “next best move” — immediate, controlled actions in chaotic situations. Healthcare leaders can adapt this strategy. Preparing and building consistent habits can empower you to perform under pressure. Your team will emulate your behavior in crisis situations, ensuring success.

Build for the long-term: Future-proofing healthcare teams is essential, especially with 23% of healthcare workers over 55 and a median RN age of 46. High turnover compounds the challenge. However, significant growth is projected for nurse practitioners (52%), occupational therapy assistants (36%), physical therapy assistants (35%), and home health (32%). To navigate this, monitoring recruitment KPIs — open position rate, turnover rate, time to fill (3 months for RNs), % offer acceptance, and day one no-show rate — is crucial. A proactive market analysis can drive recruitment strategies to combat turnover and reduce time to fill, enabling organizations to stay in control.

Cultivate inclusivity: For healthcare leaders in any setting, inclusivity is key. Make a conscious effort to welcome new individuals, ensure everyone feels included, and avoid cliques.

Leading in a remote world: The challenges of remote work are well-known: miscommunication, isolation, and lack of visibility. Leaders can counter that by encouraging engagement through breakout rooms, polls, chats, and open-ended questions. Recognize every contribution, no matter how small.

Recruiting top talent: When recruiting, seek individuals who demonstrate resilience, self-motivation, and the ability to thrive in diverse settings.

Success in Volunteering

Volunteer work can help create a positive workplace culture, but here, too, healthcare leaders should be intentional. 

• Strategic planning: Develop a strategy by assessing your current volunteers’ effectiveness. Gather feedback through surveys or platforms like LinkedIn.
• Set trackable goals: Establish reasonable and trackable goals. Create a plan to achieve them.

The Road Ahead for Healthcare Leaders

Effective healthcare leadership in today’s challenging environment requires understanding people, fostering a resilient and optimistic mindset, and prioritizing continuous growth for teams and individuals. Embracing these must-haves, healthcare leaders can drive positive change and build a stronger, more resilient healthcare future.

Medix — Your Partner in Strategic Team Planning

To realize the vision outlined at the HFMA Leadership Summit, healthcare leaders must have the right talent. Medix is committed to partnering with healthcare leaders to deliver strategic staffing solutions that enable you to build high-performing teams and achieve your most critical goals.