Insights

The healthcare industry is constantly changing and iterating, so we’ve made it our mission to keep a keen eye on the latest industry trends – especially amongst mission-minded organizations.

You sit down to start fresh on a new resumé. The job sounds perfect for you, and it’s a step up from your current position. You dust off the template and start typing underneath your job title: managing day-to-day operations…conducting performance reviews…developing strategy…

Too often, healthcare leadership teams are resistant to change or accepting of it in word only. For a system to truly remain effective and continually improve the level of care it provides, it must embrace change — even seek it.

“Mission Integration” has become a bit of a buzzword in recent years, and many healthcare organizations are just beginning to understand the term and its importance. A growing number of heath systems, however, see it as so crucial that they have hired C-suite level leadership to implement it.

Running a nonprofit board can come with a number of challenges — some unique to nonprofits, some that simply come with maintaining a board of directors. As leadership navigates the everyday decision-making, establishing of procedures, and even the facilitating of meetings, they will inevitably face crossroads and roadblocks along the way.

A mission statement should be more than just a few sentences on a plaque hanging in your organization’s lobby. It should be the filter through which every decision and interaction is made, and this is especially critical for a faith-based healthcare organization.

As the state of the healthcare industry continues to be in flux, particularly as it relates to the Affordable Care Act, leaders are left to wonder how they can move forward in such uncertainty. How do you plan for the future if you’re unsure of what it will hold?

Finding the right executive candidate can sometimes be a long, expensive process. Of course, if the right leader is chosen, it’s well worth the investment, but doing it the wrong way can often make it even more costly.

Over and over again, studies show that creating a shared — or cohesive — vision is all about listening to others’ perspectives. The only way to make a vision stick long-term is to make sure it is truly shared. That means it has to speak to the goals and aspirations of more than just one person.

Reference checking is a critical component of most search processes. It is often one of the final steps taken before a candidate is selected for a position and as such, there is a tendency to treat this function as a formality. Through years of experience and quite a bit of practice, I have learned this is a mistake.

HealthSearch Partners (HSP) recently completed focus-group interviews with previous and current clients to get their thoughts about the firm and about the executive search experience in general. One interview stood out to me and others in the firm. The interviewee’s comments underscored what we have always felt is a primary differentiator for HSP, our size.

What most likely is the predictor of success? Success in life, in the next job, in a marriage, in reality any endeavor in life. At HealthSearch Partners, we believe the crucial aspect is “The Fit.”

Remember, as a child, when we attempted to put the wooden Playskool puzzles together. Each piece would only fit a certain way.