Changing Leadership’s Mentality to Be More Agile

It’s become increasingly clear that most healthcare CIOs have become leaders and vendor managers. The CIO of today needs to have an understanding of technology, but the majority of their job is managing people and vendors. Hospital CIOs aren’t managing technology.

Much of what a CIO can accomplish is based on the mentality and behaviors they inspire in their people. One of the latest trends in technology thinking is around agile. Many in healthcare have pushed against the concept of agile in healthcare supposing that agile equals reckless. However, it’s been proven that just because you choose to change quickly and efficiently doesn’t mean that you’re changing recklessly in ways that will harm patients.

The move to agile has been hard for many hospital CIOs. This was highlighted recently by hospital CIO, David Chou when he shared this image and tweet:

Culture change in an organization is not really something you can buy. Plus, as the quote specifies, the change to an agile culture is really hard because it is often not the behaviors that put leaders in senior positions in the first place.

The biggest fear with any change is failure. Ironically, an agile approach embraces failure as part of the learning process and incorporates a quick recovery when something goes wrong. This is a massive change in mindset for many senior healthcare executives. It goes counter to the group decision making driven by large committees that occurs in most of healthcare. That’s why it’s scary and why most CIOs don’t do it. However, it’s exactly what’s needed to be prepared for the future.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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