Our Mission: Elevating Leadership Performance in Health Care
Leadership Too Often the Missing Ingredient
High performance health care organizations deliver not only excellent clinical care but also exceptional business performance. The ability to achieve these results is based on the powerful combination of three factors done well: right strategy, correct analysis, and precise execution. Across all three, strong leadership is required to routinely and effectively create and deliver these factors. Perhaps more importantly, effective leadership—sometimes through sheer determination alone—is the only force that can overcome any lapse in these critical building blocks. In health care, it is exactly this type of decisive and innovative leadership that is all too often lacking—to the detriment of overall health system performance.
Development Need at the Core
While there are multiple performance levers that create the capable and motivated managers we need in health care, development of core business skills and capabilities is central to this effort. Unquestionably, alignment, accountability, and incentive structures all have a critical role to play. But because so many health care managers are promoted to leadership on the basis of their clinical or technical expertise, they are often ill-prepared to face the pressing business challenges before them—even when alignment and accountability are strong. Effective leadership development is thus the most potent tool to enable all three performance levers and thereby create the strong leadership bench required for high performance.
The Advisory Board Academies Ambition
Across more than five years, the Advisory Board Academies have launched a portfolio of leadership development programs, each targeted at distinct constituencies across the hospital or health system. Utilizing an on-site or national university teaching format (depending on the constituent need), the Advisory Board Academies provide a full suite of leadership development infrastructure and support, including dedicated faculty advising, rigorous application of course concepts, integration of local issues and examples, online study, and participant recognition. Our ambition is to build the bench strength of skilled leaders with the perspective, business vocabulary and analytics needed to drive meaningful health system improvement.
The Link Between Leadership Performance and Organizational Performance
Investments in leadership development must demonstrate a clear connection to improvements in leadership capital and, ultimately, improved organizational performance. In the Advisory Board Academies, these improvements take many forms:
- Elevating specific leadership skills (e.g., staff management, applying financial concepts)
- Improving physician satisfaction and thereby enhancing hospital-physician relationships
- Driving specific hospital outcomes (e.g., patient satisfaction, productivity)
- Completing practicum projects that deliver identified value to the organization
- Contributing to achievement of magnet status
Results vary both by program and partner objectives; however, the unifying theme across all Advisory Board Academy programs is a firm commitment to measure and report tangible benefit and ROI as determined by the Advisory Board Academies’ proprietary progress tracking system and other metrics.
