|  Scott Regan

The Achilles heal for most hospital brands these days is the fact that they are built upon statistics. The two most common brand platforms – customer service and clinical outcomes – are often reliant on patient satisfaction scores, core measure data, Healthgrades rankings, and the like. And why not? Objective, third-party data is always better than hollow claims of superiority.

But what happens when the market shifts? What is the impact to your brand when patient satisfaction falls, or the competition’s scores surpass your own? Where do you turn when your brand – based on clinical outcomes and medical staff performance – is suddenly under attack because of a headline-raising event?

These are issues faced by every company that built its brand around celebrity endorsements. Pepsi-Cola with Michael Jackson. Hertz with OJ. Kmart with Martha Stewart. And, most recently, Accenture, Nike, Gillette, and Gatorade with Tiger.

And they will eventually be issues faced by every hospital built around market data. At some point, the market changes, and your brand has to high-tail it out of town.

So how do you prevent this likely brand demise?

Simple. Build a brand that transcends market forces.

Sounds mystical, doesn’t it? But it is relatively quite easy. If the brand is built upon the organization’s personality, values, operational philosophy, or some other organizational attribute, it can make itself immune to market conditions.

Take, for instance, a hospital brand not build on clinical superiority, but on the experience and commitment of its people. This was a strategy deployed by Avis, which built a brand on its “we try harder” mantra. It didn’t matter whether Avis was No. 1 or No. 2 in the market, nor did it matter if it was ever awarded a single J.D. Power customer satisfaction trophy. Avis was laying claim to an organizational value that was elevated to a brand position. Only Avis could sabotage its brand, and it never has. The “we try harder” brand was launched in 1962 and will soon celebrate its 50th birthday. How’s that for market transcendence?

Now, imagine your own hospital brand being wrapped around the experience and commitment of your staff. No one – and no organization – can strip you of these attributes. Commitment and experience are yours to own or give away. They do not rely on market superiority to succeed, or volume supremacy, Magnet hospital status, nationally leading patient satisfaction statistics, or any other measure that the competition might claim.

Certainly, you have to deliver on the brand. But if you do, yours will be a brand that really does elevate itself out of reach of market forces.

Hopefully, your 2010 strategic plan is completed, approved, distributed, and communicated.

However, I suspect there are many of you who are still putting the finishing touches on your organization’s strategic plan, either because you are awaiting final year-end numbers to validate your 2010 objectives, your board didn’t meet in December to approve the plan, or the executive team got sidetracked by the budget process.

Regardless of whether you have finished the planning process, resolve to build accountability into this year’s plan. Assuming you use the standard business school strategic planning model of goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics, and that your organization has quantifiable and measureable 2010 objectives, as well as strategies and tactics designed to achieve those objectives, here then is a six-point plan for driving strategic plan accountability:

1. Make sure each 2010 objective is assigned to a single senior leader in the organization. Objectives are the lifeblood of the strategic plan; they should be “owned” by your senior-most executives — not middle managers. And they should be assigned to single individuals, not a team of executives. At the end of the day, you want to know who is ultimately responsible for an objective. Individual ownership breeds accountability; team ownership does not. And if you think that because yours is an integrated delivery system with 12 hospitals, 65 physician practices, 18 outpatient centers, etc., you are forced to have shared objectives, then understand that this is just the culture of your organization talking.
2. Make sure every strategy and tactic has a very specific completion date. Second quarter is not specific. Neither is June 2010. However, June 18, 2010, is. And unless your organization’s leadership team routinely works weekends and holidays (which I doubt they do), make sure completion dates don’t fall on any of these days. In addition, the completion date for any strategy should be the latest completion date of the tactics that make up that strategy. A strategy is nothing more than the sum of the tactics that comprise it. When the tactics are completed, the strategy is completed. Period.
3. Make sure every strategy and tactic is assigned to someone in management. Like objectives, they should be assigned to single individuals, not teams of people. Even if a team is required to execute a strategy or tactic, one person will be designated the team leader. This is the person who should have strategic plan responsibility. Don’t ever assign strategies and tactics to non-management staff or to physicians who are not employed by your organization (that includes physicians who receive a medical director stipend). This is a recipe for failure.
4. Monitor due dates. Develop a system for notifying people when they have a strategic plan strategy or tactic coming due. Let them know how to report the status of their activity, and whom to report it to. And when they are late, let the executives in your organization know. Implementing strategies and tactics on time should not be optional; it should be required.
5. Create an easy-to-understand dashboard system to monitor your organization’s objectives. Any such system should include early-warning flags that alert the organization when an objective is in jeopardy. This will help your strategic planning team assess whether the strategies and tactics were ill-conceived, or just poorly executed. Devise a scoring system that shows the success of the plan. My favorite methodology is to use a 100-point system in which meeting the objectives is 75% of the score and completing the strategies and tactics on time is 25% of the score. Scoring makes communications easy, as people inherently know that a strategic plan score of 88.5 is much better than a score of 72.6. And while you’re at it, establish a score you are aiming for — for instance, 90.0 (if you ever achieve a perfect score of 100.0, I would argue that your plan was soft).
6. If possible, incentivize your management team on the success of the strategic plan. Align management bonuses to the plan, either as a team or as individuals. There are pros and cons of each. Strategic plan incentives that are based on individual contributions to the strategic plan provide your team with intense focus, but it can also create silos. On the other hand, awarding the entire team equally on strategic plan performance might create a culture of teamwork and camaraderie, but it can also breed contempt, as the bottom performers receive rewards equal to the organization’s star achievers. I’ve seen both models work, depending on the organizational culture at hand.

Follow this six-point plan, and you will find that strategic plan accountability in your organization will become second-nature, and that your likelihood of success will be achieved.