Forum

Meeting the Healthcare Challenge Through More Effective Leadership

The Situation

The U.S. Healthcare Reform Act has created sweeping changes in the insurance market as companies anticipate and prepare for the effects of the act on their business. A major insurance company launched a campaign that aimed to enhance its ability to act on new opportunities and threats in the healthcare market and to increase the speed with which it brought its services to market now and in the future. The CEO and Board of Directors saw the strategy as fundamental to the company’s success—they implemented a major re-organization that affected a broad swath of middle and senior managers. Within that group were a few very senior people who, as a result of the reorganization, were moved into key positions—positions situated at critical junctures for executing the new strategy. These managers would need to transition quickly and successfully, deal with the increased scope and complexity of these roles, and reduce the time it would take for their people, processes, and functions to deliver value to customers and the organization.

“We were able to start faster, our pace was faster, and we can go further as a result of the [Forum learning] experience. While it initially slows you down to think and reflect, it improves your thought process and results.” —Senior Executive whose team’s efficiency improved 20 percent as a result of the program

The Solution

Building on groundbreaking research as described in Strategic Speed, Forum worked with the client to design a solution that would develop the organization’s leadership capability to execute this (and future) strategies swiftly and successfully. The goal was to strengthen the capability of the top 200 leaders and their teams to navigate the many transitions resulting from the reorganization, and to provide intensive support to the group of leaders newly positioned in “mission critical” roles.

The solution included formal workshops on leading through transitions, attended by top leaders and their teams. These workshops introduced a core set of transition navigation tools that the leaders applied to their situations in real time, resulting in plans that they would subsequently execute. The leaders also received intensive support in the form of a 6-month executive coaching engagement that helped them execute both their role transitions and achieve critical business results demanded by the organization’s new approach to the market. The executive coaches helped the leaders target critical business and leadership goals, and, using a core set of strategic speed tools, tie what they had learned about strategic speed to the actions and behaviors that would enhance their success driving specific, high-stakes initiatives.

The Impact

The results included: faster implementation of the company’s new strategy; increased speed of execution for key business initiatives and changes; minimized risk of failure in key executive transitions; reduced time to value and increased value over time in executive transitions; improved executive performance and higher levels of engagement; and greater levels of agility in responding to ongoing changes in the business and marketplace.

In order to determine the financial return, Forum interviewed executives and asked them to document specific business results that they had achieved and to estimate the contribution of their leadership development experience to achieving them. Executives linked the coaching experience to enhanced success in initiatives aimed at increasing client retention, shortening sales cycles, avoiding losses, and increasing operational efficiency. One executive said, “This helped me to be crystal clear about what my top three priorities were, so that I could turn to my teams and help orient their activities. The greater focus on these improved our speed by about 25 percent.” In another case, a team identified an issue that posed a serious risk to the organization (on the order of $15 million) and were able to act quickly, averting 75 percent of that loss. The multimillion dollar financial value of the collective results of the participants yielded a return on investment estimated conservatively at more than 20:1.

For more information contact Forum.