Health Sciences Update - Woodruff Health Sciences Center

May 4, 2009

Fred Sanfilippo,
MD, PhD

Transforming health and healing requires transforming culture

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Albert Einstein

Just as our own personal interests, abilities, and needs evolve over time, so too do those of an organization such as the Woodruff Health Sciences Center (WHSC). For the past decade, WHSC has been on an impressive trajectory—becoming an internationally recognized leader in research, education, and patient care. This outstanding progress shows that we are an organization of people who don't rest on their laurels; instead, we're thought leaders with a common purpose of serving humanity by improving health. One key aspect of our ability to do that is our willingness to continually transform our behavioral norms, i.e., "culture," to ensure that they optimally support our ever-evolving strategies, goals, and performance. Aligning culture with strategy is a proven way to maximize an organization's success.

The good news is that we already have transformed our culture dramatically over the past 20, 10, and even five years. The transition of The Emory Clinic to an integrated part of Emory Healthcare and WHSC has changed the culture of the clinic, just as the increased focus on research has changed that of the schools of medicine, nursing, and public health. More recently, the development of integrated centers, such as in Transplantation and most recently Critical Care, as multi-disciplinary units spanning multiple departments across the medical school, clinic, and hospitals represents another major shift in performance and culture. Likewise, the development of the department chair/service chief model between the School of Medicine and Emory Healthcare is a significant organizational—and cultural—change. Perhaps most important, initiatives currently under way within WHSC to ensure that our financial practices are well aligned with our strategic initiatives will have a significant impact on expected behavior, i.e., culture.

Indeed, increasing alignment and synergy is a basic tenet of our success and a driving factor of our culture transformation initiative. It's not enough to simply hone the individual units of our organization; we must also optimize the ways in which we work together as a whole. To invoke the familiar sports analogy, it doesn't matter how terrific individual players are; if they don't play well together, the team won't be as successful.

As organizations like ours become increasingly successful and complex, it becomes especially important for our culture to keep pace. Culture change occurs spontaneously as a result of changes in processes and priorities, but to drive the highest levels of performance, it is essential that we direct this change explicitly. Applying clear processes and measures to assure that things move in the direction we want is just as important for culture as other critical performance parameters.

As I shared during the State of the WHSC address, our own leadership has identified specific culture directions for desired change, which is something I also have heard from scores of faculty and staff. Many have said that the rapid growth of WHSC in recent years has outstripped some of the strategies, processes, structures, and behaviors that helped get us to where we are. Furthermore, as we are all too well aware, the external environment has changed dramatically, especially in the past few months. That's why culture transformation is one of the most important initiatives we have under way. We are in the rapids, and we will need to adapt how we do things with increasing nimbleness, transparency, and synergy to remain both effective and true to our values.

Some are concerned that directing efforts toward changing our culture implies that our current culture is bad and for that reason prefer to use the term "culture transformation" rather than "culture change." But obviously, our culture is not bad. Our many successes of the past decade wouldn't have been possible if we didn't have a successful culture. Culture change simply means that we aspire to become even better, and—like many other successful organizations—we recognize that attending to our culture is critical to achieving our ambitions.

I recently appointed a Culture Transformation Planning Team under the leadership of Dennis Choi, Carlos Del Rio, and Dallis Howard-Crow. The team is charged to help identify ways in which we can build an even higher performance culture that accelerates momentum toward our goal of being the 21st century model of a health sciences and services center. This team planned and directed a very successful retreat on April 1 to inform, educate, and get feedback from WHSC leadership on culture change, and they are planning several more such meetings for additional groups in May.

What does this all mean to you? It means that faculty and staff throughout WHSC will be working together to help align our culture with our evolving strategies and goals and to help each of us attain our very high personal and organizational expectations. This is not a simple or quick undertaking, but rather an ongoing process—unless at some point we are satisfied with our performance and achievements and no longer want to get better.

We would like to begin the process by listening to your stories and ideas. What are units and programs across WHSC doing right? What could be done better? We are especially interested in hearing examples of the ways in which you and your team are contributing to the kind of caring, constructive, collaborative, and mission-oriented culture to which we aspire. Please share your stories and ideas with us at evphafeedback@emory.edu.

I am confident that we will continue to improve performance—and therefore culture—taking the WHSC from great to even greater as we continue transforming health and healing … together.