Ever since the concept of teaming was introduced in the 1990s to achieve organizational goals, teaming gurus told us that you could create high performance teams if a team’s focus was on soft skills like togetherness, consensus, communications, conflict management and other interpersonal skills.

Unfortunately, this advice hasn’t born out to be true!

After forming, training, coaching and facilitating the deployment of scores of value teams for our clients since the 1990s, what we have found to be true is that focusing on these soft skills will more often hold the team back from high performance. In contrast, what we have found that works in creating high performance value teams is "getting the right people with the right incentives looking at the right things, with the right performance-focused processes, and the right leadership and discipline to stay the course."

The right people with
the right incentives

All winning value teams are a combination of attitudes, talent and traits matched with the right leadership and incentives to give them the right vision, goals and objectives, and "can do" attitude, a team that takes responsibility for its actions and pride in its accomplishments. Ideal competencies for outstanding value team leaders and team members need to be identified (e.g. analytical thinker, organized, reliable, enthusiastic, takes initiative, computer literate, welcomes changes and change, etc.). This will help you find the right people with the right competencies on your value team and create a high performance environment, as opposed to the selection of value team leaders and team members based on their organizational titles (e.g., director of nursing, director of material management, infection control manager, operating room manager, etc.) or their influence or power in your organization (e.g., medical director, chief financial officer, chief of medical staff, etc.).

Looking at the right things

Most value teams spend most of their valuable and limited time evaluating/selecting new or renewal group purchasing organization (GPO) contracts when they should be focusing their efforts on looking at the high cost spends that their healthcare organization purchases annually. If new and renewal GPO contracts are of such volume to warrant it, there should be a value team designated for this purpose only. This will generate huge savings by your value teams working in other areas of supply chain management.

There is also a tendency for value teams to be inundated with requests from department heads and managers for new purchases, which is a symptom of ineffective or disastrous supply chain management. For hospitals with this warning sign, I would recommend establishing an ad-hoc committee to review the reasons for these out-of-control requests. Usually the reason is a cultural tendency to buy everything that is requested, because "we have always done it that way."

The right performance-focused processes

Most healthcare organizations are "Winging It" with their value team’s processes. Their processes are informal, instead of scientific or systematic, and they are not based on outcome-based performance goals and objectives (measurable savings or quality gains). They are always reinventing the wheel with each value study they conduct.

To have really effective and performance oriented value teams you must have a function-oriented, repeatable process to drive out all waste and inefficiency in your supply/value chain, and a team-based performance model that is outcome-based, not activity-based. By activity-based I mean that there is a lot of activity (meetings, reports, dialog, sub-teams, etc.), but little or no results to show for your efforts.

The right leadership, discipline

Every team’s performance looks great at the starting gate (when they are being formed and for their first few meetings), but can quickly deteriorate into an unruly horde of undisciplined individuals who don’t come to meetings, don’t do their assigned work or drop off the radar screen all together. The team inevitably disbands after a few short months because they couldn’t make savings and quality gains happen.

This is the history of many value team initiatives, due to the lack of leadership and discipline imposed by team leaders, whose responsibility it is to hold their team members mutually accountable for their actions and their performance outcomes. The lesson to be learned here is that all great value teams have a great performance ethic that sets them apart from failed value teams. This performance ethic is brought about by strong team leadership, by being a role model for their team, (attending every meeting, pointing out weaknesses in team performance, challenging negativity, being available when needed, providing interventions, etc.) and holding team members accountable for their actions or inactions. HPN