Revamping supply chain’s farm system

Back in January I wrote to you about the shrewdness of my hometown baseball team and drew the comparison to our need for retaining and developing talent. [Editor’s Note: See January 2020 Periscope, https://hpnonline.com/21118036.] In just a few short weeks to follow, the veracity of that editorial column on how to build a world-class team seemed to vaporize with the news that the Houston Astros had been caught stealing pitcher signs, which had reverberations throughout the major league and apparently angered the baseball gods in the process. Well, perhaps the baseball gods were not angered, but the latest [in early June] is that Major League Baseball won’t begin its season until early July and wrap up sometime in early November.

The reality is that the Astros had a great team going back two years before the scandal and two years after. Their Triple-A farm system, led by the co-founder of FC Barcelona’s La Masia farm system and steeped in the rigorous empirical analysis of baseball statistics, was and still is considered one of the best in professional baseball. That farm system, not to mention a good deal of proving the critics wrong, will propel my team to another playoff berth, but let’s return to the topic at hand.

Competition for talent

As I previously shared, the competition for talent remains a threat to supply chain leaders from industries where our skills and experiences translate well but also between provider organizations. The latter has reared its ugly head in the form of a compensation war between market competitors around the country. Will the recent pandemic and the fear of job loss quell the competitive volleys? Perhaps, but the situation is certainly only a temporary reprieve. And what of the points I made concerning limited data, declining member engagement in the institutions long responsible for professional development, shrinking budgets, lack of succession planning, and the influx of talent from outside our industry? Again, the need for us to put aside old paradigms and rethink what it means to retain and develop talent is calling out for our attention.

Critical and timely to-do’s

My call to farms – an intentional and strategic approach to talent management – elicited dozens of responses from Healthcare Purchasing News readers.

Who are our anchor organizations and what obligation do they have to ensure that talent management remains a top priority?

The names of organizations you provided were plentiful and, in fact, there were a few that I had never heard of or never ventured to learn more about. What was very insightful was the suggested perspective that by definition, an anchor organization must have an obligation to improve the professional lot of its participants, and without such obligation, it is really no anchor organization at all. This begs the question whether such an organization deserves our time, that crucial resource we should never squander?

How does higher education play a role, and what linkages might supply chain leaders create with their local universities, colleges and vocational schools? And what can we do to turn the tables on our non-healthcare rivals for talent and become more competitive for entry-level personnel who haven’t given healthcare serious consideration to launch their careers?

I combined these two questions as the responses were very similar. In retrospect, it is easy to see why. The theme here was universally shared by all respondents: Get involved in your local institution for higher education through guest or regular lecturing, hiring student interns and generally holding yourself as an available mentor to those entering the profession. Doing so pays dividends! One respondent shared that his five-year relationship with a nationally ranked supply chain graduate program has, he believes, garnered him preferred promotion of his internship program that, in turn, has led to the hiring of at least two former interns all of whom entered graduate school with plans to go into manufacturing. The point that many respondents made was to actively commit to your local programs where young talent are in abundance and sell them on the idea of healthcare as a viable industry alternative.

What groups must collaborate to form a multi-disciplinary panel of thought leaders to accurately identify the educational, training and networking requirements of team members?

The responses here seemed more discerning than from my first question regarding anchor organizations in part, I believe, because so much is riding on who would provide the subject matter experts capable of transforming our approach to talent management. Several organizations, including the Association for Healthcare Resource & Materials Management (AHRMM), Strategic Marketplace Initiative (SMI) and Bellwether League, were mentioned more than once as a source for a multi-disciplinary panel and for different reasons. AHRMM as its mission expressly calls out education, SMI for its promotion of collaboration, and Bellwether League for recognizing and inducting the best-of-the-best talent.

How do we help organizational development and education departments to best reprioritize resources to support our efforts in talent management?

This question drew the fewest responses. One respondent summed up the challenge well when she stated, “There are no extra dollars to go around. If the resources are to be made available for my team, these are going to have to come from my connections outside the organization.” I know this individual. This was not a “half-empty” kind of response but a recognition of the reality that many of us face, and with the understanding that it will take a bit of work to research available resources. Take, for instance, the white papers produced by the aforementioned organizations. With a bit of tenacity and creativity, many of these can be shared with team members simply as reading material for the most aspiring team members or as the subject of a brown bag lunch session that you hold as a training session.