April
20, 2003
How To Change Negative Behavior of Your Value Team Leaders and Value Team
Members
Robert T. Yokl - President - The
HCP Group, Ltd.
“Blessed Are The Flexible, For They Shall
Not Be Bent Out Of Shape.”
Michael McGriff
I was just
asked the other day by a material manager, “What should I do with a key
player on my surgical value team, who has no interest in being involved
in their teams’ cost management efforts”, which brings me to the title
of this newsletter. What do
you
do to change negative
behavior of your value team leaders and value team members?
Here are seven steps that I would recommend to bring about positive
behavior in these situations:
1.
Mandate
that the team
leader or member be actively involved in your VA process or their
performance review will be effected by their negative behavior.
2.
Communicate
what your expectations are from them as a team member, e.g. be present at
all meetings, be an active participant in discussions, follow through on
work assignments, coach other team members when they need help, etc., to
insure they have a clear understand what they need to do to improve their
performance.
3.
Reward
any positive
behavior that you observe with complements, praise and letters of thank
you to reinforce this positive behavior.
4.
Train
and retrain these individuals in the areas that they are weak in, such as,
meeting management, project management, value analysis techniques, etc.,
so there are no excuses for their poor performance.
5.
Support
these team
members by being available for questions, propping up, mentoring and give
encouragement to sustain their positive behavior.
6.
Monitor
these players by
observing their behavior and meeting with them frequently to ask them,
“What progress are they making?” “Do they believe their behavior is
changing?”, “If not, why not?”, and “How can I help?”
7.
Take Action
if, after you have taken these steps, you have determined that the team
leader or team member “can’t” or “won’t” change their behavior. You must
then retire them from your value team and replace them with an individual
that can and will grow in a value team environment.
The typical
response when faced with negative behavior of value team leaders and
team members is to ignore the behavior and hope that by some magical
process these individuals will somehow change on their own. This
response is doomed to failure, because only those players who are eager
to change – will change. Players who are inflexible, incompetent or
undisciplined will only pull your value team down to their level
ineptitude, as opposed to, raising the level of performance of your
value team to the next level. So for this reason, always be prepared to
take immediate
action when you observe negative behavior of your team leaders or team
members, because the empirical evidence is quite clear that individuals
won’t change by themselves without intervention from you or your
management team.
_____________________________________________________________
Robert T. Yokl,
President, The HCP Group, Ltd., has over 35 years of experience as a
consultant and manager in the field of Supply/Value Chain Management and
is one of the country's leading healthcare experts in value analysis,
value engineering and materials management. He is the developer and
program leader of the award winning Certified Value Analysis Practitioner
Training Program™. Mr. Yokl is also the developer of the healthcare
industry's leading ValueNetCentral™ Value Analysis Software. Over the past
two decades he has trained thousands of healthcare managers in his
patented Strategic Value Analysis™ and Team-Based Project Management™
processes and has assisted scores of organizations in developing their own
value management programs. He has published six books, videos and audios
on supply/value chain management. His latest book being, “ Strategic Value
Analysis™: The #1 Smart Strategy for Taking Cost Out of a Healthcare
Organizations’ Supply Chain Management”.
_____________________________________________________________
COPYRIGHT 2003 - THE HCP
GROUP, LTD. - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
