The identified manager is Mr. Grant Muddle, an Australian expatriate who is the COO (Chief Operations Officer) of a large healthcare services organization in the Middle East. Grant Muddle has over 23 years of experience in healthcare organizations across Asia, Australia, and Europe with small stints in the United States also. Grant Muddle is a known people’s person and he is known to be an inspiring leader under whose leadership, teams achieve their objectives very easily.
Grant Muddle typically has headed organizations with over 8, 000 employees. Almost the first thing that he does when taking of reigns of such large organizations is to create a strong managerial team that would report to him. He sets out on a surgical mission, trying to identify what goals and the various objectives he needs to achieve in a given span of time and delegate it to the existing set of people with time-bound reviews, initially over shorter periods of time and later on a quarterly basis. Grant does this to ensure that the people he chose to delegate are capable of delivering the goods, and also have understood what larger organizational goals are being achieved in a given span of time. With his varied experience, he takes on the role of mentor, coach, and at times a difficult boss to ensure the organization he heads achieves the goals they are intended to achieve.
Grant Muddle sets clear cut performance measures. In one of the hospitals that he headed he had faced several challenges. The hospital was a JCI accredited hospital and had to meet mandatory staff training standards which were not implemented in the last one quarter. He clearly needed to meet this one challenge if he were to protect the accreditation coming up for audit at the year end. This was a challenge his HR team needed to meet. He reviewed the existing situation and realized that the 8000 employees had met an average of only 2 training hours per head while the required was 12 training hours per head over a year. This translated to conducting 10 training hours of work in the next 3 quarters on specific areas.
Grant came up with metrics that on a weekly basis there need to be a minimum of 8 training courses that must run and that they must run full house. At this rate the quota would be met in about 8 months and one month to spare. However while interacting with the training team he realized that the team also faced another challenge – participation. While all line managers agreed that training was a crucial part of their work but they were strapped of manpower and could not adhere to the nominations that they sent in advance for each of the programs. This left many training programs without audience and had to be canceled at the last minute. This meant paying outside trainers also additionally, which was a drain on training budget. Muddle took it up and started communicating with the line managers of the importance of training and wanted them to rigorously adhere to the nominations that they sent. Instead of using a threat he added the training hours to be part of the annual performance review and nomination adherence part of the line managers’ performance review. When this happened the line managers began chasing their teams to attend the training programs. When he saw this he also created an annual training award to be given to the department that had the best training record in terms of initiative, participation and leadership! With this measure Muddle ensured he had everyone on the same page and meeting the larger organizational goal of retaining JCI accreditation. What Muddle did was to create stake for each of the people involved in the training process and encouraged compliance!
References
Joint Commission International (JCI). (2014). Improve with JCI. Retrieved from Joint Commission International (JCI): http://www.jointcommissioninternational.org/improve/
