By Jay Juffre
I have only worked professionally for two companies, but I have worked with 1000’s of organizations in my career. Not to overly simplify, but what separates the great organizations from the good or poor ones comes down to two simple things: Culture and Leadership and from my perspective, the latter drives the former. So how do you develop a world class culture. Most organizations have a clear set of values or operating principles, but in many places, they are not real. Employees think about them rarely because they are not reinforced daily. So how do you reinforce the values you wish to uphold? Something we do at our company is Ripples. The concept of a ripple was first popularized by Robert Kennedy in his “Ripple of Hope” speech. The idea being that if you throw a small pebble into a pond, the wave ripple extends outward in distances well beyond the initial impact. In our company, a ripple is a story about something that happened in the last few days that directly relates to the culture we are trying to create. It is essentially an easy way to reinforce the culture daily. Every meeting, every huddle, and many debriefs start with a ripple at the beginning. Some outsiders may view this as a waste of time, but this establishes and reinforces the norms that we desire. For example, one of our core values is safety (like many organizations). Having someone tell a story to start a meeting around an event that resulted in making the company a safer place, is strengthening the culture we are trying to create. Start by teaching everyone the behaviors you want from day one. Then use stories, or ripples to emphasize the lessons. If you want to be great at patient care, set the expectation and strengthen it every day. Your referrals will go through the roof. Have a great week.
Jay Juffre is Executive Vice President and Chief of Staff, ImageFIRST. For more information on ImageFIRST, call 1-800-932-7472 or visit www.imagefirst.com.
