Want Better Case Times AND to Make Your Team Happier? Rethink This One Thing.

Which is more important?

What you do.

How you do it.

OR ...

Why you do it?

In medicine, what we do makes a difference. The world of evidence-based medicine dictates our practice. When we have certain outcomes we’re not happy with, those outcomes prompt changes in protocol. Those protocol changes are implemented, and we then measure the difference.

Somewhere, sometime, a consultant met with your hospital leadership team and began the process of strategic planning. From there, you developed a vision, mission, purpose, core values and all that jazz. Unfortunately, for most hospitals, this is just rhetoric and jargon. I’m sure that at some level the leaders within the hospital make decisions based off of these “values,” but it seldom permeates in a meaningful way to the people who are providing care for patients.

Again, which is more important?

What you do.

How you do it.

OR ...

Why you do it?

I think the obvious answer is this: WHY you do something is always more important than WHAT you do. More importantly, it shapes how you do things which, in turn, impacts what you do. And when what you do is shaped by a strong value (the “why”), you and your team will not only believe in your choices more, but you will also see much more rewarding outcomes for your patients.

Here’s my (transparent, yet embarrassing) example …

I worked in a amazing hospital as the STEMI Coordinator and I had the wrong mindset when I started. When we had a “fall out” STEMI (A STEMI time over 90 minutes), it created an insane amount of work for me.

I’m sure this resonates with all coordinators reading this. Because we were concerned about the “fall outs,” our wins went unnoticed most of the time. To compensate, we evaluated every “fall out” within 24 hours. Within those few hours, I had to pull together everyone on the team and perform a mini root cause analysis to see how to prevent failing in the future.

While not a terrible exercise, I wasn’t thinking about this from the correct perspective. My mindset was: Don’t fail. Don’t fail. Don’t fail. NOT FAILING became the unspoken value (or the WHY) that shaped everything we did within our organization. This focus on “DON’T FAIL” impacted how we did things, and ultimately, it impacted WHAT we did as well.

We focused on “What we did poorly.” The culture was built around “not losing.”

Play it safe.

Don’t take risk.

Don’t fail.

If this line of thinking permeates the organization, it’s almost impossible to win. You cannot win if you’re playing not to lose (focusing only on the WHAT - or the outcome). The end result is paralysis.

Failure is inevitable. Yes, we learned from these failures but in the end, we never took advantage of learning from our success. Looking back, I wished we had approached the problem from the perspective of WHY.  Why do we care about improving those times?

The answer, of course, is our patients. We needed to focus solely on our mission of improving the lives of those we serve, and make each decision based upon what would best help us achieve that goal, rather than on what would look best on paper.

Had we done this, we would have been able to improve our outcomes in a quicker, more efficient, and natural way that would have also left our team members feeling fulfilled and appreciated rather than burnt out, stressed, and like they were constantly failing.