Lessons from the Field - 10 Deadly Sins Stopping Midsized Healthcare Vendor Growth- Part 2

 

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

Part two of a two-part series.

In part one of “Lessons from the Field - 10 Deadly Sins Stopping Midsized Healthcare Vendor Growth”  http://bit.ly/300vgUS, we examined the first five reasons why midsized healthcare vendors are not growing organically. To recap, the first five reasons were: 

1.       The person or group who started the company or came in and grew it to a certain level is still there. 

2.       The entire focus of the management team is making money. 

3.       A comprehensive business vision and strategy is lacking. 

4.       Internal communication is limited and focused on a transactional basis. 

5.       There is no organizational culture, or the culture is broken.  

In part two, we continue our journey with reasons six to ten.

Reasons six to ten are related to leadership management, style, and attitudes. As stated previously, being beat in the market by competitors is one thing. Beating yourself due to ineffective leadership, vision, process, and structure is far more deadly than competitors.

Identifying and correcting internal obstacles to growth is the mark of a company moving from good to great.

Image by Alexandra from Pixabay

Reasons six to ten why organic growth stalls for the midsized healthcare vendor. 

6.       Lack of investment in education and training for supervisors and managers.  Improving the managerial skills and capabilities of your team is job number one of leadership. One of the critical attributes in successful growth is educating and improving supervisors' people management skills and subject matter expertise. Too many small to midsized vendors leave continuing education out. The idea of training is senior management or favored employees attending conferences and seminars. The attendee brings the PowerPoint or handouts back, tells everyone what a great meeting and leaves them to figure it out without the background. Can you say the flavor of the day? An investment in the continuing education of managers improves culture, efficiency, effectiveness and directly impacts growth. 

7.       Leadership and managers display the “nobody can do their job better than me” attitude. This comes in many forms, but the most obvious is when the CEO or other leaders in the company chime in with the “if it were me” suggestions, followed by the caveat, “I am not telling you what to do.” Suppose you are a leader in a company, and that is your management style? In that case, you're telling the team or individual what to do, creating a dependency on you for answers inhibiting the development of a creative, efficient, and effective team. Sooner or later, the “team” waits for you to say something, solve the problem, or give a direction to follow. You may feel good, but if you set up the situation where you’re doing everyone’s job, then you have failed. Let those you hire do their jobs. 

8.       Micromanagement, ineffective and inefficient leadership meetings. Each day starts with a bevy of meetings at all levels of the organization. Each one recaps the last days' events and what the current day will bring. Some organizational meeting pace is needed, but that is the extreme.  No senior management team and their managers need to meet every morning to set the priorities for the day or update everyone on the last 24 hours. That is micromanagement to the extreme and a waste of time. It also displays a lack of trust that people are doing their jobs. 

An interesting topic in meetings is the sales pipeline. Those weekly meetings that more often than not, become a beating meeting when prospects don’t move, in management's opinion, through the pipeline stages quickly enough.  It is far better to have a weekly distribution of a pipeline report highlighting those prospects that are moving from one step to another but hold the update meetings every three-four weeks or so. Keep sales in the field and not endlessly defending their pipeline. Let your team sell. If they can’t sell, then replace them. 

9.       High overall organizational turnover and lack of turnover in management positions. Some managerial positions turnover with regularity while some never do. Managers have cliques and dysfunctional relationships. New managers are greeted with the “I‘ve seen your type come and go, and I am still here” attitude. Senior leadership professes a desire for new ideas and change, but when push comes to shove, new ideas are greeted with skepticism, and internal roadblocks are erected with tacit approval. The more things change, the more they stay the same applies—the manager who has been there from the beginning remains closed to new ideas and subtly obstructs change. Inappropriate behaviors and demands of people, or verbal beatings in public by leadership and peers, occur.  Morale and performance decline. An antagonistic culture persists, and turnover is just a never-ending revolving door. The cycle becomes someone leaves, and when you hire, train, berate, they quit, in an eternal process. 

10.   The company thinks it’s bigger than it is in reality. Confidence and belief are one thing. Arrogance and conceit are another. The adage “don’t believe everything you think”comes into play here. I get it that you think your product or service is the greatest thing since sliced bread, claiming to be national, means a national presence, not geographically regional. A little bit of humility and a reality check every so often can propel the company forward to achieve brand recognition and sales in the market.  Why? Because you understand the reality of the company size and put those visions, strategies, and tactics in place to make it a reality.  Then you communicate to the entire organization the vision, strategy, and tactics, not just a select few.

Are your customers referring others to you? No? Then your customer service may not be as good as you think it is. Companies tell themselves the big lie all the time.  The problem with that is, sooner or later, it becomes a fact and belief when the evidence speaks otherwise. Just because you say to or write it, does not make it so. The market rolls their eyes at your statement and says, "who are you again?" or better yet, "I never heard of you."  Figure out what you must do to grow the company to the size already in your head.

Summary

None of the ten deadly sins stalling growth have easy peasy fixes. Some are deeply rooted in organizational issues, while others come down to effective leadership and management. Sometimes,  there is no way to fix any of the organizational issues unless there is a leadership change. The best you can do is recognize what is fixable and then pick off the ones you can change.  Some fixes will take years as they require changing the company culture.

The answer to stalled growth may very well be asking, “What is the exit strategy?”

Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay

Michael is a healthcare business, marketing, communications strategist, and thought leader. As an internationally followed healthcare strategy blogger, his blog, Healthcare Marketing Matters, is read in 52 countries and is listed on the 100 Top Healthcare Marketing Blogs & Websites ranked at No. 3 on the list by Feedspot.com. Michael is a Life Fellow, American College of Healthcare Executives. An influencer in healthcare marketing strategy, communications, digital marketing, and social media, Michael is in the top 10 percent of social media experts nationwide. For inquiries regarding strategic consulting engagements, you can email me at michael@themichaeljgroup.com. 

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