5 ideas from Simon Sinek to boost your medical practice's culture

Simon Sinek might be as recognizable from his many best-selling books as he is for the things written about him and his attention-grabbing speaking engagements.

Just this past month, Inc. magazine featured Sinek — an organizational consultant and author of Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t — after a tweet he sent back in March touched off a look at leadership styles that improve staff performance.

For us at MGMA, Sinek isn’t just the keynote speaker for the upcoming 2018 Annual Conference in Boston — his Leaders Eat Last was the inaugural pick of the leadership book club, which many MGMA staffers (myself included) joined to discuss the finer points of the book.

While we have not seen his upcoming book yet — his general session speech Sunday, Sept. 30, “The Infinite Game: Leadership for Long-Term Success,” will give us all a sneak preview — we know plenty about what has made Sinek such a highly sought-after speaker.

Here are five key ideas from Sinek’s work that can help you rethink the culture of your healthcare organization:

1. Employees are people, too.

Seems simple, right? But consider that the clear majority of Americans don’t feel fulfilled by their work at the end of the day, as Sinek notes in the above video clip.

In Leaders Eat Last, he frequently cites the work done at manufacturing company Barry-Wehmiller to both return the organization to profitability while also hearing from everyday workers. A general sense existed that the management did not trust the workers, resulting in cumbersome processes that hindered workflows and subsequently hurt the workplace culture.

Through some simple changes to show the workers that they were listening and entrusted to get things done, the company saw more than just cultural improvements — the bottom line also improved.

Additional reading:

• “Use stay interviews to address employee concerns, build a better office culture”
• “How often do you tell your employees they are doing a good job?”
• MGMA member-benefit tool: Employee Feedback Survey
• On-demand webinar: “Creating a People-Centric Culture to Attract and Retain Top Talent”

2. Build a sense of security.

Videos of Sinek’s TED Talks have generated millions of views, and the above talk from May 2014 is echoed in Leaders Eat Last — “it should be the goal of leadership to set a culture free of danger” from issues such as intimidation, isolation or humiliation by establishing clear values and beliefs that provide your staff a sense of belonging.

Sinek refers to such a culture as a “Circle of Safety” and that leaders should be looking out “for those inside their Circle.” If this is done, leadership functions not as an extension of rank or title, but as a recognized position of authority that others will look to in the future.

 

3. Extreme measures may mean extreme failure.

In an appearance on the Tony Robbins Podcast in December 2017, Sinek emphasizes his beliefs on patience and how a leader being the last person to speak in a meeting leads to greater success. In a sense, it forces you to become a better listener, but it also makes others feel they have had a part to play in the work because they’ve already shared their thoughts.

Beyond that, Sinek cautions that when we become extremely passionate about a topic, it can create an intensity that undermines the consistency needed to get the job done: “You can’t go to the gym for nine hours and get into shape,” Sinek says. “It doesn’t work. But if you work out every day for 20 minutes, you will absolutely get into shape.”

In other words: Focus on patience and sustained results rather than explosive change.

Additional reading:

• “Effective meetings: Building alignment, accountability and trust in your practice”

4. Lead people, not the numbers.

While numbers obviously matter in an industry that increasingly relies on quality metrics and data analytics, healthcare leaders’ focus should be on leading the people who will be driving those numbers.

Developing physician leaders and focusing on helping staff members grow with an organization is a key to long-term success. Sinek cites the work of Dr. Natalia Lorinkova on the differences between directive and empowering leadership styles for teams: Teams with directive leaders may outperform others early on, but teams with empowering leaders “experience higher performance improvement over time because of higher levels of team-learning, coordination, empowerment and mental model development.”

 

5. Your goals should be set by your vision, not your competition.

Many people feel they have a calling to go into healthcare. It’s an art and science, but it’s also a business. As I wrote in the July issue of MGMA Connection magazine, Sinek recommends that business leaders answer a key question: Is the goal to beat your competition or to outlast the competition?

In the above video, Sinek lays out what he sees as the difference between computing giants Apple and Microsoft from this perspective of “finite” and “infinite” players:
The finite player is playing against its competitors, and the infinite player is playing against themselves. “The infinite player wakes up every single day and says, ‘How do we be better this week than we were last week? How do we perform better next month than we did this month? It’s a game of constant improvement. It is totally fine to study our competition for tactical reasons, but the number of companies that study their competition for strategic reasons is scary [because] they react strategically to their competition and will change entire business models basically on a whim, which means the company has no stability.

To hear more of Sinek’s latest work, join us in Boston Sept. 30 to Oct. 3 for MGMA18 | The Annual Conference.