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Mangum Community Hospital was on the brink of closure due to an operating loss of approximately $500,000 for the fiscal year 2005. Around this same time, Blackhawk Healthcare, an organization committed to providing quality healthcare in rural areas, stepped in to acquire the struggling hospital. Blackhawk was able to help them get to a financial breakeven point in less than 60 days.
Despite the more stable financial footing, several issues continued to impede Mangum. They were experiencing high turn-over on an executive level with three CEOs in two years. Employees were living in fear of losing their jobs. Well-respected doctors were no longer willing to practice at the hospital and people in the community stopped going to the facility for care.
THE PROCESS
To help with the situation at hand, Blackhawk contracted with Kathryn Weldon, a CTT-trained independent consultant, to facilitate a culture change that positively impacts the people and the bottom line. Ms. Weldon recommended that the best place to begin was to develop a set of shared values chosen by the people rather than instituting mandates from the home office. This way, the people in the hospital could be collaborative and more easily align with the hospital’s values because they helped set them.
In 2007, Blackhawk participated in an organization-wide Cultural Values Assessment (CVA) as the first step in the culture change process. The results from Magnum Community Hospital were some of the worst in Barrett Values Centre history. The 56% entropy and 11 potentially limiting values in the Current Culture confirmed the seriousness of the issues being experienced at Magnum.
Hospital-wide meetings were held to discuss the values assessment beforehand and to present the results. Meetings were held several times a day to ensure that all employees had a voice in the process.
For over 15 years, TMSi Logistics, a highly respected Top 100 national logistics firm and Inc. 5000 company, has differentiated itself through a performance-driven culture resulting in cost savings and improved service levels.
From the start, the culture of the company was based on the strong personal values of the leadership. In 2002, TMSi decided to put their values down on paper. In this process of self-discovery, they also asked “What is TMSi?” The company doesn’t own any assets; the trucks and buildings they use are all leased. They realized that they are a service agency focused on people and processes. They needed to empower their leaders and invest in their people to get better, more sustainable, results.
THE STRATEGY
The TMSi shift in focus, from a top-down approach to an emphasis on leadership, was based on the understanding that employees primarily experience the company through their interactions with their managers.
To support this effort, TMSi used the Cultural Transformation Tools to carry out the following assessments:
1. Small Group Assessment (SGA) of the executiveteam-7 people
2. Cultural Values Assessment (CVA) of them anagers in the company – 125 people
3. Management Values Training– All of the 125 managers went through training to learn more about values. TMSi recognized that they needed managers’ buy-in to a values-based approach, otherwise the strategy would not work. In the training programme managers learned about Maslow’s theoretical foundations, the Barrett model, and discussed common definitions of values.
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