Growing an improvement culture will.
The culture of an organisation has the single biggest impact on the quality improvement journey. When quality becomes an issue, staff will often feel disengaged with improvement and feel that the organisational strategy and priorities are focused on other areas. Any ideas that are generated fail to execute and improvement becomes sporadic – with the potential of great ideas implemented locally not shared across the organisation. Learning from quality becomes minimal. With your most important resource not aligned to improvement, it tends to become the priority of a few highly trained individuals. The impact of this is that improvement does not go anywhere.
In the scenarios above, measurement of organisation level improvement tends to show no change or even a regression. Objectives including reaccreditation become more of a struggle than had previously been expected. The system shifts from an improvement mindset to a compliance, or survival one.
Leadership at all levels of an organisation has a key role to play in establishing a culture that encourages improvement. Leaders are the enablers of change; from role modelling the right behaviours to working to remove the barriers that prevent change being effective. The best leaders harness the capabilities of their staff and allow them to thrive.
Your staff are your most important asset. Developing their skills, capabilities and confidence in improvement tools and techniques will, of course, have a positive impact on outcome. However, a failure to understand the importance of the role of leadership and culture risks derailing your improvement efforts. It is not hard to find examples of where a poor culture has led to some very high profile failures in patient safety. Organisations that are serious about improvement need to start by addressing their culture.
An approach that address these leadership and cultural aspects will be a more sustainable and effective way to deliver results.
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