British cycling team - CORE principles and healthcare application
The British cycling team which could hardly win a gold medal was transformed into a team which won more than 60% of Olympic gold medals consecutively in the Beijing and London Olympics. Sir Dave Brailsford the head coach has brought in some changes which helped to attain such success. There are many learnings from this to healthcare professionals and hospital administrators.
First he was authentic about the facts of what is right in the team and what is not right and where we stand now and where we need to go and the different strategies to do it were thought of. Instead of being the head coach and directing and dictating the team members what to do and what not to do, one of his approaches was applying the Principles of CORE among the different team members.
C- Commitment
O- Ownership
R- Responsibility or accountability
E- Excellence
Commitment- He screened the people for their levels of commitment to achieve the gold medal in the cycling events whether it be Olympics or the Tour de France. The vision was clear and confidence of achieving was boosted and unshaken commitment was imbibed in the culture of his team members.
Ownership- the ownership of achieving the goal and medals was transferred to the team members rather than to him. He made it clear that it is their vision and mission and made them to own it completely day and night, round the clock.
Responsibility and accountability - it was not plain transfer of ownership to the team members and riders, but also the responsibility was given to them. There was a mechanism of accountability for the work and efforts and commitment levels that the team was keeping forward.
Excellence - when all these things were put into practice and a conducive environment was created where in all the issues were addressed fairly, the excellence was bound to come which reflected their astounding achievements.
What are the learning for the healthcare industry:
This CORE principle has helped me in many areas of my clinical practice. Let me explain to you one of the areas where it worked really well. I communicated clearly to the newly recruited receptionists about their roles and expectations. Their role was not just to register the patients and make them wait till their turn comes up for the consultation; but I shared the vision of bringing in the wow experience to our patients with empathy and humaneness. I selected only those who were aligned to this vision of bringing wow experience and were committed to put in the constant efforts to make it so. Gave them one week of time to come forward with steps to be implemented. After a week we had a detailed meeting in which my role was to ask questions like how and what we should do? And encouraged every member to contribute ideas. Many suggestions came like what content has to be run on the television, type of magazines in the stand, changes in arrangement of sitting, cushion types, providing of welcome drink and toffee at the reception, display of real time waiting period, and various engagement activities. A few receptionists actually went and watched the hospitality in 5-star hotels too. Once they got involved in the vision my job became easy to transfer them ownership by encouraging and rewarding them accordingly. I displayed their name on the shortlisted ideas like (Rida’s toffees, Sneha’s welcome drinks etc). I helped them to organize and implement these steps. The Next step was to identify key elements to be done consistently on a daily basis and the metrics of outcome. The responsibility was given to the staff and a mechanism of accountability was put in place. The change started becoming obvious soon in the form of fewer complaints, better feedback by the patients, more positive reviews in social media platforms and an increase in the number of cases who were actually referred by friends and relatives. This is how we achieved excellence in the reception area. Happy and satisfied staff who took ownership of comforting the patients is what we always wanted.
