reportcardIf you’ve ever been the parent of the patient in a hospital, you know that you are hypersensitive to everything going on with your child.

Spend a few weeks camping out in the hospital room, and you’ll feel like you’ve earned at least your first semester’s credits for medical school.  I’m now uncomfortably familiar with fluid output levels, white blood cell counts, NG tube placements, bandage changes, wound care and the wonders of all manner of pain killers and various other medicines.

You also become attuned to the flow of information, the conduct and attitudes of the doctors, nurses and technicians. We engage with doctors looking for signs of progress or puzzlement, and we take comfort from the personnel that help the mind and body.

Little things make a big difference when a loved one is ill, and while our filters are tuned to high, doctors and healthcare professionals and hospitals are in the ultimate customer care business, and we as customers are quick to notice great performance as well as the occasional lapses.

The many leadership and customer care observations and lessons are still top-of-mind following our recent experience, and I’ve noted a few below. It’s a fair bet that these lessons apply across disciplines and professions as well.

Leadership Lessons and Other Observations Gained While Consuming Too Much Hospital Food:

1. Leave your ego at the door, please! The doctor that walks in the room and indicates to the patient that during his visit to ICU, HE (the doctor) was the most important person in the room, needs to have his ego and head examined. Frankly, the patient was the most important person in the room.

As the boss, you are never the most important person. First come your customers, then your team members, then your supporting cast…and then everyone else. Then you. Maybe.

2. Initiative wins the day. The nurse that takes the patient’s complaints about the bed seriously and literally scours the hospital on the night shift to find a better bed, and then physically pushes the bed down the hall and makes the change, is someone that I want on my team.  The fact that she checked back the next day (off shift and on her own time) to see if the bed was working out, speaks volumes about this great professional.

Don’t wait for someone to tell you the right thing to do to serve your customer.  Seize the moment, serve the customer and job description be damned. The nurse in this example dramatically improved the quality of the patient’s comfort and is now and forever more a hero in our household.

3. Who’s training your team to be great? After marveling at the generally great attitudes of the nursing staff, I finally met the senior team member that had trained everyone on this floor.  After five minutes of discussion, I understood why the care quality was so high. She set the bar high for excellence in care and conduct, and made people want to jump over that bar. For the one bad incident, she took ownership of the problem and provided constructive coaching to the individual in question.

I’ll think of this professional every time I encounter service providers that appear to be pissed about having to serve their customers. This poor attitude is inexcusable and it’s on the shoulders of management that clearly didn’t care enough to ensure that their employees care.  Think: Cashier at Wal-Mart.  When was the last time one of these beaten down souls bothered to look you in the eye and engage with you as a human?

For all of us, building a great customer care culture is much more than metrics and slogans. It starts with management actually deciding that being great at this is important, and then hiring and developing the people to carry it forward.

4. You are only as good as you are able to communicate. Being in the hospital is frightening for most. Leaving the hospital with new hardware and drainage systems is psychologically brutal.  Helping the patient adjust and adapt to their new world by employing genuine empathy, great psychology and a nearly constant stream of dialogue over the days is priceless.

Our customers are all trying to solve problems, and just the very nature of a problem creates stress, frustration and sometimes fear. How well trained are your team members to relate to the client and metaphorically hold their hands through the problem resolution? Do you have systems in place to make this happen? Does your training support this mentality? Are you hiring people that genuinely give a damn and that take pride in helping?

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Caring for sick and wounded people is something that not everyone is capable of. Those that do it and do it well, likely hear it as a calling.  And while making the hyper-jump from human lives and health to business services and products is perhaps a stretch, there’s much to gain from observing the best of the best at giving care and comfort under stressful circumstances.  If you are in business to solve a problem for someone (and who isn’t?), then make it your calling and hire, train and support those that hear it the same way.