Stephanie Mitchell came back from vacation and got called into the C-suite. They wanted her to run the hospital laboratory temporarily. She was an ICU nurse who had moved into administration, she knew nothing about lab work, and consultants were arriving to cut costs. She took the job and asked to be let out of it as soon as possible.
Four months in, working night and day while lab staff wondered what a nurse was doing there, she thought she had made a mistake in saying yes. What changed was learning what the work actually was. She had assumed lab staff sat waiting for her phone calls as a nurse. They did not. By the end of the assignment she wanted to stay and fix the processes she finally understood, so she asked to interview for the permanent job she had been trying to escape. She retired from that lab 20 years later.
Stephanie retired as Director of Lean Process Improvement and Laboratory Services at Riverside Medical Center in Kankakee, Illinois. In this conversation with host Mark Graban, who worked with her as a Johnson & Johnson consultant 20 years ago, she explains what separates real cost reduction from telling a department to cut 10 percent and figure it out, why a written no-layoff commitment made improvement possible, how faster test turnaround times helped the hospital avoid building an emergency department expansion, and the five separate checks the blood bank built so no single human error could give a patient the wrong unit of blood.
If you lead people whose work you could not do yourself, this one is for you.
Full episode page: https://markgraban.com/mistake367
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