Uniting An Organisation Around A Shared Purpose.

Have you ever led a new organisation through a significant strategic change by engaging a workforce of several thousand people while they are delivering vital healthcare? 

That was the experience of Canberra Health Services and its CEO, Bernadette McDonald. 

Bernadette says, “One of the key things we needed to do was create a new identity for the organisation. And the best way to do that was to create a unifying vision that we could all get behind. We needed to be really clear about what we want to achieve, our role, and the values that help us achieve our vision.”

It all started when ACT Health became two organisations: ACT Health Directorate and Canberra Health Services (CHS). 

ACT Health Directorate is the territory’s governing body; it sets health policy and plans the delivery of health services. And CHS is the leading organisation that delivers that care for the community.   

Bernadette continues, “For any organisation, whether you’re a new organisation, or been in existence for a while, it’s important to be clear that you’re all on the same page. That’s what a vision does, it gives you the shared understanding of what you’re trying to achieve together. And it’s also aspirational, it’s something to work towards that inspires and challenges your organisation to be better.” 

If a vision is something that should motivate everyone in the organisation it makes sense that each of the organisation’s 7,500+ staff members should have a role in articulating that vision. But how does that happen when your busy organisation has the size, diversity, and complexity of a small town?

CHS worked with Midnightsky on an ambitious process that would give everyone in the organisation the opportunity to contribute to the creation of their vision, role and values. 

CHS nominated around 70 people from across the organisation to take on the role of Conversation Starters. While they came from different departments and had different levels of leadership experience, they all shared an appetite to connect with their colleagues and work together.

Midnightsky trained these Conversation Starters to, you guessed it, start conversations with their colleagues and community members. The facilitated conversations asked specific questions about what CHS should be striving to achieve, how to achieve it, and how all staff members should behave along the way. 

Midnightsky’s training gave the Conversation Starters the skills, tools and confidence to engage with their colleagues. And the success was remarkable. 

Over several weeks, the Conversation Starters met with over 5,200 people, a massive 65% of the whole organisation. The Conversation Starters confidently smashed the targets they set themselves. 

The Conversation Starters also read patient surveys and gathered existing quantitative data which added to a comprehensive picture of the organisation. 

The group gathered valuable information about what people thought about the organisation; not just what was wrong and what they needed to work on, but what was good and positive. 

At the end of the research phase the Conversation Starters brought together all of the rich data and participated in workshops with Midnightsky and the CHS Executive team in order to identify the organisation’s new vision, role and values. 

All levels and sections of the organisation were represented in those workshops. The group worked as peers to examine the information and bring their own strategic minds to the task. Through a range of activities including small and large group discussions, collective writing, voting, healthy catering, and moments of laughter the organisation built its new strategic position. 

Canberra Health Services’ vision is, ‘Creating exceptional healthcare together’.

Their role is, ‘To be a health service that is trusted by our community’.

And their values are; Reliable, Progressive, Respectful and Kind.

Reflecting on the conversational data gathering process Bernadette says, “It energized people. People were a bit shocked, but in a positive and refreshing way, that we were asking their opinion. We had a lot of people who were excited to be involved. While a vision gives the organisation that one unifying thing, the engagement process is the other major plus of creating a vision. When you do it properly it creates a buzz and energy in the organisation. It’s hard to measure but it’s really valuable.”

Bernadette continues, “The most common thing that people say to me is, ‘I feel like there’s hope now’. People feel more valued because we actually asked what they thought and that hadn’t been done before.” 

The Conversation Starters all had good stories to share of their encounters with colleagues and community members. And while a few of them encountered some tricky questions, the team was well prepared to deal with it. Bernadette says, “It was a really positive experience for the Conversation Starters. It gave them the responsibility and opportunity to lead this work across the organisation.”

When it comes to making such big strategic organisational decisions, it is unusual to include staff from outside the Executive or Board levels in those discussions. Bernadette says, “Most of the feedback from the Executives was that they’d never experienced a process like that before, and that it was fabulous. They all walked out of the workshops believing in the value of that process. Now we are a little way down the track it hasn’t lost its credibility at all, if anything it has been strengthened.”

Once the organisation wrote those foundation statements it was able to develop its Strategic Plan. The organisation continues to apply the new strategic position to each key document that sits under the Strategic Plan, including the Corporate Plan and Divisional Plan. It is also included in the Frameworks which impact on the entire organisation; the way it governs, makes decisions, measures progress, implements innovation, uses resources, looks after its people and delivers care.  

In each of these documents the organisation consistently and practically defines two key words from the vision: Exceptional and Together. Therefore, all the clearly outlined deliverables, targets, roles and responsibilities help everyone in the organisation understand how they can work as a team to achieve the vision. And it allows team leaders to help their people understand what it means for their work every day. 

The impact is significant. Bernadette says, “Everybody in the Senior Management Team and across the organisation is heading in the same direction.” She continues, “It’s still a work in progress but it’s so easy to come back to the consistent approach and knowing what we are here for.” 

CHS’s values define how everyone in the organisation behaves in order to achieve the vision. There is an awards program that celebrates individuals’ achievements which best personify the values: Reliable, Progressive, Respectful and Kind. 

Bernadette explains, “We have a pin for each value and we rotate through one each quarter. Everyone in their divisions gets to nominate somebody who demonstrates that value. There are only a limited number of pins and we have a competition where people are trying to get all four. And we’ve just had our first CHS awards recognition ceremony where we used the vision and the values as criteria for a set of awards. It was a lovely, fun and relaxed event which all came back to creating exceptional healthcare together.”

Bernadette adds, “We’ve embedded the vision, you can’t escape it!”

The organisation has laid a solid strategic foundation on which it can build its success and help it continue to provide essential healthcare through good times as well as crisis. 

Bernadette reflects, “When we talk about our definition of exceptional care – it’s safe. (Delivering healthcare in a crisis) is not different to what we normally do, it’s just amplified. The vision of creating exceptional healthcare together is needing to work together to keep everyone safe. And people did really well.” 

by Cressida Bradley