Disruptive change and uncertainty will continue to characterize the healthcare industry throughout 2015. Faced with uncertainty, healthcare CEOs and their Executive Leadership Teams (ELTs) must decide on their most important strategic priorities for the year.

It will be necessary and important for healthcare organizations to focus on improving quality, reducing costs, and experimenting with new strategic partnerships and payment models. However, there are other urgent and important priorities that pose great risk if not attended to this year.

Here are five priorities that we see CEOs and their executive teams chronically under-attend to that left unaddressed will undermine your ability to execute strategy and to find innovative solutions to the challenges facing healthcare today:

1. Making the vision more tangible and more clearly defining the destination for transformation. Employee uncertainty creates resistance to change and lowers employee engagement. It is critical that you as CEO repeatedly articulate the attractive future you envision for your organization and engage in ongoing dialogue with employees about the vision. This helps sustain energy as you work through difficult changes and reduces uncertainty, which almost always provokes a threat response in the human brain.
2. Making a stronger effort to build personal relationships with physicians and employees below the ELT level. Physicians and staff need to feel that they are part of creating change rather than pawns on which change is being imposed. Again, the key here is to proactively seek and create opportunities to gather input from these key stakeholders and talk with them about their ideas and concerns and act on them when you can.
3. Holding the ELT to a higher standard of alignment and results orientation. Employees always watch the executive team for signs of misalignment. Misalignment creates problems for execution because employees from different functions can’t collaborate effectively when their leaders are misaligned.
4. Being less consensus-oriented in decision making and more willing to “lead from the front.” In times of great change, CEOs must be willing to make difficult decisions on behalf of their organization and not wait for consensus. One of the highly valued traits of successful CEOs is intelligence and the ability to foresee how current events will impact the organization in the future. But this is of no value if the CEO feels compelled to convince everyone before acting. Boldness is contagious and it starts with the CEO.
5. Debating less and acting more. The tendency in all industries, but particularly in healthcare, is to debate issues ad nauseum and fail to act. This is a manifestation of risk avoidance. As CEO, make sure you hold ET members accountable for meeting deadlines and creating outcomes. It is confusing and discouraging when the CEO describes a vision for change but no change is actually occurring.

I welcome your thoughts about my list and what you would add. Please email me at [email protected]. Best of luck in the New Year!