When he landed a job at a major East Coast children's hospital, Chris Grivas was determined to make the right diagnosis— not for a patient, but for the organization itself. Chris was hired as an internal organizational development consultant. He wanted to get a read on the health of the organization and its 1,500 employees. So he ran a needs assessment and discovered the organization had a problem around conflict: No one wanted to have any.“They valued being nice, as you would hope any children's hospital would,” he said. “But a lot of conflict was swept under the rug.”
As a result, confrontation was avoided. People worked in silos. Leaders felt isolated. Chris came up with a programmatic solution: a leadership development program that would reach all 170 top leaders in the hospital. His goal was to promote healthy communication by bringing people together in small groups and giving them a shared language for discussing behavior and problem solving.
He used two assessments: Disc for measuring behavior and FourSight for measuring cognitive style. “I pick FourSight as a tool because communication issues often come from people starting to approach a problem in different places and not seeing that,” said Chris
Leaders were invited in groups of 10 to 15 people. To break down communication silos, the OD staff made a deliberate effort to invite a cross-section of disciplines. “You had the head of the ICU sitting next to the head of nursing, sitting next to head of pharmacy, sitting next to the director of HR,” said Chris. “The goal was that these people would talk to each other and get a sense of what they each brought to the institution, and understand their thinking types as well.”
So began a rolling series of 2.5-day leadership development sessions. “We had at least one senior leader in every session to show that the institution was taking this training seriously,” said Chris. People used the assessments to explore the diversity of thinking in the room. They were asked to talk frankly about their strengths and challenges and focus on their own development.
In one FourSight exercise, Chris had people sit in groups of mixed FourSight profiles. They each had to tell a story about how they went about solving a problem. Everyone in the group had to listen carefully and then respond by sharing how they might have approached it. “You really got to see the difference between a Developer and a Clariferapproaching a problem,” said Chris. “It would be right there in the words they used. And after the debrief someone would say, ‘Ah-ha! He was looking at tinkering right away instead of asking more questions or investigating other ways to go about it!”
“FourSight was a great way of highlighting the diversity of thought within the institution and getting people to recognize the value of those diverse elements.”
“I thought FourSight was a great way of highlighting the diversity of thought within the institution and getting people to recognize the value of those diverse elements,” said Chris.
At the end of the 2.5 days, each leader walked away with a personalized 90-day development plan. Then they set off to tackle it. After 90 days, the same group reconvened and discussed what worked, and what didn’t. “We heard about improved communication. There was a willingness to knock on doors that they hadn’t been willing to knock on before,” said Chris.
“Frankly, I think the nurses were most eager to learn different communication strategies. And leaders from stand-alone groups, like pharmacy and radiology, felt more integrated into the whole.”
By the time all the leaders had cycled through, close to 90% had completed their development programs.
But for Chris, there was something even more impactful. “The most successful thing was giving people a language to talk about their differences in a non-judgmental way—in an appreciative way,” said Chris. “Valuing the fact that there’s somebody who doesn’t think like me has a ripple effect in terms of communication and resolving conflict.”