We’ve been working on this notion of a One Team Culture for nearly three years. Why One Team? Because the work we do matters to the lives of millions of Californians who need health care or benefit from social programs organized or funded by our hospitals.
Our work helping hospitals accomplish their mission of caring for their communities requires aligned, coordinated goals and activities. It requires deliberate communication – a lot of it – both within our individual organizations and across the Federated Team. It requires us to trust and respect each other, to appreciate team success over individual accomplishment, to surface issues before they get in the way of relationships, to value each and every team member’s contribution, to try new things, to learn from mistakes, and to hit the pause button to acknowledge and celebrate our successes.
Only through working together, across the state and Washington, DC, aligned and supportive of each other, can we deliver exceptional results to our members – and to you and me as Californians.
You may recall that shifting culture is not easy work, and it doesn’t happen overnight. Because of the work led by the CEO Team, we’ve been able to establish a core set of One Team Behaviors and have made remarkable and measurable progress to date creating the foundation from which the next phase of One Team initiatives will build upon. This next phase is all about driving the One Team culture standard further into our teams, making it part of our everyday experience. It’s about having candid conversations about where these values align with our behaviors, and more importantly, where we fall short. It’s about using our crucial conversation skills to have open dialogue. And it’s about creating and maintaining shared accountability, where team members will make an active and supportive move to press our culture forward.
This One Team Culture acceleration phase will be led by a group of culture ambassadors. The ambassadors, selected by the CEO team earlier this year, are going to be learning key elements of leadership, team health, and performance so they may actively contribute to our ongoing culture transformation. While the ambassador program, led by Nicholas Beamon from OneTeam Leadership, had to be reconfigured due to COVID-19, I’m pleased to announce its official kickoff on June 16. Even though we’re now doing this work virtually, we’re off to a strong start and will be accomplishing a great deal over the next six months. I’ll share progress reports along the way, and more importantly you’ll be hearing directly from the ambassadors as they are tasked both with putting what they are taught into practice and sharing key concepts and learnings with the rest of the team.
A special thanks to each of the ambassadors for accepting this role and to every one of you who continue to go above and beyond, each and every day, for our members and for each other amidst some exceptionally trying circumstances. Thank you for leaning in. We are stronger together.