Professional Coaching as an Effective Strategy to Retaining Frontline Managers

摘要

Historically, executive coaching has been reserved only for the c-suite in healthcare organizations. Expanding this resource to directors and managers has been assumed to be cost-prohibitive. The authors describe an intervention whereby executive coaching was expanded beyond the c-suite, during a critical transition time for the organization in an attempt to positively impact management turnover, staff turnover, and employee satisfaction. Saint Joseph Hospital is a 535-bed, acute-care community teaching hospital in urban Denver, Colorado. Strategically, in 2006, amid near-complete executive turnover, the organization was facing 2 large-scale initiatives requiring a solid leadership team: implementation of an electronic medical record by early 2009 and the building of a replacement hospital by 2014. Although clinical quality was strong, particularly in key service lines such as cardiac and vascular services and women's services, patient satisfaction, physician satisfaction, and employee satisfaction data placed the organization in the bottom quartile when compared with national benchmarks. It was apparent that effective nursing leadership would be critical to ensure that the organization would continue to excel clinically while improving these other performance measures.