Thomas Watson, the well-known former CEO of IBM and a member for 8 years of Mayo Clinic’s board of Directors (in the 1980s), wrote: “…The basic philosophy, spirit, and desire of an organization have far more to do with its relative achievements than do technological or economic resources, organizational structure, innovation, and timing. All these things weigh heavily on success. But they are … transcended by how strongly the people in the organization believe in its basic precepts and how faithfully they carry them out.”
At the Mayo Clinic, teamwork is not an option, it is one of the two fundamental values of the institution. For over a hundred years, doctors who work there have chosen this unlikely small town with a population of 100,000 in one of the coldest states in the USA, remote, in the middle of nowhere, because they feel to be better doctors here than anywhere else, because everything here makes it possible for them to cultivate their talents. Patients come from all over the world to be treated here. All medical staff have access to an information system that holds the patients’ medical files (the bête noire of French hospitals: but how many have been to see how it works in the Mayo Clinic, which is taken as a benchmark?). The doctors here feel rather like goldfish in a bowl, closely watched by their colleagues. This transparency is the driving force behind their performance. A junior doctor sees what the senior doctor diagnoses and prescribes. He follows the reasoning. The patient’s file is a continuous source of teaching as well as of evaluation of the quality of care provided. It would be well worth writing a book about the history of the Mayo Clinic’s information system over the past hundred years as this is so exemplary and instructive. It did not appear overnight as if by magic. It cannot manage 13,000 patients every day without having had a long gestation period, including trial and error, success and failure.
Teamwork at the Mayo Clinic is a model for large companies. It is the practical incarnation of the principal “act small even if big“. The patient is at the centre, actions are individual, the scale of the actions is elementary even though the organisation is vast.
Teamwork also means breaking down barriers. The services are organised by discipline, as is usual. But the Mayo Clinic has shown that communication between services is possible: they do not operate in isolation. Hospitals are so often divided into baronnies, fiefs and territories. The Mayo Clinic is more like a rugby team: it looks to be chaotic, totally disorganised, but the play requires communication between players, continuous adjustment to a changing, uncertain situation, the need to resolve problems without having to refer to superiors.
The next post will look at how Mayo Clinic aims for performance.
0 Réponse pour “Mayo (4): Teamwork is not an option”