5 Imperatives to Hiring a Lean Six Sigma Expert for Your Hospital
Hiring an expert is often one of the first steps taken by hospitals embarking upon a Lean Healthcare or Lean Six Sigma for healthcare program. Usually a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt is chosen to develop the program. Unfortunately, there are few Black Belts at large that actually have the Lean Six Sigma skills and healthcare experience necessary to build an effective, self-sustaining program.
The effort to search for and recruit an individual with the right fit is a difficult, yet critical activity that requires a generous time commitment from a deployment leader. A wrong hire will cause tremendous setbacks for the program and will risk the buy-in of senior leaders in your organization. This newsletter series will work through five imperatives to hiring a Lean Six Sigma expert for your hospital so you can get the kind of talent on board that will make a big difference for your organization. We've already covered Imperatives #1 and #2, here's the next one:
IMPERATIVE #3: Soft Skills are a Must-Have.
Most of the Lean Six Sigma training that healthcare professionals are exposed to focuses on the methodology’s technical tools – the SIPOC, Pareto Chart, hypothesis test, Control Chart, and so on. However, it is what’s most difficult to teach in a classroom – the soft skills – that make one of these experts so invaluable to your organization. Many leaders make the assumption that the technical tools are what set these individuals apart. It’s actually the ability to help people to change that gets the results. How does an interviewer deduce whether a Lean Six Sigma expert has great soft skills or not?
How to Test for Soft Skills
Testing an individual’s soft skills is difficult and requires the interviewer to predict how the candidate’s performance during the interview will translate to performance on-the-job. But the balanced Lean Six Sigma expert who assiduously develops both the hard and soft skills of a change agent will reveal himself during an interview.
Key Questions
1. “What’s the first thing you do when you start a project?”
A Lean Six Sigma expert who cares about creating positive change in your hospital environment will tell you that one of the most important first steps is putting the team together, getting the right leaders involved, and understanding how they all fit. If the candidate instead talks about measurement systems, collecting enough data, and spends little time talking about people, then a red flag should go up.
2. “What books have you been reading?”
A candidate who cares as much about technical tools of the methodology as the soft skills will read books like The Six Sigma Handbook and Ohno’s Toyota Production System, but also will read leadership books like The Nun and the Bureaucrat, Kotter’s The Heart of Change and the Heath brothers’ Made to Stick. A candidate who is imbalanced might only read one type or the other and an interviewer should come prepared asking about several key books that any practitioner should have read. We have lists of these books, so contact us if you’d like to learn more.
3. “Give me an example of how you dealt with resistance between two individuals who were not in agreement during a project. What techniques did you use and what were the results?"
This may seem like a common question, but most interviewers listen for the wrong themes in a candidates answer. Many times an interviewer will listen to the answer to evaluate the merit of the example that was provided – and not pay enough attention to the detail to which the person describes the different stakeholder’s perspectives, motivations, and personalities. Instead, listen carefully how the Lean Six Sigma expert speaks about the people and compare it to how much emphasis is placed on the problem or its solution.
Note the level of the organization (or ask more to find out if this info is not provided) that the individuals who were resisting worked at and the type of project that it was related to. If you are hiring a Lean Six Sigma expert to tackle the tougher, enterprise-level projects then he should be aware that this is the type of example you are looking for. If instead the example of resistance is one that is more localized and has less significant to organizational strategy, then that is likely the experience level that the individual has previously been exposed to.
You should also listen carefully about how the candidate facilitated discussions between the stakeholders and the techniques used to build consensus.
A Great Role-Playing Exercise
Have the candidate present the solution to a technical problem to you playing the role of a project Champion (An example might be a Measurement System Analysis or hypothesis test – make it fun so create a backstory, too!)
This technical problem should not be designed to stump the candidate (don’t make it a softball either). The candidate, first and foremost, should be able to quickly process the problem’s solution. Even though NOVACES recommends hiring a healthcare Lean Six Sigma expert with excellent soft skills, each expert must still possess all the basic technical skills before they can be considered for such an important position (for more on this, see Imperative #1).
As the candidate presents the solution to you during this role playing exercise, evaluate how well he is able to communicate the solution in your language. Will your staff, your peers, and the executive team be able to understand? A person with solid soft skills will be a great teacher and will present information in a way that helps you make critical decisions for your organization.
On the other hand, if the candidate spends a lot of time trying to impress you with his understanding of statistics and all its inner workings, then you have found a resource who is great at statistics – but probably not at change!
Also in This Series
Imperative #1: Know How to Evaluate Technical Proficiency
Imperative #2: Decide Industry vs. Healthcare Experience