Doug is President of UMass Memorial Community Hospitals and Chief Administrative Officer. He writes that, “The method employed by ThedaCare [a hospital network based in Wisconsin], commonly known as Lean, is about two fundamental principles: respect for people and continuous improvement.”
Those principles jive nicely with SHARE’s core beliefs: that the employees who do the work firsthand should be the ones who define how that work gets done. And those principles are very much at work in the new SHARE-UMass Memorial Contract Agreement. Frankly, we couldn’t have said it better than Doug Brown did in the T&G:
While seemingly simple, these principles have profound implications for how an organization is managed. Respect for people turns the traditional top-down management style on its head. It recognizes that the best ideas come not from senior leaders, but from those on the front line. That is where value is created in an organization. The job of leaders is to develop systems and tools to unleash those ideas. And then get out of the way.
