On the Road

On the road again—this time to Cleveland, Ohio, to meet with teams there.

We just returned from the beautiful Northwest Region, where we spent several days visiting with UBT co-leads, Performance Improvement staff, senior leadership and the UBT Resource Team.

As we travel to the different regions we are constantly meeting unit-based teams that are truly high performing. These teams have made the commitment to do things differently and get everyone involved in the decision making process. But how does a team know when they have hit and are sustaining their peak performance? Is it the same from department to department? Facility to facility? Region to region?

Déjà vu. Atlanta, Georgia…Paul is driving…it’s 100 degrees…and we’re lost…again. Did you know Atlanta has some of the worst traffic in the country, along with Washington, D.C. and almost anywhere in California? There’s one other problem. Every other street in this town is named Peachtree (Avenue, Boulevard, Circle, Street, Lane, Road… you get the picture). Did we mention it was hot? But we digress.

We hope you got a chance to attend portions of the Quality Conference. We were in bargaining but have spent some time listening to several of the sessions that are available on-line  through September. It is worth listening to them. One presentation stands out: the Woodland Hills Infusion Center UBT. What an impressive team with some outstanding results!

Many of us are thinking about the opportunities that could open up for Kaiser Permanente with health care reform. Experts talk about Kaiser Permanente as one of the models that could be the “gold standard” of how to provide health care in the country. While the specifics of health care reform are still being defined, it is clear that many people who currently do not have health insurance will have access to coverage.

We were off again in March to the Peachtree State: Georgia. KP Georgia employees are some of the friendliest you’ll meet. First stop was “Coffee and Conversation” with Regional President Peter Andruszkiewicz (also known as “Peter A.”) and Dr. Rob Schreiner, the executive medical director of the region.

A very painful example of the tragic results when an organization does not learn from its mistakes comes from a case study by the Harvard Business School of NASA.  The study examined the NASA chain of command following the 2003 destruction of the space shuttle Columbia during reentry. At that time, NASA was a very top-down organization. Bringing up problems was a career killer. In fact, many NASA employees felt that they had to prove that there was a problem, before it was safe to even raise questions.

Where are you going to get the likes of KP CEO George Halvorson, John Sweeney, AFL-CIO president emeritus, the LMP’s Barb Grimm, John August of the Union Coalition, Darth Vader, Spider Man and a small cast of cuckoos in one place? Hollywood, that’s where! The 2010 Union Delegate Conference was held at the Hollywood Renaissance Hotel in the heart of La La Land.

Roving UBT experts Dan Ryan and Paul Staley wouldn't miss the largest gathering of frontline employees for anything.