What is your company culture? As an insider, are you sure you can really "see" what's going on, the good the bad and the ugly? Or like Uber's Travis Kalanick, are you in danger of being pushed out because of a systemically toxic environment? My recent article in Huffington Post explains how you can avoid Uber's mess by evaluating, and fixing, your culture before it's too late. Read it below or by clicking here.

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Simon Associates Management Consultants (SAMC) does a lot of work with clients that are struggling to drive change. Many are healthcare clients, and over the years, we've become adept at spotting trends while we're out in the field. What we've been noticing lately is something that, frankly, we find rather troubling.

What we're hearing firsthand from a number of healthcare leaders is that these fast-changing times are posing serious challenges for them. As I explain in my recent article in Hospital Impact, CEOs are feeling enormous pressure to reduce costs, improve quality, change care delivery, reduce readmissions, focus on the population’s health, concentrate on the individual’s utilization, and on and on. (You can read the article here.)

Are you feeling intense pressure to change, too?

As I say in my article: "It doesn’t matter if it is a hospital or a multi-specialty group of doctors joining a new healthcare system. The demands upon leaders and staff to change is proving overwhelming." 

But diametrically opposed to these demands is the fact that our brains hate to change. Learning new things is just hard, meaning that old ideas and ways of doing things often survive long past the time when they make any sense or add much value. The result? In the blink of an eye, an organization can find itself drastically behind. 

The times they are a-changin’. What to do? How do you drive change?

New ways of working involving new policies and procedures. Here are five steps to help start your company's change process and keep it going: