1. Establish Trust by Recognizing Your Employees
Building trust with employees is a key component to any organizational restructure, said Scott, but the effort shouldn’t stop there. Scott’s philosophy is really about working together to find out what the team can truly improve upon, and he believes that making IT staff more recognizable within the organization will help them not only pinpoint those problems but also find a better way through them.
He admits that this mindset was “a real shocker” to many people at the organization, but ultimately the approach is helping his team members perform to the best of their abilities.
“My staff is amazing — they have an amazing work ethic and a passion to do great stuff and do the right thing,” said Scott. “It’s all in support of these departments, enabling these departments to do what they need to do, which is taking care of the consumer, making sure that people have a great experience.”
2. Focus a Little Less on the Here and Now
When Scott first arrived at Good Samaritan, many of its operations were being run like a mom-and-pop shop, where people would essentially make do with what they had. To help bring the organization into a more enterpriselike mindset, Scott highlighted the importance of taking a more strategic, forward-looking approach to leadership.
“I’m always thinking about six months down the road,” he said. One of his first initiatives at Good Samaritan was to put together a leadership meeting offsite with his team, where they could focus less on the day-to-day work and more on the high-level strategy.
“We just talked about, ‘Here we are today. How are we going to get to where we need to be?’” said Scott. “And it really forced them to kind of think about, ‘Yeah, what do we need to do to be able to get from A to Z?’”