The Busy Leader's Handbook

41Focus on What Right Looks Like:

How to Collect and Move Best Practices

What does right look like? While the question seems easy enough, the answer is often missed. All too often our human nature is to focus on what is wrong to the exclusion of what is right. Some years ago, I spoke at a Carnegie education conference. One of the featured presenters was Chip Heath. He and his brother, Dan, are noted authors. This was right after their book Switch, that spent 10 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, had come out. In his presentation, Chip shared that a key to achieving better results is to spend more time on what is right versus what is wrong.

One example he used is that in studies of high school graduation rates, a tendency is to spend most of the time researching the children who drop out, not the ones who don’t. He shared that yes, more children in poverty drop out than those children who are not in poverty. So, study the children who live in poverty who stay in school. Find out what’s different about them and how it can be duplicated in others.

This rang a bell. Years ago, I was in a leadership role at Holy Cross Hospital in Chicago, and we had very low patient satisfaction. Of course, we came up with all sorts of reasons why our patient satisfaction was low, and most were things we felt we could not control. We let ourselves off the hook. Then one day we noticed one patient care unit had much higher patient satisfaction than anyplace else in the hospital. So we ...