SaferPatients

Twenty percent of the clothes in your closet are worn 80% of of the time.

Twenty percent of the carpet in your house gets 80% of the wear.

Twenty percent of your friends get 80% of your time and attention.

Twenty percent of your employees or direct reports cause 80% of your headaches.

Twenty percent of what you do in your job every day accounts for 80% of the value you provide to your employer.

You’ve heard of the 80/20 rule before. I’ve blogged about it in a previous post. The correct name of the rule is Pareto’s Law and it affects just about everything we do in life, including leading a successful patient safety initiative.

The amount of time that leaders, managers, and administrators invest in leading the change will amount to about 20% of the total hours invested in the whole initiative. Front line workers - the physicians, nurses, and staff that provide the actual hands-on care to your patients - will account for 80% of the total time a patient safety project requires. The folks doing the daily work of providing care will invest way more hours in making the implementation successful than do the organization’s leaders.

Yet, the 20% of the work in the initiative done by the leaders will ultimately account for 80% of the success of the effort.

It’s really quite simple: No leadership = No change.

The difference between “sorta” successful and “wildly” successful is leadership. Will the organization’s leaders persistently do with discipline and focus the simple, daily actions required to effect sustainable culture change?

This is why LifeWings invests so many hours with an organization’s leaders IN THE BEGINNING of a new patient safety initiative. Leaders must have effective change management skills. They must know what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. Get the leadership actions wrong, or fail to do them at all, and your safety initiative has no chance of success.

Bottom line: Persistently follow the blueprint for leadership actions. Eighty percent of your success depends on it.

�