CTI Blog

To keep momentum in a project, you need to run great meetings. Make your next project meeting productive with these guidelines:

• Restate the meeting's purpose. Even if you think everyone knows it, it helps to remind them and sharpen the group's focus.
• Include everyone. If one or two people dominate the conversation and others are shy about leaping in, draw out new people by saying, "Thanks for those ideas, Carl. What are your thoughts about this problem, Megan?"
• Use color: Use green, yellow, red to provide feedback on progress.
• Start with last meeting action plans: Always start with the follow up actions from the last meeting to ensure progress and closure. You send a message that you are holding people accountable to the actions and commitment.
• Recognize accomplishments and Progress: Recognize people for the completion and accomplishments of the action items.
• End well. Close the meeting with an action plan and a clear time frame. State the decisions the group has made, who owns what, and when they need to report back to the team.

CTI is proud to be part of the ONE BAY Healthy Communities. 200+ community and healthcare leaders came together into a regional visioning session at the Tampa Convention Center. 

CTI was a Breakfast Sponsor and one of the key facilitators of the visioning exercise. 

We believe Tampa has the opportunity to transform the health of its community by changing the way we think, the way we deliver care and the economics of healthcare. 

We need to shift our thinking

From   To

Sickness Wellness/Prevention

Ignorance Awareness/understanding

Opposition Alignment

Treatment Prevention

Reactive Proactive

Inpatient Outpatient

Episodic Wholistic

Procedure Performance

Isolation Integration

Non-Efficient Efficient

We believe the key guiding principles for the transformation of healthy communities include: 

1. Prevention/Wellness (Vaccination, screening, infectious diseases, maternal/fetal health, smoking cessation,..)

2. Access To Healthy Choices (Markets, stores, schools, parks, sidewalks…)

3. Access to Quality Care (Insurance, care, preventative care, Patient-Centered care,….)

4. Health Equity/Health Disparities

5. Personal Engagement/Healthy Behaviors (Eating, walking, physical activities, exercise, family,….)

6. Education (nutrition, choices, behaviors, environment,…)

7. Community Engagement (It takes a village!!)

• Employers’ Engagement (Work based wellness, incentives,…)
• Schools’ Engagement (Healthy Choices, Education,..)
• Local Community Engagement (Local efforts, support,…)
• Insurers’ Engagement (Incentives, rewards,…)

8. Advocacy (Government, policies,…)

9. Chronic Diseases Management (Diabetes, heart, cancer,..)

What started six years ago as a USF Health leadership development effort has now grown beyond the USF campus to reach clients across the country. The USF Center for Transformation and Innovation (CTI) was established in 2005 to accelerate the transformation of USF Health through leadership training. Since then, CTI has grown by more than 1,000 percent and expanded its client base to both private and public organizations outside Florida, including its most recent connection in Iowa.

Team CTI.

“CTI’s growth has been phenomenal and is a testament to its quality, effectiveness, and value,” said Mohamad Kasti, Chief Transformation Officer and founder of USF Health’s Center for Transformation and Innovation.

“We’ve built a strong reputation for helping professionals, teams and organizations transform themselves, and client-partners are eagerly seeking our services. We believe that every organization, team and leader is unique, so our solutions are customized to meet their distinct visions and needs and incorporate the world’s best practices and practical experiences from top experts. This customized approach helps clients transform their performance in their own organizations, teams, communities, and lives, every time.”

A map shows CTI’s reach.

A calendar shows CTI booked through 2013.

Since its inception, CTI’s reputation has quickly spread, and currently the group is developing and transforming leaders and organizations in Ohio, Nebraska, New York, Wisconsin, Georgia, Iowa, and Missouri with great results. Most recently, CTI connected with the Iowa Hospital Association (IHA) to create Iowa’s first statewide physician leadership program.

“IHA created the Leadership Institute because Iowa hospitals and physician leaders recognize that we can no longer afford to send physicians to generalized leadership development workshops,” said IHA President/CEO Kirk Norris.  “Lasting success requires an approach that is focused, high-quality, delivered on-site, and customized to the needs of physicians and hospitals.”

The IHA is a voluntary membership organization representing hospital and health system interests to business, government and consumer audiences.  All of Iowa’s 118 community hospitals are IHA members.

In connecting with these groups, CTI competed against other reputable training and development organizations and CTI is winning.

“Our partnership with IHA is a great example,” Kasti said. “USF was put up against various big, established programs like Mayo Clinic and the American College of Physician Executives (ACPE), and the IHA chose the USF CTI program due to its high quality, customization, experiential learning and its graduates’ positive experiences and transformation.”

Following a lengthy and thorough search that included numerous providers and programs, IHA chose to partner with USF Health to develop and implement a high quality, customized Leadership Institute. CTI has an extensive record of successfully designing and implementing a number of Leadership Institutes for hospitals, healthcare systems, and physician groups across the country with impressive graduates and results.

“Physicians are key leaders in our healthcare system, but they are not formally trained in leadership, nor is training specifically aimed at physicians readily available in Iowa,” said Norris.  “The Leadership Institute is designed to fill that gap and equip physicians to better lead with strategy, communicate more effectively with and lead teams, and organize and work as team members to improve delivery outcomes and results.”

Before launching any institute, CTI uses a comprehensive 360° Diagnostic Process to get feedback on individual leadership competencies and behaviors such as strategic thinking, communication, response to change, conflict resolution, teamwork, professionalism, and trust.  Based on the diagnosis, a customized 12-month curriculum is designed to include on-site sessions and conferences, mentorship, one-on-one coaching, team learning projects, networking, and simulation-based learning to maximize leadership potential. Each physician personalizes his or her learning journey through a CTI process called Personal Strategy Map TM.

CTI services include four quality Institutes:
1) Leadership Institute: teaching high-potential faculty, physicians, administrators, nurses, and staff how to lead self, lead with strategy, lead others effectively, lead for results.
2) Strategy Institute: teaching organizations how to establish their innovative strategies and align their teams to execute them and produce results.
3) Process Improvement Institute: teaching organizations how to become more efficient by removing waste from the system;
4) Innovation Institute: teaching individuals and organizations how to accelerate innovation from idea to adoption.

In addition to providing clients with customized sustainable programs, Kasti attributes much of CTI’s success to another factor that other development companies don’t offer.

“We tackle a client’s problem at the DNA level,” he said. “That means we target the cultural issues throughout the organization, at every level, so that the entire organization is part of the desired change.”

As for helping Iowa’s physicians, Kasti expects great results as he and his team lead the design and implementation of the program. Leadership Institute classes and activities, which start this fall, will be held on-site in each of the IHA’s seven districts.

“We are excited about the opportunity to partner with the IHA and bring the Leadership Institute to Iowa,” he said. “We are confident the physicians will find the experience transformational, rewarding on both a professional and personal level, and one that produces a strong return on investment.”

For more information about how CTI can help you and your team, call (813) 974-3674. To learn more about the USF CTI program and IHA check out their websites at cti-usf.com orwww.ihaonline.org .

Story by Sarah A. Worth, photos by Eric Younghans, USF Health Office of Communications

Culture Vs. Strategy Is A False Choice

The leaders of tomorrow will need to rethink what it means to be bosses and mentors, according to a report from Hay Group. Twenty years from now, employees will expect more autonomy and less top-down management. Working relationships will be built on mutual trust and loyalty on the personal level, the report predicts.  CBS MoneyWatch

Leaders must start doing things differently. Very differently. Right now. That’s the conclusion of the Hay Group new Leadership 2030 study, completed with Cologne-based foresight company Z-Punkt.

The six ‘megatrends’ it identifies suggest that organizations will fail unless leaders drop much of the thinking and behavior that first propelled them to the top.

New suggested leadership competencies

The new business world order will challenge leaders on three levels: cognitive,

emotional and behavioral.

Cognitive

• Leaders need new forms of contextual awareness, based on strong conceptual and strategic thinking capabilities.
• They need to be able to conceptualize change in an unprecedented way, again based on conceptual and strategic thinking.
• Leaders need to exhibit new forms of intellectual openness and curiosity.

Emotional

• Overall, leaders will need to be much more sensitive to different cultures, generations and genders.
• They will need to demonstrate higher levels of integrity and sincerity and adopt a more ethical approach to doing business.
• They must also tolerate far higher levels of ambiguity.

Behavioral

• Leaders must create a culture of trust and openness.
• As post-heroic leaders they must rethink old concepts such as loyalty and retention and
• personally create loyalty.
• Collaboration – cross-generational, cross-functional and cross-company – will be their watchword.
• They must lead increasingly diverse teams.

Do you have a culture of Innovation. Take the following test

Does your organization?....

1. Defines and promotes innovation as part of the organizational values
2. Has a well-understood organizational innovation strategy
3. Innovation strategy translated into individual clear goals and metrics
4. Well defined and communicated expectations of Innovation
5. Leadership/management support
6. Clear measurement of creativity and Innovation
7. Protected Time for Innovation (Google 20%)
8. Identified impediments to innovation and dedicated resources to remove
9. Designs organizational structure and workflow around innovation
10. Innovation as a major competency in leadership development
11. Recruitment and selection based on innovation
12. Providing internal training in creativity and innovation practices
13. Maps/tracks the knowledge domains of internal experts
14. Funding of new ideas
15. Rewards and Incentives even for failures

As Steve Jobs passed away, I stop and reflect on his innovative, transformative leadership legacy.

He was a leader that we need in healthcare. He had 

1. Intuition
2. Vision
3. Purpose- Think Differently
4. Passion
5. Persistence
6. Presence
7. Courage
8. Power To Influence
9. Perspective
10. Creativity
11. Simplicity

Nowhere are these charateristics more important than the world we operate in, the world of healthcare that continues to be fragmented, misaligned, confusing, and frustrating for us and our patients and families. We need more Steve Jobs in healthcare.

His Intuition and Persistence:

One Steve Jobs' talent that resonated with me was the way he trusted his gut feelings to shift our paradigm. His unwavering belief in a vision and an idea and keep trying again and again. He had his share of failures and he learned from them. He saw what we did not see. He trusted his intuition- that in many ways was ahead of our times. He knew what we really needed and not what we say we needed. He believed in showing people the vision and not asking them sometimes- His quotes were:

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” — BusinessWeek, May 25 1998

“So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big [thing.] There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me “A faster horse.” ‘ ” – CNN / Money

His Courage:

Finally, I have this quote in my office of his – Stanford 2005 commencement address

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.

Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.

And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

I gave tribute to this innovative, transformative leader. We will miss you, Steve. Thank you for lighting the spark in many of us to believe in what we do, to follow our heart and intuition with courage, not be distracted by others' noise, and to never never give up!!!

Sincerely

Mo Kasti

Please do not confuse adoration with lovability, or even likability. Effective leaders have a mystique about them that sets them apart from other mortals. They have an ability to garner respect, admiration, reverence, and generally high regard wherever they go. These are the elements of adoration that we will be dealing with in this article. Different [...]

Posted on September 29, 2011 by Wayne Kehl