A Pathway to Measurable Outcomes: An Adaptive Leadership Perspective in Healthcare Organisations

Kylie de Klerk
Jan 20
4 min read

Updated: Jan 20

Adaptive leadership, a framework centred on agility, innovation, and collaboration, plays a pivotal role in the leader’s boundary-spanning engagement across an organisation. Adaptive and dynamic leader approaches are being actively applied in numerous industries to accelerate transformation and help leaders navigate changing circumstances.

The proficiency of adaptive leadership approaches in bolstering financial sustainability in healthcare organisations has become an area of increasing interest. By empowering multidisciplinary healthcare worker teams to locally address complex challenges, streamline processes, and respond to changing demands, adaptive leadership approaches directly translates into measurable cost efficacy.

Here are some examples of immense challenges currently facing healthcare organisations and how this leadership approach can help drive efficient and measurable outcomes. Similarly, the framework can be applied to many other sectors too.

1. Streamlining operational inefficiencies

Adaptive leadership encourages environments for bottom-up participation in an organisation. Thus, innovative thinking emerges from the coalface of the problem to better identify challenges and resolve inefficiencies confronting the workforce- most commonly at the patient interface. For example, long wait times, patient bottlenecks, and resourcing challenges are notable challenges across the healthcare sector.

These patient bottlenecks or treatment flow blockages influence pre and post operative care quality and limit treatment options for patients (1). Current data indicates that just over 55% of patient emergency department visits were completed within 4 hours and 90% of visits were completed within 10 hours and 45 minutes (2). A collaborative bottom-up approach to innovately addressing these issues directly affecting the workforce. Not only does this improve patient care and the quality of the healthcare workers’ daily environment, it also influences healthcare organisational revenue by increasing overall efficiency.

2. Reducing Hospital Readmissions

Adaptive leaders prioritise solutions tailored to the specific needs of their patients. For example, implementing patient programs or protocols based on ongoing learning and collaboration through clinician-patient partnerships can help prevent readmissions. Patient readmission has been labelled as a wicked problem due to the challenges readmissions pose for the healthcare sector which include the cost and workload burdens they place on healthcare organisations. Where traditional or previously tried strategies to avoid readmissions may be ineffective, novel strategies are required to address these challenges (3). Novel treatment strategies and protocols are developed through a requisite variety of opinions and the lived experience of those directly involved.

3. Enhancing Workforce Flexibility

Healthcare organisations endure fluctuating demands which lead to periods of overstaffing or more frequently understaffing challenges. Adaptive leaders promote cross-training and flexible staffing models, ensuring that employees can shift their roles and responsibilities as needed. For example, The Cleveland Clinic in the USA implemented a float pool of nurses trained across specialties. This adaptive approach included participative decision-making across the hospital group to optimise staffing and the standardidisation of nursing practives. This reduced overtime costs and temporary staffing expenses, leading to millions annual savings (4).

Preventing Medical Errors

Adaptive leaders cultivate a psychologically safe culture where workers feel safe to speak out, raise questions, and continuous learn. Therefore, workers feel encouraged to disclose both patient and systemic issues. For example, medication errors are the most frequent errors in the healthcare system occurring at rates of 5-18% in Australia (5). As many as 250 000 yearly hospital admissions are due medication errors at an estimated annual cost of AUD$1.4 billion to the healthcare system (6). Healthcare workers feeling comfortable to speak out, voice their concerns, and suggest amended protocols are more likely when leaders facilitate environments where these critical conversations can take place (7).

5. Multiple factors affecting the healthcare sector

There is an active multi-entanglement of factors that need to be addressed to alleviate healthcare sector stress, such as a housing and a cost-of-living crisis (8), and a burgeoning population in Australia. These are perhaps the most critical external system dependency issues currently challenging the sustainability of the healthcare sector.

Recent data from a study in Sydney showed that 2140 adults residing in homeless hostels were hospitalised for treatments at a median cost of $81,481 per person amounting to a total cost of $548.2 million for 27,466 admissions (9). Adaptive leaders don’t just facilitate bottom-up approaches to challenges in organisations but answer the call to address macro-level challenges that generate cascading effects across these interconnected systems.

Adaptive leadership is a transformative approach that helps organisations navigate complexity and optimise outcomes. By fostering cultures of change and collaboration, leaders can enhance workplace environments and achieve significant cost savings.

These practical examples underscore how adaptive leadership is not just a theoretical framework but forms part of critical and practical strategies in organisations.

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