Is kindness the missing piece of your brand—the ingredient that can allow your organization to stand out in an age in which consumers long to be treated as more than a nuisance?
Lloyd H. Dean, president and CEO of Dignity Health, one of the nation’s five largest healthcare providers, tells a story about a member of Dignity’s housekeeping staff, who in the course of cleaning a breast-cancer patient’s room took the time to listen and share her own personal experiences and encouragement. Later, the patient wrote to say, “The clinical care was excellent … but it was the housekeeper who saved my life. She gave me hope.”
Dean draws a conclusion: “Compassion and kindness aren’t expensive,” he says. “But the yield is priceless.”
A few weeks ago, Dean shared the stage with the Dalai Lama at Santa Clara University, where they led a session on the advantages that come from a compassionate business model. The event represented an important bridge between entrepreneurship and ethics, co-sponsored by Santa Clara’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, named after Apple co-founder Mike Markkula, and the Stanford University School of Medicine’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education.
Beyond Lip Service
Healthcare is one of the most contentious topics in the country today. Those in the business feel crushing burdens—bureaucratic, political, economic ones, even beyond the usual hard work of healing.
Dignity’s approach, Dean tells me, is to go beyond the usual lip-service to create an environment in which everyone at all levels of the organization holds others accountable to the calling to be kind.
He says there is actually a bottom-line pragmatism in this, pointing to empirical studies linking emotional and physical well being. “Where there’s kindness and compassion,” he tells me, “the probability and quickness of healing rises exponentially.”
[Indeed, while the human mind seems wired for competition, neuroscientists have also demonstrated that it gets just as much pleasure from doing acts of charity as it does from acquiring prized possessions or status. The brain’s reward center is even activated when watching others do a kind deed.]
“The reason a compassionate lifestyle leads to greater psychological well-being may be explained by the fact that the act of giving appears to be as pleasurable, if not more so, as the act of receiving,” the Association for Psychological Science reported last year. It seems a wordier version of the timeless wisdom, “It is more blessed to give than receive.”
How’s Your Company’s Bedside Manner?
Dean believes the principle of compassion should guide businesses far beyond healthcare, and that a focus on compassion need not come at the expense of all other factors.
“The Dalai Lama promotes excellence and high performance, and the idea that you should do the best you can,” he says. “But he promotes balance.”
Dignity Health CEO Lloyd Dean recently appeared with the Dalai Lama at Santa Clara University to... [+]
For Dean, balance means that caregivers and frontline workers need to feel valued and respected while they go about caring for others. Again, Dean goes back to science and neuroscience that link emotional well being to physical well being. “What we have in the mind connects to the body,” he tells me. Indeed, the rapid proliferation of “mindfulness” seminars and meditation practices in corporate America (such as tech pacesetter Google) suggests that the mind-body connection is being taken seriously than ever before. Old-school managers who disdain high-touch management practices may be more on the defensive now than ever before.
Dignity isn’t the only example of an enterprise that has benefited from a human touch. UCLA’s health system has long had a sterling reputation for cutting-edge research and technical knowledge. But it had a middling reputation for the human touch. Hospital CEO David Feinberg concluded that the most state-of-the-art medical instruments would be rejected if they were too cold, and accordingly made human touch the utmost priority at all levels of the organization. Within a few years, UCLA’s hospitals moved from the 38th percentile to the 99th percentile in responses to the question, “Would you refer us to a friend?”
Marvin O’Quinn, chief operating officer for Dignity, says that the compassion model isn’t just a nebulous attitude, but a concrete tool for making decisions at an enterprise that employs nearly 11,000 physicians and 56,000 employees at some 300 care centers and hospitals spread across 21 states.
He points to Dignity’s choice to keep the doors open at four hospitals in bankrupt municipalities, lest many thousands of people in those communities lose the ability to receive care. Those hospitals are not profitable in and of themselves, but they are still seen as core to the mission and character of the overall organization.
Kindness + Compassion = Easier Said than Done
Dignity also maintains a number of other disciplines that can in a sense reduce efficiency but which are core to their mission.
- Senior leaders do a “sacred hour of rounding” each morning with patients and staff, during which no meetings are to be scheduled. This is followed by practical discussions about whether staff have what they need to do their jobs well.
- Staff may take time to, say, tend to a patient’s pet at home so that she can recover without anxiety.
- No terminal patient is ever left to die alone, without human touch or company.
- In a recent year, Dignity Health provided $1.6 billion in charitable care and services.
- And Karen Byrne, Dignity's manager for east valley service excellence, says that there’s an ability “to break the rules when it’s the best thing for the patient.” She notes the case of a young woman in the latter stages of terminal cancer who told the staff that she wanted a pedicure and the company of her dog. “We arranged it,” Byrne tells me with pride.
O’Quinn, the COO, notes that, as a nonprofit, Dignity is shielded from some of the searing heat from shareholders to maximize bottom lines on a quarter-to-quarter basis. But he and Dean suggest that many for-profit corporations could stand to benefit from the goodwill that such approaches build.
Dean says that the housekeeper who encouraged the cancer patient represents the business that all of us should be in. “That’s what the world needs to be more about,” he tells me. “People would live longer, and they would be more prosperous. Society would be better.”
