New Year's Resolutions...

Happy New Year everybody--

I've been thinking about New Year's resolutions over the last few days. A friend asked me what mine were, and I told him I didn't like them. He wanted to know why not.

Partly, my issue with the New Year's resolution is the way it suggests that I am the problem. I'm doing too much of something (smoking, drinking, watching TV, surfing) or not enough of something (working out, helping the kids with homework). Why? Because I'm rotten. If I just had a little more resolve, this issue wouldn't exist.

Many resolutions, it seems to me, are addressed at long-standing issues or behaviors. It isn't that I turned bad last year all of a sudden, it's that I've been this way for a long time. But what's changed, besides the big number at the top of the calendar? Nothing. All the reasons for my bad behavior remain the same. There's a book I like, How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work, that addresses this point. Keegan and Lahey point out that there are almost always competing priorities that have been preventing you from changing whatever it is you now want to change by making a resolution. Underlying those priorities are assumptions. (For example: I can't take time to run because that's not productive work; other people need me. Running is selfish; if I'm selfish I will be shunned, which is much worse than heart disease).

The point is this: in the absence of some careful thought, even our best-intentioned resolutions are unlikely to be successful. The system will prevail. Worse yet, the role of the system will remain invisible to us! We will likely see our failure as a reflection on our own lack of willpower, our insistence on subverting our own good intentions, our own failure in self-management. This is all in the structure of the New Year's resolution: "Do this... or else know yourself to be an irresolute failure."

Better would be to develop some big strategic goals for yourself, and then start devising plans to address those big goals. My wife and I have made "healthy and happy" a strategic focus for the last couple of years. There are hundreds of ways to go after that goal-- and if many of them fail, that's OK. Keep trying! Find some things that work! Reflect regularly on what is and isn't making you happy! Ditch what isn't working! Maybe a conscious program of saying "please" in the family setting would increase happiness! Give it a shot! Try a pilot! And then think of ways to sustain it!

Let me briefly bring it back to the subject of the blog: one, self-management is a key success factor, the foundation of good leadership. Two, don't do "New Year's Resolution"-style planning and then expect good results. Do solid strategic planning, and then do solid business planning on specific action items.

--Steve Orton

More fiscal issues

Following up on Steve’s post, I visited the discussion forum for the web cast on Public Health Survival: Leadership in a Falling Market (which is now posted). One of the respondents wrote in to tell about his predicament – to save money, the City Council had dismantled his public health department, transferring some functions to other departments, cancelling others, and leaving this respondent as a “department of one.”

I was shocked by the drastic nature of this city council’s actions, and it struck me that a lot of drastic stuff might be going on out there that we in academia are not fully aware of. It would help us to know what is going on for you… that way we can think about things we could do or offer that would better serve you through these trying times. In any event, as a community of practice, it would be good for us all to know what’s going on and how different individuals, organizations, and communities are dealing with it. For example, the man who is the only member of his department is working on changing his role from one of “directing and controlling to one of advising and consulting,” he said on the discussion forum. Ideally, he is drawing upon connections he’s made in the past to work with others who are now doing the work he and his colleagues used to do. He asked, at the end of his post, whether there were any role models for such a drastic transformation. All I could think of was the importance of making sure you have a community of people and organizations who understand what public health is and why it is important to them that the public stay healthy and safe: that way you'll never truly be a "department of one." But I'd rather hear from you...

If you get a chance, please write in with your stories about “providing leadership in a falling market” – whether yours personally, or those you have heard from others, and what you are doing right now to cope with the challenges of these times. And we realize there are still the day-to-day challenges – what is getting cut in your health department? Are you seeing a change in your clientele as a result of the economic downturn? Also, if you’ve undertaken public health business planning in the past, are you having any positive results of work you’ve done building partnerships, using business practices, and the like?

- Anne

Fiscal issues

If you didn't see it live, take a look at the webinar on public health survival in a falling market-- should be archived at the site in the next week or so.

Here are two things that came out of the session that stuck with me and that seem to apply to our continuing discussion here:

• Reach Out To Partners: Now may feel like the time for your organization to circle the wagons, pull back, go into your shell.It isn't. Jim Marks at Robert Wood Johnson Foundation says now is the time to reach out, and Bobby Pestrunk, the new director of NACCHO, agrees. Here's my take on why: resource deficits make it tough on many different organizations that are trying to make communities more healthy. Bobby points out "your partners are hurting too." The fiscal crisis makes it more important-- and perhaps paradoxically easier-- for you to work together now. Leah Devlin (state health director in NC) talks about going after big grants and lining up health care partners, for instance.
  
• Look For New Resources: Of course. Yes, the budget is shrinking. Some things that your organization had been doing will no longer be possible. So what things do you stop doing? The opportunity here is to stop doing things that are inefficient and unimportant... and use the newly-discovered time and energy to do something new, different, more effective, more useful to your constituents, more valuable to your funders, more timely and relevant. As recently as last year, I had public health leaders tell me that their plates were too full, they had more programs and partners than they could track, and that they wished they could get out of some of their long-term commitments!
  

I'll stop there and listen to what you think--

--Steve Orton