by Sydney Edmond
Close your eyes and imagine your organization from a customer’s perspective. Now consider sharing this image with someone else. What if their reaction to the image is not what you expected? As anthropologist Ralph Linton once said, “The last thing a fish would ever notice would be water.” Each day working in your environment, you become more comfortable and less aware of your surroundings. If you want a better image to share, consider hosting a Summer Enrichment Program intern to receive a new evaluation and to help you see your organization and leadership styles through someone else’s eyes.
With Lean, a “fresh-eyes” approach is used to identify improvement opportunities by introducing someone to unfamiliar processes. Consultants are also used for observation and solutions since they do not have any pre-conceived ideas about the organization. There are several other ways that leaders incorporate fresh eyes, such as asking customers for feedback on what can be done better, adding a new board member or involving the team in decisions. Today, a new way of using the fresh-eyes approach in your organization is hosting an SEP intern. Similar to Lean and consultant methods, hosting an intern is a significant way to display your organization how you imagine it and then examine how someone perceives it for the first time. Thus, the fees associated with hosting an SEP intern can simply be viewed as an investment, just as it is for process improvement.
SEP interns are current or recent students in collegiate programs. With their education, interns’ knowledge is a powerful asset that can be used to bring in new and innovative ways of thinking. In addition, the program is a way to expand healthcare leadership opportunities for ethnically, culturally and racially diverse individuals; host sites are catalysts for this process. Not only would a host site benefit from having a fresh set of eyes, but also it would gain rising stars that have diverse backgrounds and already see the world through different lens.
Often, we become comfortable with operations, and it takes someone new to ask why certain things are being done. An organization becomes static in composition and thus responds to issues and operates in the same way, every day. Different possibilities can be shown through a fresh set of eyes, and interns will ask new and different questions that may provoke leaders to think about their decisions and leadership styles. During or after the internship, prepare a gap analysis. What is different between what you expected and what your intern observed? A popular equation states expectation minus observation equals frustration. By having an open mind and hosting an SEP intern, you can change the equation and replace frustration with opportunity.
Invest in process improvement at your organization by hosting an SEP intern! For more information, click here.
