LEADERSHIP
Deepening Relationships Randy Chittum: How Leadership Can Strengthen Relationships with Customers By Pete Mercer
With all the complexities that the healthcare supply chain has faced in the last year, it’s easy to overlook the
impact it had on your relationships with your customers. Sure, it was harder, if not impossible, to meet in person. Regular customers may not have been purchasing as much as they usually would.
Dr. Randy Chittum, Principal of Still Leading, recently spoke at Share Moving Media’s Healthcare Supply Chain and Distribution Summit, leading an interactive group discussion on how supply chain leadership can focus on initiatives that will deepen relationships with customers and provide better service throughout the supply chain. Still Leading specializes in coaching and organizational development for executive leaders, teams, and entire organizations, keeping the goal of mindfulness as a core principle for creating excellence in leadership. Chittum works with executives and managers worldwide in the areas of emotional intelligence, succession planning and leading change. He spent almost a year developing and strengthening a nursing strategy with Prisma. In an attempt to understand how supply chain leadership can deepen relationships with their customers, Chittum led a conversation in three major parts: the present conditions for our healthcare customers, the future conditions of our healthcare customers, and how to lead with empathy. Chittum said, “With complexity, things like ‘best practices’ lose their value.”
What is true now of our healthcare customers? Dr. Chittum started the group discussion focusing on what we know 58
December 2021
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Dr. Randy Chittum
is true about our healthcare customers to better understand what they are facing right now. It’s critical for supply chain leaders to understand how healthcare is being shaped by the current situation. ʯ Resource scarcity Resource scarcity has been a persistent issue since early 2020. As toilet paper and hand sanitizer started to disappear from stocked shelves, so did medical supplies and PPE materials for healthcare workers. This scarcity is hitting industries across the spectrum, and healthcare is feeling it with a shortage of masks, gloves, gowns, oxygen, beds, and ventilators.
ʯ Labor shortages With work conditions the way
they are, healthcare workers are becoming more difficult to find these days. Because of the challenges that the nurses, doctors, and primary care physicians are facing on a daily basis, it’s becoming harder to staff healthcare systems. Plenty of organizations are offering a higher salary than usual, stretching and breaking the limits of healthcare budgets everywhere.
ʯ Increased fatigue/ lowered morale Part of what leads to labor shortages are an increase in fatigue and a decrease in employee morale. Healthcare workers are more stretched than ever before, leading to burnout and a drop in morale. “Healthcare workers are a significant risk of physical and mental health challenges,” Chittum said. “Due to the nature of their job, nurses are at an even greater risk than doctors.”
ʯ Where do we go next? There’s plenty of talk about “agility,” “pivoting,” and “flexibility,” but how do we pivot in a time like this? And to what do we pivot to? Chittum said,
