with Customers

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 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.

Dr. Randy Chittum

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,

“Leaders are ill prepared for the world that we are living in.” There’s no amount of training that will prepare anyone to make the decisions that leaders are having to make right now.

What will be true three years from now?

As important as it is to understand what’s happening now, it’s also critical to forecast what the future might look like. Getting a better understanding of what the future could bring will help suppliers and healthcare systems to prepare for a better and more efficient future. Chittum said, “Trust, convenience, and visibility will be service outputs from the seller to the buyer.”

ʯ Fewer healthcare workers

What will happen to all the future nursing students when they can see the state of healthcare right now? It’s not exactly an inviting profession, even with a higher paycheck. Going forward, we will likely see fewer healthcare workers.

ʯ Consolidation will continue

As the supply chain becomes gradually more stressed, consolidation will force the smaller players out to give room for the bigger companies. While those who support consolidation cite benefits like better quality of care and improved clinical integration, but it can also lead to higher costs and an increase in organizational complexity.

ʯ Government may have a bigger hand

With the current state of the

United States supply chain, it would not be surprising to see the government become more involved in the process. Whether it’s imposing more regulations regarding the stockpile or developing strategies for a more resilient supply chain, the government will likely step in to prevent another massive disruption.

ʯ More production in

United States

Perhaps the most positive future outcome is that we could see more production move to the United States.

While it’s certainly cheaper to build manufacturing plants in a different part of the world, it would ensure more stability for domestic healthcare systems.

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.

Leading with empathy

One of the most critical things that leadership in any industry can do right now is to lead with empathy. Empathy is the key to unlocking someone else’s experience, getting a better understanding of what they are experiencing and how they are experiencing it. This is a vital tool for business leaders, as it gives you a window into the lives of your customer base. For healthcare systems, empathy will help you understand their frustration and desperation right now.

Empathetic leadership isn’t just a great tool for your customers, but it’s also a highly effective management tactic as well. An empathetic leader will gain the trust of their employees, helping to increase productivity, efficiency, and improve employee morale. A lot of your employees are seeing firsthand the struggles that their clients are facing, which is not an easy thing to watch. They have worked to build relationships with healthcare workers and may not see any hope for the future of the healthcare supply chain. As the leader, it’s your responsibility to address those concerns and help to find an achievable solution. Chittum said, “The job of leadership is to confront the current reality and still inspire hope.”

Using an empathetic approach will also help sales reps connect oneon-one to their customers. Chittum said, “It’s not the job of the sales rep

to fix the problems of the healthcare worker, but you need to be aware of what they are facing.” Even if they can’t fix the overall problems facing healthcare workers, they can work to better understand how they can help to meet the needs of their clients.

More than ever, it’s up to leadership to pave the way forward for the healthcare supply chain. The next generations of supply chain leaders are depending on us to make the right decisions for the industry, which will greatly impact the future of the healthcare supply chain. Empathy will allow you to connect with your customers and encourage your employees.