Leading With A Bit Of Audacity – Building The Grafton Foundation Of Care

June 14, 2019

*This article originally appeared on the Open Minds website.

Jim Gaynor, former CEO of Grafton, asked a simple question when he arrived in 2002: “How many of your treatment plan goals are you achieving?”

“The teams thought they were achieving about 80%, but weren’t sure,” Zeiter said. “They had to ask themselves, ‘How do you hit a goal that you don’t know how to measure?’ Ultimately, they determined that they were only hitting 30% of their goals.”

Realizing that Grafton was unable to consistently and accurately capture, document, and report the quality of client care, individually or collectively, was the impetus for Grafton leadership to begin the process of making fundamental organizational change.

Organizational change of any kind is hard. Reviewing and objectively assessing 60 years of “We’ve always done things this way,” presented a daunting challenge. Bringing representatives from all parts of the organization together to review existing processes and procedures and contribute to the development of a new plan was the critical features in Grafton’s ability to successfully execute its organizational transformation. This transformation took well over 15 years and went through multiple iterations.

First, a concept called “goal mastery” was developed to set the basic rules and expectations for goal writing and assessment of progress. This process was ultimately patented by the organization. Goal Mastery was adapted to a software application that automated much of the goal ‘rating’ and even provided staff with a goal-writing wizard that helped them construct goals with fidelity to the model. Now it is being integrated with a clinical approach embedded in empiricism that answers the question “how” in regard to Goal Mastery. At its core is the “Foundation of Care.”

Read the full article here.