HELPING HAND
Many employers help cover the costs when their team members choose to take professional development courses. When organizations need to have everyone reading from the same page, they can take advantage of custom corporate or executive education programs offered across the province.
Craig Ivany is the chief provincial diagnostics officer for Provincial Laboratory Medicine Services. His agency integrates and coordinates public and private medical labs across B.C. Ivany wanted his team to boost their skills so they'd be great collaborators and partners with the independent members of the province's lab ecosystem, while also meeting the Ministry of Health's objectives. PLMS doesn't direct those organizations—they're autonomous.
“We knew that we had to think very carefully about exactly what our role was and how we needed to show up in every interaction that we have with the lab systems,” Ivany recalls.
PLMS weighed numerous custom education options and landed on the service leadership program founded by Mark Colgate at the Gustavson School of Business at the University of Victoria.
Why would a provincial health bureaucracy seek guidance from business experts specializing in something called service leadership? It might not appear at first glance to be a natural fit, Ivany acknowledges: “Many people in lab medicine are very skeptical of folks outside of their realm.”
But Colgate and his colleagues work with government agencies, as well as with businesses and Ngos—basically, anybody who deals with clients or customers. “We help raise their game in terms of the quality of service that that they deliver,” explains Colgate.
He says organizations find alignment when they focus on client experience, and become more effective with their resources: “You're more efficient at delivering service, you're more reliable, you make fewer mistakes, you're more accurate, you get less rework and fewer complaints.”
PLMS has just started working with the service leadership program, but Ivany is ready to incorporate the ideas Colgate presented as some of his organization's defining traits. “Boy, oh boy, he really connected with our team—really understood what our needs were,” Ivany says. “He delivered a very compelling case for us to think about our world differently; to look at our world through a different lens.”
Ivany says his people quickly grasped the value of becoming a customer-centric organization, and of building a culture of accountability. “We know it's the right path for us, given our mandate,” he explains.
“We knew that we had to think very carefully about exactly what our role was and how we needed to show up in every interaction that we have with the lab systems.” —Craig Ivany, chief provincial diagnostics officer, Provincial Laboratory Medicine Services
I think that’s where executive programs at universities are the best, right? Where they have professors who have a particular knowledge to share with clients.” —Mark Colgate, service leadership program founder, Gustavson School of Business at the University of Victoria
For Colgate, service leadership is more than just an idea that sets his program apart from others. He literally wrote the book on it—the Science of Service: The Proven Formula to Drive Customer Loyalty and Stand Out from the Crowd. So Gustavson executive education participants like PLMS are getting the fruits of Colgate's academic research, and his life's passion.
Colgate suggests organizations should look for providers with specialized academic expertise to teach them the ideas they're interested in. “I think that's where executive programs at universities are the best, right? Where they have professors who have a particular knowledge to share with clients,” he says.
That's good advice for anyone who's curious and wants to learn: find instructors who love what they study and who want to tell the world about it.