How to Build a Gritty Culture in Your Healthcare Organization

When Harvard Business Review set out to describe gritty companies, they turned to healthcare organizations like Cleveland Clinic for their abundance of high achievers with steadfast commitment to high-stress, demanding fields.

Authors Thomas H. Lee, MD, and Angela Duckworth detail how Cleveland Clinic builds grit in individual physicians and providers, in healthcare teams and in the organization as a whole. They highlight how Cleveland Clinic’s annual professional review process assumes an individual with grit — a person who wants to improve continuously in service of a higher goal and is motivated by progress toward that goal.

Building teams of gritty individuals can be a challenge in healthcare given the historically autonomous culture in which some physicians were trained. But modern healthcare requires collaboration, and the authors highlight healthcare executives’ use of General Stanley McChrystal’s Team of Teams to build resilient, gritty, patient-focused teams.

The authors also discuss how former Cleveland Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove, MD, built grit in the organization at an estimated cost of $11 million after hearing of one negative patient experience. Learn more about how Cleveland Clinic establishes grit as a social norm in the full article.

Cleveland Clinic also offers training in its grit-building organizational strategies through its Global Executive Education programs for healthcare leaders. Programs are open to aspiring or current leaders in healthcare organizations and run the gamut from intensives in niche topics to long-term fellowships for international leaders.