How to Select the Best VA Team Leaders
Indentifying the best value analysis team leader candidates can be like playing a game of roulette if you don’t have a list of proven characteristics that are known to be a good predictor of success. To help you in your selection here are four characteristics you should look for in your Value Analysis leaders:
1. Team leadership experience
Your candidates should have managed at least one team previously, before even being considered as a VA team leader. This is not the time for on-the-job training if you are looking for a high-level of performance for your value analysis teams.
2. Problem-Solving Skills
This is an essential skill that your team leaders must possess, since this will be a big part of their job as a VA team leader. This important skill will help their project managers when they hit the wall on their projects and think that no solution can be found to move their projects forward.
3. Proven Track Record
Just because a candidate has led a team before, doesn’t mean that they have done it successfully. Look for candidates with a proven track record of results (quantitative and qualitative) before assuming that they have the leadership abilities necessary to lead one of your VA teams.
4. Excellent Communications Skills
One of the most important leadership skills a VA leader can have is to be an excellent communicator, since this is 80% of what a VA leader does. A VA leader must provide frequent, consistent and timely verbal and written communications to their team members that are clear, motivating, and goal oriented. If a leader doesn’t have this skill they will be ineffective in leading their VA team in the right direction.
These are just a few of the characteristics we have found that VA team leaders must exhibit if they are to be effective, successful and competent in leading their VA teams. Don’t forget to use them the next time you make the important selection of a VA team leader. This will ensure your ability to get a good fit – not a mismatch!
How to Identify Your Best Value Analysis Team Members
Most hospitals, systems and IDNs have value analysis teams that evaluate and select the products, services and technologies that they are buying. The question I would like to pose to you is how do you identify the best VA team leaders and team members? Is it by chance or fact?
For years, we allowed our clients to select their value analysis team members by title or position, only to find that we were leaving this selection to chance – not facts! Our studies were showing that 76% of the team members that were selected by this chance method were failing in their team member roles.
We then realized that this selection process was really a hiring decision and it had to be made more scientifically if our clients were to have the best talent on their value analysis teams. That’s when we instituted our “Team Leader and Team Member Placement Test” based on the top value analysis team member competencies that we have observed were the most successful, more often, in the past.
The result, after eight years of using this test with our clients, shows that if you have a placement test for your team leaders and team members you have a 97% probability of having the best candidates for
your team’s jobs and you can, up front, eliminate any mismatches for this teamwork before it becomes too late or too embarrassing to do so.
So if you want to hit the bull’s-eye every time by truly predicting the performance beforehand of your new value analysis team leaders and team members you need to design a “Team Leader and Team Member Placement Test” for your new team hires based on FACTS, not chance.
