RELATIONAL COORDINATION is communicating and relating for the purpose of task integration. Relational coordination is particularly useful for improving quality and efficiency performance under conditions of task interdependence, uncertainty and time constraints.
RCRC’s mission is to transform relationships for high performance by building shared goals, shared knowledge and mutual respect across boundaries. We connect with practitioners and academics in an innovative, collaborative setting to develop and test new models of change. Together we help organizations transform the relational dynamics underlying their work processes and redesign their structures to support and sustain new dynamics.
RCRC News & Announcements
Bo Vestergaard of Act2Learn wins Best Paper award for Academy of Management Meetings in August
May 16, 2012
"Leading Unpopular Changes with Fair Process: Towards a Strategic Process Design" by Bo Vestergaard of Act2Learn (Denmark) was selected as one of the top papers submitted for the upcoming AOM meetings in Boston, by the Management Consulting division. This paper will be presented Monday August 6 from 1:15-2:45 in the Adams Room of the Westin Copley Place, in Boston. Bo asks: "How do you transform unpopular changes - demands to produce more, at higher quality, using less resources – into frontline innovation? Most managers intuitively buy in to my argument of why relational coordination is a driver of quality and efficiency outcomes for core work processes. From research we know we are likely to achieve both outcomes if we focus on increasing RC. But how we do it matters. By following – or violating - the principles of fair process, top, middle, and frontline managers are more or less likely to succeed in engaging the frontline in delivering solutions that realize the strategy and increase performance outcomes.” In other words, as a leader or change agent, you have to be the change you want to create. Fair process is what we could also call relational process - acting to build shared goals and shared knowledge in a mutually respectful way.
Bo is one of the launch partners for RCRC in Denmark, using relational coordination to improve effectiveness in health and human service organizations, as well as manufacturing. His organization - Act2Learn - is planning to sponsor the next RC Training Workshop in Copenhagen, September 24-25. If you attend the AOM meetings in Boston this August, you can meet Bo and his Act2Learn colleagues at the RCRC reception Saturday evening, August 4 from 7:30-9:00, and attend his presentation on Monday. An abstract of the paper is posted here.
Palo Alto Medical Foundation Awarded PCORI Grant to Study Patient Centered Care and Relational Coordination
May 8, 2012
Led by Dominick Frosch of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, this study is titled "Creating a Zone of Openness to Increase Patient-Centered Care." The two novel interventions to be implemented and tested are hypothesized to impact specific processes during the clinical consultation which in turn impact the outcomes of patient activation, empowerment, increased collaborative engagement in clinical decision making and patient perceptions of being informed and satisfied with the care received. An important innovation is the clear recognition that the interventions will be embedded in existing microsystems that must be analyzed and understood to ensure that the implementation approach is responsive to the local environment and workflow logistics.
A further innovation is that the study will also examine the relationship between the interventions and relational coordination among clinical staff in participating clinics. Developed as a way to understand organizational performance and improvement, relational coordination is “a mutually reinforcing process of communication and relation for the purpose of task integration.” A professional team that shows high levels of relational coordination can identify a shared goal (e.g., providing outstanding patient care) and has mutual respect for the roles each team member plays in achieving this goal. Initially developed in the context of the airline industry, relational coordination is increasingly being applied in health care settings as an approach to facilitating organizational change. The concepts are philosophically consistent with patient centered care. The study will measure the degree of relational coordination among clinical teams to examine if it is associated with better patient outcomes and will also measure whether the interventions reciprocally lead to greater relational coordination among clinical teams. For more about this proposal, visit here. For the Health Affairs article that lays the groundwork for this research, visit here.
Join Us in Welcoming Professor Jane Dutton to the RCRC Board
April 3, 2012
RCRC welcomes Jane E. Dutton, Ph.D. as a new member of the Board, approved unanimously by our current board members to fill the seat recently vacated by Edgar Schein. MIT Professor Emeritus Ed Schein was a powerful influence in the founding of RCRC and has now stepped down to prepare his memoirs. Professor Dutton is a leader in the field of relationships at work who will bring this perspective to the RCRC, with an appeal to both practitioners and researchers. She is the Robert Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Business Administration and Psychology at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. Her research is focused on processes that build capabilities and strengths of employees in organizations. In particular, she examines how high quality connections and identity processes increase employees' and organizations' capabilities. Her research has explored compassion and organizations, resilience and organizations, as well as energy and organizations. This research stream is part of a growing domain of expertise at the University of Michigan called Positive Organizational Scholarship www.bus.umich.edu/Positive. Her past research has explored processes of organizational adaptation, focusing on how strategic issues are interpreted and managed in organizations, as well as issues of organizational identity and change.
On Doctors and Other Divas
Naralle Hanratty, April 14, 2012
1. Skill or service or efficiency is not concerned with empathy or relating.
2. Not only is skill or service or efficiency not concerned with empathy or relating, they are in contradistinction; more of one guarantees less of the other.
3. Empathy or relating is a “nice-to-have”; it’s the icing on top but makes no appreciable (read, measurable) difference in the execution of a skill or service, nor in the world generally.
There’s also a fourth underlying assumption which Seth Godin notes (how great is this guy? Posts seven days a week, produces potent little gems most):
4. Trapped in the “scarcity model” of thinking, we assume if someone is truly gifted they don’t have the “time or focus to also be kind or reasonable or good at understanding our needs”. In short, a “diva” is great because she is a jerk.
All these types of assumptions are markers of the “scarcity model” of thinking, the conception of the world in which everything is finite. They are also markers of a conception of the world in which a fatuously mechanistic cause-and-effect operates.
It’s all nonsense, all a fundamental delusion about the world and the way it works, and people like Professor Jody Hoffer Gittell are illustrating it.
Touch Feely? Get Over it! Dr. Tony Suchman Blogs about Jody Hoffer Gittell and Relational Coordination
April 13, 2012
Dr. Tony Suchman, McCardle Ramerman Center website
Brandeis University researcher Jody Hoffer Gittell has been making sense of how people work together effectively for most of her life. She grew up on a farm where there was constant work with many interdependent tasks. Even at that young age she found it striking that everyone knew what needed to be done and how to coordinate their work with everyone else’s.
More than defining RC, Jody identified specific qualities of communication and relationship that made this possible and designed the elegantly simple Relational Coordination Survey to measure them. She found that on high performing teams members share the same goals, know about each other’s work and respect each other’s work.
New Book
Developing Relational Leadership
by RCRC partner Carsten Hornstrup and colleagues
March 5, 2012
Taos Institute Publications
Taos Institute Publications is thrilled to offer this innovative book which has been translated from Danish to English. The authors share a wealth of experiences working with leadership and change in organizations.
"Developing Relational Leadership offers the scholar, the practitioner, and most importantly, the scholar-practitioner an exuberance of riches. The authors provide a deep foray into the worlds of systemic, cybernetic and constructionist ideas, while bringing those ideas to the worlds of leadership and organizational change and practice. The authors share cases that present tools for exploring these ideas and practices..."
Relational Coordination: Harnessing the Transformative Power of Relationships to Improve VA Health Care
Richard M. Frankel, Ph.D.
Excerpted from The Richard L. Roudebush VA HSR&D Center of Excellence on Implementing Evidence-Based Practice
November 2011
One promising research approach to transforming performance within and across settings is "relational coordination," a term coined by Jody Gittell, a professor of management at Brandeis University. Relational coordination refers to, "a mutually reinforcing process of interaction between communication and relationships carried out for the purpose of task integration." Gittell first applied the concept to studying Southwest Airlines and found that the company’s success lay primarily in its ability to encourage and support high levels of communication across multiple job classifications and management. Her latest work has been in health care where she has shown that organizations with high levels of relational coordination have better care outcomes and lower overall costs.
...Relational coordination is not about blaming individuals for poor performance, but rather encouraging us to recognize the immense complexity of creating coordinated experiences for the billion patient visits in the United States each year. Doing so requires everyone’s best collective efforts and creativity; to do less may put the future of patients like Mr. LW, and our current medical culture, at risk.
Read the complete article here
Transforming Relationships for High Performance
The Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship Newsletter
November 4, 2011
Excerpted from The Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship website
Perhaps what is most intriguing about the Collaborative (RCRC) is the use of quantitative methodologies to measure and map the highly qualitative processes of relational coordination and organizational change. We are developing methods—like relationship mapping—that help to make relational dynamics visible to participants for the purpose of establishing the current state, then reflecting on it and transforming it as part of a broader intervention. Other methods may be useful for assessing the effectiveness of interventions, for example, using pre-and post-intervention measures of relational coordination.
Relational coordination theory contributes to POS by making visible the humanistic process underlying the technical process of coordination, showing that coordination encompasses not only the management of interdependence between tasks, but also between the people who perform the tasks.
Read the complete article here
Australian Primary Health Care Research Institute Awards Jody Hoffer Gittell International Visiting Fellowship
Awarded through:
Lucio Naccarella - Australian Health Workforce Institute, University of Melbourne
Greg Bamber - Department of Management, Faculty of Business and Economics, Monash University
David Burns - Affinity Organisational Development
Excerpted from the Australian Health Workforce Institute website
Prof. Jody Hoffer Gittell's work and research experience has direct relevance to the Australian PHC service system, which is facing pressures due to increasing demands from an ageing population, increasing chronic disease, increasing co-morbidities, workforce shortages, and increasing health system complexity and fragmentation. To improve access to care, to enhance local service coordination, population health planning and service integration, the Australian Government is establishing a network of independent PHC organisations (PHCOs/ Medicare Locals) National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission (NHHRC).
Dr Gittell's work has clearly shown that policy changes and increased access to care will not alone address these pressures. Timely, accurate, problem-solving communication that crosses all organisational boundaries is required to build a high performing work system that foster relational coordination across multidisciplinary primary health care team.
