In the world of hospitals, patients, and physicians, there is a quality metric that speaks volumes about how well doctors and nurses think critically and attend to those who need them. Failure to Rescue refers to a delay in recognizing and responding to a patient’s needs or complications, usually resulting in death.
As it turns out, a healthcare team’s ability to rescue people when they experience a complication has proven to be one of the most reliable indicators of expert care. What distinguishes good from great in a hospital setting is not about failing less, but in rescuing more.
Great healthcare teams and institutions are fixated on rescuing more people who need them than they are on eliminating the risks associated with failure. How good they are at recognizing and responding to complications actually highlights how good they really are. In the words of one famous physician, “The harshest failure is the failure to rescue someone who needs you.”
It’s not hard to use this idea and analogy to think about great leadership. Leaders who recognize the unique needs and potential of team members and work diligently to not let them fail are likely more skilled and expert than those who set tests to see who on the team will rise to the occasion.
Leaders who think of themselves as developers of talent and potential are fundamentally different than leaders who build teams by cutting out anyone who cannot reach high performance. A Failure to Rescue or develop others’ talents is a problem that plagues too many leaders.
Which leader would you describe as most masterful: a leader who selects a set of highly skilled members and develops them into a great team, or a leader who seizes the potential and skill level of top, average and low performers and turns them into a great team? The latter is certainly harder, and it speaks to the idea of building a “mastery of rescue,” as surgeon and author Atul Gawande likes to describe it.
Rescue, in this case, is only a metaphor and does not fully capture what leaders really do. Good leaders don’t rescue as much as they learn the skills and talents of those they work with and invest, improve, and develop them. The mindset of finding great talent versus creating great talent is what separates real expertise and skill between leaders.
Just like great doctors, the best leaders aren’t as concerned with a failure to rescue as they are in rescuing more people. How do you measure up on that metric? How many average performers have you developed into top performers in your career?
