Healthcare leaders can readily name the outcomes their organizations need: stronger engagement, improved retention, better patient experiences, higher quality, and healthier cultures. The more complex question is how to translate those priorities into consistent behaviors across the healthcare enterprise.
In our recent AMGA webinar, Behavior Change at Scale: What Healthcare Leaders Must Build Next, polling results reinforced a clear theme: organizations largely know where they want to go, but consistently translating strategy into action remains difficult.
What Healthcare Leaders Told Us
- Inconsistent adoption is the biggest barrier. 56% of respondents identified inconsistent adoption as the top challenge to strategy execution, followed by limited manager capacity (25%) and lack of accountability (19%).
- Leadership effectiveness is the top priority. 38% selected leadership effectiveness as their most important outcome for the next 12 months, followed by workforce engagement (25%) and patient experience (25%).
- Strategy communicated to frontline execution is low. Just 5% said they are very confident that strategic priorities are consistently translated into frontline behaviors. Most were either not very confident (53%) or somewhat confident (37%).
Taken together, the findings point to a familiar knowing-doing gap: the challenge is building the leadership capacity, accountability, and infrastructure required to turn priorities into consistent behaviors at scale.
Behavior Change at Scale: Five Priorities for Healthcare Leaders
Together Stephen Beeson, MD and Matthew W. Gosney, Ed.D. explored why traditional, disconnected development efforts often fall short and what leaders can build instead. The discussion surfaced five priorities:
- Name an owner. Behavior change often spans HR, quality, patient experience, and operations. Without one accountable leader, a shared language, and common measures of success, well-intentioned programs remain fragmented.
- Close the knowing-doing gap. Defining the desired outcome is only the beginning. Leaders must identify the specific, observable behaviors that will produce it.
- Rebuild coaching infrastructure. Many of the informal structures that once supported real-time feedback and peer learning have disappeared. Organizations need to make coaching and development part of everyday work again.
- Start at the top. Senior leaders have significant influence on organizational culture. Sustainable change requires them to participate in and model the same behaviors they ask others to adopt.
- Fund behavior change as one strategy. Fragmented budgets often reflect fragmented accountability. Aligning investment across functions can help behavior change become an enterprise capability rather than a collection of separate programs.
Together, these actions offer healthcare leaders a practical starting point: name the behaviors, build the system that reinforces them, and lead the change from the top.
Continue The Conversation In Person
Interested in aligning your organizational priorities with what’s coming next in healthcare? Join other healthcare senior leaders at the Healthcare Workforce Futures Forum this October.
- Philadelphia — October 6, 2026: https://info.practicingexcellence.com/2026philadelphia
- Denver — October 22, 2026: https://info.practicingexcellence.com/denver2026
Choose the location that works best for you.
Watch The Full Webinar Recording
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