THE ARBINGER INSTITUTE
Authors of Leadership and Self-Deception, The Anatomy of Peace, and The Outward Mindset
Two years ago, an executive from a healthcare client of ours called to tell us that the executives were thinking of commissioning someone to write a book about their company. They wanted to know whether we would allow them to share some of the Arbinger Institute's ideas. They were asking because, in their view, their story cannot be told without talking about Arbinger since they built their company, in large part, through the process of applying Arbinger's ideas to healthcare.
Beyond our early thumbs up, we have played no role in the writing or production of this book. In fact, we heard very little about the project until Kimberly White reached out to us eighteen months later with a near-completed manuscript.
Upon reading the manuscript, we were reminded again that although the people in this organization have been our clients and friends for years, they have also been our teachers. They have built an amazing company that enriches millions of lives—the lives of the elderly, the infirm, the injured, and the family members of all those they serve. They do this perhaps better than those in any other organization of its kind.
At the heart of their success lies this insight: to be great at caregiving, you have to actually care. Behavioral strategies designed to demonstrate care, which have become increasingly popular as healthcare reimbursements have become tied to customer satisfaction scores, aren't enough. No matter how many training dollars an organization puts toward trying to improve the behaviors of its people, there is no way around the stubborn truth that real care begins only with real caring. Other people can tell whether the care we are showing is real and heartfelt or manufactured and fake—our patients can tell, our coworkers can tell, and our family members can tell. Try as we might, we can't hide the truth.
So it isn't enough to modify people's behaviors. The change that is most needed is a change in how we see—how we see others, ourselves, and our obligations relative to one another. This realm of how we see is the realm that we call mindset. In over three decades of working with clients in healthcare and many other industries, we have learned that efforts to change both mindset and behavior yield dramatically better results than efforts to change behavior alone.
The genius of the company you will encounter in this book is that by focusing on mindset change as well as behavior change, from top to bottom, it has established a program and culture that produces real, actual, heartfelt caring. And the value of this book is that it manages to capture that caring in such a way that it seeps from every page into the reader's heart.
Kimberly White engaged on a personal journey as much as a professional one when she threw herself into learning what makes this particular company tick. The nurses and aides and janitors who opened her eyes to how they care in their jobs also opened her heart to how she had been failing to care in her own life and how that reality was the cause of so much of the pain, despair, and anguish that she had been blaming on others.
Studying the transformative work of this particular company changed Kimberly's life. Reading how and why that happened may change yours.
The Arbinger Institute
November 21, 2017
