How Value IQ + EQ in Leadership Creates Sustainable Improvements

IQ EQ
May 10, 2023

How Value IQ + EQ in Leadership Creates Sustainable Improvements

Lydon Neumann 2 LR 2 300x300 1

Written by Lydon Neumann

Category: Change Management - Performance Improvement

I recently hosted an in-person focus group with key healthcare executives. The topic of discussion was “How Value IQ + EQ Creates Sustainable Improvement.” The group agreed with our initial thesis that, more often than not, healthcare organizations fail to seek and realize full benefits and value when investing and implementing enabling technologies. We identified several reasons behind this challenge along with how a process framework combining Value IQ and Value EQ can help create a sustainable environment for identifying and realizing benefits and continual improvements.

You are likely familiar with many of the challenges healthcare organizations face when implementing new technologies. Often these challenges emerge from a lack of up-front activity to identify, quantify, and mandate improvements that would ensure the realization of benefits for large projects, often technology investments, and help track progress and sustainment of the desired outcomes. Challenges tend to appear when organizations are narrowly focused on implementation activities instead of concentrating on desired results that would drive on-going operational excellence. Plus, without proper guidance and planning, we see a lack of adoption and achievement of best practices and optimized workflows that would raise and sustain overall performance. Of course, it doesn’t help if the organization is missing the effective communications and formal change management to prepare the business for the transformations.

While our group agreed with the challenges most organizations face, they were curious to learn what we considered to be the key ingredients of Value IQ and Value EQ and how they could help ensure investments were delivering measurable and persistent value.

Value IQ


Refers to the scoping of the effort, cost modeling, and benefit intelligence gathered to fully understand its high-impact potential to deliver real value.

Value EQ


Ties to the human intelligence and leadership required to set achievable objectives to realize desired results, including:

  • Program + project management

  • Governance

  • Change Management

Value Creation

Value IQ is the analysis that helps organizations determine the What and Why for their project. This analysis is critical to any project, it establishes clear objectives with defined and quantifiable metrics. Setting up clear KPIs and developing dashboards to track current baselines and future statistics helps organizations visualize and trend their success over time. Not only does this help validate the decisions made at the beginning of the project, but it can also help set needed guide-rails for decisions made throughout the project and for future enhancements as well.

Value EQ is the human side, it is the delivery, communications, preparations, and execution of the project itself, Value EQ is the how. If we were considering a piece of art, Value IQ would be the media, the medium, and the subject or definition of the project; while Value EQ would be the painter, their approach, technique, and how they choose to communicate the piece to the world around them. For a healthcare organization to deliver value, they need to make sure the leadership team is aligned, ownership and accountability for the project is clear, and a model for project governance, project management, change management, and training has been established.

To deliver the targeted value on technology investments, we believe Value IQ and Value EQ need to be interdependently woven together throughout the planning, implementation, and sustainment phases of a project.