Leadership: Transparency, Honesty, and The Value of Your Team

INTRODUCTION:
You’re listening to Tiller-Hewitt’s Leadership Lens Podcast. If you’re a leader - or an aspiring leader - who wants to stay relevant and impactful… YOU’RE IN THE RIGHT PLACE.

At Tiller-Hewitt we believe it’s faster, smarter -- and less painful -- to learn from leaders who have walked before us. That’s why we invite top leaders to be our guests on the Leadership Lens.

Your host is Tammy Tiller-Hewitt – Founder of Tiller-Hewitt HealthCare Strategies. Let’s jump into the podcast.

TAMMY:
Today my guest is Matt Fry – President and CEO of St. John’s Hospital in Springfield, Illinois – a member of Hospital Sisters Health System. Like all leaders Matt is crazy busy – leading their flagship hospital while wrapping up his doctorate degree – but he candidly gives us great insight or what he refers to as his “dirty little secret” around successful leadership.

TAMMY:
Matt Fry, welcome to the Leadership Lens podcast.

MATT:
Thanks for having me, Tammy.

TAMMY:
Oh my gosh. I'm so excited. I have so many questions to ask you. You relocated to the Midwest from California, and I can't wait to hear all the aha’s that you've experienced around that, you're in a doctorate program, you're with an emphasis on mentorship for leaders. I mean, we have so much to talk about. Let's like jump in quickly.

So let me first start by saying you're such a young leader at the helm of HSHS, an over 400-bed Flagship Hospital… so my first question is, what would you say is the secret to your career, growth, and success at such a young age?

MATT:
Well, you know, I think the dirty secret here is there's a lot of luck, there's a lot of timing, there's quite a bit of hard work involved, no doubt about that. But you know, I haven't achieved any of this on my own. A lot of this has been due to the mentors that have guided me along my path and frankly, you know, my teams - listening and learning from my teams and growing and developing with them, alongside them - has been critical to getting where I am today.

TAMMY:
Wow, that's nice. I hope all of them are listening so they can hear your humble shout-out to them.

So, you talked about mentorship. I know that is something that's near and dear to your heart, talk to me about mentorship and why you have such an interest in that.

MATT:
Yeah. So mentorship is traditionally thought of as you know, a more seasoned, a more experienced leader working collaboratively with a less experienced leader to help develop them and guide them as they pursue their career aspirations. And mentorship to me, what it means, in a nutshell, is being willing to give back and serve.

I have been very fortunate over the last 11 years in healthcare to have some really incredible mentors that have guided me along the way. Many of the key attributes that I am sure to incorporate in my leadership style are really directly handed down from mentors.

I have a very firm belief in servant leadership. About 10 years ago, I had a mentor and he was really great. One day he explained to me what servant leadership meant to him and it really stuck with me and frankly, I incorporate this into my daily activities at work. So he said, really Matt it comes down to three things.

One is you have to be responsive. You need to answer every one of your emails that come into your email box every single day and it's not just look at them and delete them or move them to a folder. You have to read them, you have to address them. Yes, it will make for some pretty long days. But in the end, you're here to serve your team and your colleagues and how can you possibly serve them if you're not being responsive to them?

The second you need to do what you say you're going to do. If you are a really solid person and you follow through 99 times and then you drop the ball one time or two times - Unfortunately, people will remember the one or two times that you dropped the ball. They won't remember necessarily the 99 times that you carried it through the end zone. His point was you need to always be on point, and you need to always follow through on what you say you're going to follow through on.

And the third thing was you just need to be a likable person. People gotta enjoy working with you, they gotta want to partner with you and collaborate with you. I share that story with you because that is something that is very practical that I learned very early on in my career in healthcare that has stuck with me and I think has really helped me to be a pretty solid leader.

TAMMY:
Wow, those are some great tips. You know, our listeners, I would, I don't know if it's a straight up 50 50 but I know it's close that 50 percent are senior executives who are sitting in your seat today and the other half are those who aspire and who are working their way to your position. And I think that will serve a lot of aspiring leaders well. Not that current leaders don't need a refresher for sure, but wow that was good stuff. That was worth the price of admission right there.

Well, while we're talking about raising up young leaders, and your experience with your mentors, what are some of the characteristics or traits or experience that you look for when you're building or adding to your executive team?

MATT:
That's a really good question. You know, I have a colleague, a friend and frankly, she's a mentor of mine as well. She always says culture eats strategy for lunch every day of the week. And what she means by that is, you know, you can have the greatest strategy in the world, you can have the greatest action plan in the world. But if you don't have an aligned strategy, if you have folks that are on your team that don't really line up with your mission vision, values, and what you're trying to build from a cultural standpoint, you'll never be able to actually achieve the strategies that you're setting out for. And if you do achieve them, you'll never be able to sustain them.

I really look for a cultural fit. I think there's a paradigm and I don't know who created this, but the paradigm is “skill versus will.” I'm a firm believer that skills can be trained, right? Skills can be taught and learned over time, but will, the desire to learn and grow, the ability to listen to others feedback and to incorporate that into your activities…that is something that is much harder to train someone in. One of the things that I really look for in team members on my senior team are cultural fit, and then also that will factor - that willingness to learn and grow. The skills can come a little bit later, it's really that willingness to be a part of the team and to be coachable.

TAMMY:
I'm curious when you think about will, does that also include having a fire in their belly? Would that be part of it?

MATT:
Absolutely! I mean, we have to be passionate about what we do. If you're just kind of, well, I guess we'll do this or well, yeah, I guess I can do that. The problem is the team sees that. The team that works for you. People are pretty in tune with this type of stuff. When your direct reports see that you're not passionate about something or you're just kind of going through the motions, I think that in turn provides them a little bit of safe space to do the same and you start to degrade the culture of, you know, call to action and things like that are so critical, particularly today in a healthcare environment that is quickly evolving and that requires us to pivot on a fairly regular basis.

TAMMY:
Well, let's talk about the industry a little bit. I wanna start by asking you about the big, big, big differences between Sacramento, California, and Springfield, Illinois.

MATT:
Well, from a geography standpoint, there's no mountains out here. It's pretty darn flat. The weather is just something I've never experienced in my life. I mean, three days ago we were having tornadoes blow through here and then yesterday it was 80 degrees. That's probably the biggest difference. The people in the Midwest compared to the people in California, very similar. I mean, I think all around, folks are good people, folks are trying to do the best thing they can for their families and for their communities. And that is what fills my cup. I mean that's what gets me up in the morning and makes me so energized to come to work, not only work alongside those folks, but to help grow and develop the communities that we serve.

TAMMY:
And what about healthcare, big differences there between California and Illinois?

MATT:
There's definitely some big differences. From a regulatory standpoint, California is a pretty difficult state to run ambulatory operations, as well as acute operations. It's much more regulated and there are a lot of other interest groups that need to be taken into consideration.

We don't have that same environment here in Central Illinois. But the financial challenges remain fairly consistent. The success and viability of a hospital in some respects is largely driven by the payer mix. And that's true in California, that's true in Illinois and frankly, that's true across the country. I think there are some important differences, but I also think there are many, many similarities.

I'll give you another similarity. When you look at the challenges facing the healthcare industry in California, and you look at the challenges facing the healthcare industry in Illinois. We still struggle in Illinois with staffing. In California, they have the same challenge.

California might be a little bit tougher to staff, particularly in hospitals, because there's mandated nurse-to-patient ratios depending on the level of acuity and where the patient is placed in the hospital. We don't have those in Illinois. So, staffing can be even more of a challenge out there.

But frankly, the supply-demand structure of nurses, of techs, of physicians - unfortunately, that is imbalanced across the country. Many of the workforce challenges, many of the financial challenges, those things really do transcend across state lines.

TAMMY:
There's this myth that everything on the East and West Coast is so much further advanced than the Midwest. So being a Midwestern girl, it's music to my ears when I hear we're not behind the curve of the different coastlines.

MATT:
You know Tammy, I would actually even take that a step further, and I would say that we have some pretty advanced care delivery models in the Midwest. I would argue that many of the services that our hospitals provide in Illinois would rival any day of the week the services provided at the vast majority of the hospitals in California. And that's based off personal experience. I would be confident making that same assertion, for any region in the United States. We have some pretty top-notch healthcare delivery models and systems in the state of Illinois. I'm pretty proud of that.

TAMMY:
Well, there you go, listeners come to Illinois. This is where it's happening. So there are so many priorities in health care right now, if you had the power to tackle one of them overnight and make real improvements, which would you choose and why?

MATT:
Oh, gosh. Okay. I'm gonna talk a little bit and then I'll come back to one. The things that keep me up at night are really the financial environments that we're working in. With reimbursement structures, payer mix, with the availability of capital, these types of things, they really do have a significant impact on our ability to expand services, to replace aging capital equipment, and ultimately, they impact our ability to provide care to our patients.

But I would say one thing stands out probably even more than that and that is staffing. Our ability to keep our units staffed with nurses, with tech, support staff, so the EVS workers, the food service workers. We are experiencing, and this is across the industry, we’re experiencing staffing challenges that I think are really unprecedented. Some of it has to do with the expectations that our employees have come to feel is necessary and customary with the job. A lot of that was spurred by the evolution that we were forced to make during the height of the pandemic. Remote work, flexible schedules, things of that nature. Those are very hard to actually implement, particularly in an acute setting where people being present and being in the hospital is not only vital but necessary for actual care delivery. But honestly, they're just, there just is not enough people. And so it, it somewhat ties back into the financial situation because the supply demand curve is so imbalanced, the cost of labor, the hourly rate, the benefits etc., that has now increased significantly. And so it further impacts our ability to make a little bit of a profit margin. And for those of us that run not-for-profit hospitals, essentially what a profit margin means is, that's the money that you reinvest back in the organization and back in the people. We're not paying out dividends to shareholders or anything like that. All of that net operating income is actually being reinvested in the organization. So when we have a negative net operating income, particularly when that occurs for years and years, our ability to reinvest and procure state of the art equipment for imaging and laboratory and in our emergency departments, and things of that nature is significantly diminished.

So for me, I think that if I could solve one thing and I could solve it tomorrow, it would be the supply of nurses, the supply of ancillary staff, the supply of support staff, not only for acute settings, but also for ambulatory settings. And unfortunately, that doesn't even touch on the supply and demand imbalance that we're also experiencing with physicians and advanced practitioners. So you know, both of those are, are very acute issues that we're dealing with and I would love to find a solution as quickly as possible.

TAMMY:
From the staffing losses that you've experienced, is there a generation or an age heavy group those losses represent?

MATT:
Well, I think it depends where folks are at in their career journey and where they're at from retirement savings aspect and a personal wealth generation aspect. This is anecdotal, but I know a lot of younger folks that are in their twenties and thirties that have decided to leave the industry either due to work-life balance concerns or due to just sheer workload concerns. I also know mid-careerists that have left for similar reasons or because the job market has shifted so much that they had other opportunities available to them that they didn't previously have. Then finally, you know, those, more senior team members that are in their fifties, sixties, seventies that are financially doing ok and they've decided that either they want to pivot to a new career adventure or they just wanna sit back and kind of ease into retirement. I've kind of seen it run across the spectrum.

From my perspective, I'm not so sure that there is necessarily a generational issue here. I think it is more of a - where are you at with your own personal circumstances and, you know, people are much more bold now in being willing to make, I think fairly aggressive changes in their career based on that dynamic.

TAMMY:
Yeah, that's an interesting and great answer. I just remember when the 2010 census was published and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill did this study. One of the findings was about what they were calling the silver tsunami. How all these baby boomers were gonna be retiring at some record clip? So, it's like we had a 10 year warning and I've never asked the question.

What do you think are the top leadership challenges today, professionally and organizationally?

MATT:
I think one of the biggest challenges we face as leaders is transparency, integrity and communication. And I kind of lump all of those together because by and large the majority of leaders want to do the right things for the right reasons. I will say for the last couple of years, in particular during the COVID-19 pandemic, we've been in a situation where we've had to make some very tough decisions and we've had to unfortunately be very reactive in a lot of situations rather than proactive. What thats required is for us to make decisions that impact services provided or impact our colleagues in a very real way. Sometimes through staffing reductions, sometimes through requesting colleagues to change up their job and start doing something new or different. It's really difficult to balance being transparent and open and honest with the team and appropriately keeping things confidential until it's the right time to release that information.

I think what a lot of people don't fully realize until they're faced with these types of situations is it can be really harmful to your colleagues if you release certain information before it's an appropriate time - before you know all the facts or before you have all the details for example, it can actually do more harm than good, and ultimately, all of us as leaders, we have an obligation, a very serious obligation to serve our colleagues to the utmost of our ability. So, you know, I think that’s been a very difficult challenge for leaders, particularly over the last couple of years.

I think one other challenge that we're facing in the healthcare industry is really being able to fully understand and predict the landscape six months from now, 12 months from now, two years from now. So when we're doing strategic planning and when we're, you know really looking at where we wanna go as an organization, we can make decisions that help support that. The reason why that's so stressed right now is because there are a lot of external forces that impact our trajectory or perceived trajectory.

So supply chain is a great example. We all had these big plans for turning around our hospitals, and then all of a sudden, supply chains went completely haywire and we started seeing some things disappear off the shelves, some things increased in price significantly as we had to scour the supply chain networks to find alternatives.

That one disruption was significant and ended up resulting in eating away a lot of net operating income for many systems. You compound that with labor, compound that with inflation, I could probably keep going for five minutes here. These types of external stimuli have been incredibly difficult to predict and thus they've had a pretty damaging impact on our ability to accurately strategize for the future.

TAMMY:
Yeah, both of those challenges are really good. I liked your balancing transparency with appropriateness of confidential information. That was good because that's always been a delicate balance, but I feel like in the age of transparency, it rises higher with the challenge that it brings.

And then you're right, the challenge to fully understand and predict the landscape. We work with a lot of forecasting organizations likeSg2 and Vizient who have always been in the long-term forecasting, the long-term planning, and our company is about near-term growth. And so now we've done a lot of partnering too that we can help organizations on the near term growth while we're in to build up reserves to fund the long term planning and strategy. It's an interesting really dichotomy that we talk about every day.

With that said Tiller-Hewitt works with organizations that want their leaders or with leaders who want to consistently deliver strategic growth and measurable results. What are your secrets and success strategies around both of those -strategic growth and measurable result goals?

MATT:
Well, I think it all comes down to teamwork. I had mentioned earlier transparency, I'll use it in a little bit different light for this response. You know, being really transparent and open and honest with the team about our current situation… where do we need to go, how quickly do we need to go there and then really leaning into the team and relying on them, trusting them to come up with some viable solutions.

I mean, sure, I have some good ideas but frankly, the people that are actually doing the work, the people that are closest to the work, the nurses in the units, the techs that are, you know, working in the units or providing imaging directly. They are, in many cases, an untapped resource for information and knowledge about how a process might be improved, where waste exists, how a process might even be broken.

So I think it's really pulling teams together, relying on them to be subject matter experts. And then moving forward on quick iterative experiments to see if we can make a difference. Sometimes you'll fail, right? As leaders, we need to be willing to own up to that, to accept that, look at it as a learning opportunity, and then pivot and move on to the next thing. That's really important. But honestly empowering our teams and trusting them and collaborating with them and you know, really leaning on them to come up with solutions I think is one of the greatest strategies that we can implement in order to find those solutions to challenges that frankly are impacting operations, efficiency, cost… you name it.

TAMMY:
You know, that is an excellent answer. And I love hearing a young leader answer that way because I learned much later in my career that so many people are just waiting to be asked and I don't understand why they don't raise their hand. I guess I've always been a hand-raiser. I think I've left so much good stuff on the table, over the course of my career, because I just thought people would step up if they heard we need help. But you really have to go and say I need your help. I really need for you to be a part of the solution here or find a solution, you're the front line, you see what's happening. So, Matt, that was an excellent answer. I love it.

MATT:
Tammy, you know, we also as leaders need to make sure that as we're empowering them. We're providing them the space to contribute in a meaningful way. We're providing them, you know, the intellectual and psychological security. No idea is a dumb idea-type deal. And I think we need to keep them informed along the way, right? It's like hey, we've implemented X Y, and Z, this is how we're doing. We're, we're either green or we're red. If we're red, why are we red? When do we expect to be green? Can we get there? Have we done a root cause analysis? Essentially, it’s you know, incorporating them in the process. Some of that is going to require pulling them from the floor so they can spend time in these meetings and things like that. But we just need to be very intentional as leaders and move through these types of challenges and try to incorporate folks.

TAMMY:
Yeah. Wow, that's good. Well, I can't believe we are at the end of our interview, but I want to end with our rapid-fire lightning round questions.

MATT:
Absolutely.

TAMMY:
OK. First, what's your favorite leadership quote?

MATT:
If I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants. Sir, Isaac Newton.

TAMMY:
What's your biggest leadership pet peeve,

MATT:
I'd say non-responsiveness. It's probably one of my biggest pet peeves.

The other thing I was going to say and kind of delayed on was folks who maybe are a little arrogant. Folks that are noncollaborative, that general air of feeling like your above others. I think there's no place for that in constructive problem-solving and frankly in leading our organizations of today.

TAMMY:
Awesome. What's the top value that guides what you do?

MATT:
Integrity.

TAMMY:
Now, I know my next question is, do you have a hobby if you do I'm sure it was put on hold for your doctorate that you're now working 100 hours a week and then adding another 100 for your dissertation preparation. So, do you have a hobby?

MATT:
I do have a hobby. My hobby is and this is very boring but is reading and I do get very little time to do that.

TAMMY:
Well, it'll, it'll come back around soon. And what about your proudest moment over the last year?

MATT:
Oh, the proudest moment over the last year is my wife and kids, their adaptability moving 2,000 miles away and taking on the challenge head-on, and really embracing Springfield and embracing getting incorporated into the community - I couldn't be prouder. I'm very lucky to have my wife as a partner.

TAMMY:
That's awesome. Well, Matt, thank you again for being my guest on the Leadership Lens podcast. This has been a delight.

MATT:
Absolutely, Tammy. Thank you so much for having me.

CLOSING:

Tiller-Hewitt works with leaders who want to consistently deliver strategic growth and measurable results. The organization is recognized as the leading experts in strategic growth, network integrity, and physician engagement. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Leadership Lens. For more leadership resources and strategic growth solutions, visit tillerhewitt.com.