Leadership: Lessons that Drive Leadership & Organizational Growth

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 Yelena Bouaziz. Of all my podcast interviews, this might be my hardest to tee up because she took us to so- many - places.

You’ll love hearing about her journey as an only child, and an impressionable teenage girl, her family immigrated from Russia to (wait for it) North Carolina. From Russia to North Carolina. If that doesn’t scream culture shock, nothing will! She shares a couple of very relevant lessons learned from the cultural differences that admittedly made her a better leader – and frankly, these lessons provide valuable reminders for all leaders!

She shares great advice for all you overachievers listening! I kept saying – “OH, this will set someone free today!”

I loved an aha moment she recently experienced while having a conversation with her child’s teacher that ironically applies to all leaders today! Then we jumped into Yelena's unprecedented expertise at Sg2 around consumer loyalty, innovation, what we can learn from outside healthcare, and what organizations miss when they uber-focus on market share data as their true north.

When you finish with the podcast, Yelena shares so much more on our leadership webinar series titled: Don’t Expect Growth – Earn it with Customer Loyalty. You can find that full recording and slides on our website at www.tillerhewitt.com.

I’ll hush it up so you too can get all that Yelena brought to this podcast.

TAMMY:
Yelena, welcome to the Leadership Lens podcast.

YELENA:
Thank you for having me, Tammy. I'm such a huge fan of yours, so it's truly a pleasure to be here.

TAMMY:
Oh, thank you. For those of you who don't know Yelena yet, she is one of the quiet but brilliant types. In fact, on every occasion I've had the privilege of working with you, Yelena. Once you start talking, I never want you to stop because you always have something incredibly interesting thought-provoking and, and just very thoughtful and really just off-the-charts innovative.

YELENA:
Oh, well, thank you. You're setting up a very high expectation for me that I'm going to try to live up to.

TAMMY:
Yes, you will, no doubt about it. Well, most people know at Tiller-Hewitt we like to say, “let data tell you a story” but when I first met you I just discovered quickly that describes you on steroids, how you can take a complex set of analytics and create a story in such a way that's compelling, significant, memorable and, and honestly, for me, it's so easy then to repeat and share, so people think I'm Yelena-level smart.

YELENA:
Well, thank you. Data has definitely been my passion.

TAMMY:
Yeah, we'll talk a lot about that today. But before we move on, I just want you to forgive me in advance, but I want to put out this out into the universe that Yelena is actually an author too. She loves to write. And so hopefully we're all going to see a book in Yelena's future that we'll all be able to learn from as well. So if that helps push you over the edge to get that book written, then it's worth you being upset with me temporarily for letting the universe know your plan.

YELENA:
No, I love it. I love it. That means I have to do it.

TAMMY:
Awesome. So, Yelena at Sg2, you're a principal over solution strategy and innovation. And so what does that fancy title really mean?

YELENA:
Well, don't you love a mouth full of uh titles? So, I'm part of the group that's responsible for essentially kind of conceptualizing and bringing new solutions to the market that are meant to help health systems across the country be better, be more successful. And my specific area that I lead is consumer analytics and consumer strategy.

So I discovered this space of consumer analytics a few years ago before the pandemic. And we just quickly realized how much potential the whole area of consumer strategy and consumer centric loyalty-centric strategy is and how transformative it can be. And so we have really grown it out since then, really expanded.

TAMMY:
Well, before we talk more about what's going on today to lead health care innovation and strategy, I want to back up and I want you to talk about your younger self, specifically your 15-year-old self, and then maybe how that formed you or prepared you for leadership today.

YELENA:
I was 15 years old when my family immigrated from Russia to this tiny place in North Carolina and God bless my parents, they were incredibly courageous because they left pretty much everything they had behind and moved across the ocean, across the ocean of cultures really, to a country where we didn't speak the language. My parents didn't have jobs and their education didn't count. We didn't only not know the language, but as we very quickly discovered, we had no idea about the culture.

We learned that we have to put on hold everything we knew about the way that the world works and just learn it from scratch, learn about the people and the way that life works from the beginning and that when you are a 15-year-old and feels like the world is going to come crashing down if you don't have your social group of friends, it was not the most calming experience.

But I think the saying that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger definitely applies in this case. It made me so much more resilient. In just understanding, as a person, the different challenges that people can have in the different cultures. That definitely is an experience that shaped a lot of who I am in a good way.

TAMMY:
We've all been a teenager and many of us have parented a teenager, but thinking about just the normal stuff that kids go through. Not speaking the language. I just have to giggle under my breath, like from Russia to North Carolina. I mean, you've got, you've got the, the beautiful Southern draw down there. Plus you're trying to learn English and your parents are professionals, right?

YELENA:
Yeah. So, they were both scientists. My dad was a professor of physics. My mom was an engineer and as you can imagine, coming to the United States without knowing the language, you can't exactly jump into the same career. They had to start from scratch literally in entry-level jobs.

TAMMY:
Wow. What a way to have modeled for you.

YELENA:
They're incredible, incredible people.

TAMMY:
Let's talk about your professional life and in your leadership role, I'm curious, did you always know that you wanted a leadership role?

YELENA:
I don't know that I necessarily thought about what the role is that I want as much as I was always very focused on what types of things I wanted to be able to do and be able to achieve something, and that idea of really wanting to work on something meaningful is what has always been with me for as long as I can remember.

But what I also learned very early on is that no matter how small or insignificant the role might be, there is always a way to have an impact and there is always a way to feel fulfilled at it. I remember as a 16-year-old, right? So here I am in a new country. I was actually super excited about a customer service job that I got at Burger King. And I love it. I put my heart and soul into it. I greeted our customers with a smile, and I worked so hard to be as good of a host as I could be for that restaurant, and I felt like I was making a difference. That was that first job experience was very impactful in terms of knowing I can make an impact no matter what it is that I do as long as I put my passion into it.

TAMMY:
Right. I love that. I think people think falsely that you have to have a big title to make a big difference, but that's not true. I love that. Well, was there a pivotal point in your career, defining point that felt like an epiphany or an affirmation of your chosen path?

YELENA:
It was, it was, and the irony Tammy is that you would think that after crossing the ocean and coming into a new country, taking risk is something that would have been natural to me. Well, it wasn't. I was actually very risk averse, and as a good child from an immigrant family, I was dead set on going to medical school. From the moment I started college, my entire life was planned out month by month for the next 10 years.

I worked very diligently towards getting all of my pre-med requirements and checking all the boxes of the activities that medical schools were going to be looking for, participating in research projects and it made me miserable. So eventually I made what at the time felt like a huge decision to quit my research job. And I thought, ok well I need a job while I'm figuring out what to do with my life, and I took a job as a recruiter for clinical trials, which felt nothing like what I was doing before because it was all about going out and forming relationships with the patients. No science, no content generation to this job, and again, it was meant to sort of be my, temporary opportunity to give me time to think about what my next step should be. And it turned out that there couldn't have been a better opportunity for me at the time because those people skills is what I needed to develop after sitting in the lab for the previous four or five years. And it was just, it was a pivotal moment, not because clinical trials specifically is what I ended up pursuing my career in because obviously I didn't, but realizing just how surprising opportunities can be. You don't have to plan everything. You don't have to try to control everything.

What's more important is to sort of think about what is it that I need to develop now. What is the right next step for me now, over the next 1 to 3 years? Then sort of just play it by ear. The best things honestly that have ever happened to me in my career were when I least expected them to, including consumer analytics! I certainly would have never expected to end up doing consumer analytics and here I am loving it more than I could ever imagine.

TAMMY:
That recommendation I think may set some listeners free! Because often there is that misconception that everything has to be planned out and rigid. I mean, you said month-by-month, 10-year plan. That's insane. I can't even imagine that!

YELENA:
Well, I'm really hoping I'm setting some folks free out there.

TAMMY:
Yeah, you definitely are. Okay, so what do you think, speaking of leadership staying in that lane for a while, what do you think are the top leadership challenges today professionally and/or organizationally?

YELENA:
Great question. You know, a couple of weeks ago, I was picking up my four-year-old from his school and it was one of those days where Canada fires were blowing a lot of smoke into Chicago and, it was an incredibly bad air quality. And his teacher came out and we asked her, what is your plan for managing this? And she looked at us and said, we live in an unprecedented time. We don't know, we don't have a precedent for this. So we're sort of just deciding day by day how we're going to react to it and how we're going to plan the kids schedule. And it sort of just shocked me, Tammy. Here we were after the pandemic where we felt, we thought that the pandemic is about as unprecedented as it gets. Right?

And the pandemic was followed by war and there were natural disasters greater than we ever expected. And now the healthcare industry is going through its most critical financial crisis. And it's sort of this life that we're finding ourselves in where we're continuously suddenly finding ourselves in unprecedented times. And that's what I think is the hardest for leaders is that there is no precedent to turn to. We have to be more agile and flexible than we ever have been in the past, which means dealing with our own capacity for change, but also dealing with our team's capacity for change and leading them through it, helping them be resilient as all these things are coming at us. And at the same time, also managing the strategy of our organizations and being able to pivot the strategy very quickly. And that I can't think of a tougher challenge than that of just being responsible for your organization, for yourself and the people who depend on us. And the best way that I've ever come up with for this is thinking about the people and really being people first, more than ever. Those leaders, we're not going to be able to do everything that needs to be done. But our people are there and we're only as good as they are. So truly investing into our people and enabling them to me is the best way to be resilient through all of this change.

TAMMY:
Yeah, I love that fatigue of living in unprecedented times. It's the new norm.

YELENA:
Yep.

TAMMY:
And maybe when people kind of just accept that, then they can relax and come up with faster, better solutions. But when you're kind of feel like they're chasing rabbits all day and you catch none, you know the old proverb, it's like, maybe just knowing that, that is the new norm that that will help people relax. What do you think the priorities should be in healthcare right now, knowing that there are so many? If you had the power to tackle one of the priorities overnight and make real improvements, what would it be and why?

YELENA:
I'm obviously biased given that consumer strategy is the space that I'm in, but I wouldn't be in it if I didn't believe in it’s transformative power. I truly believe that if systems overnight could wake up and find themselves capable of truly orienting on the consumer, it would be a tremendous transformative power. There are so many misconceptions about what consumer strategy is and we'll talk about it in the webinar, I don't want to go into the details now, but this idea of consumer orientation, so being able to look outside in, truly kind of putting on hold everything that in as a as an organization you believe is good for the consumer and learning how to learn about them is incredibly powerful, and something that as an industry, we just don't have capabilities in. And a lot of times it's sort of said with so much judgment that oh, we're very internally oriented industry and we don't care about patients. That is not true, that it's absolutely not true!

Having been in health care my entire life, I know for a fact that there is nothing that health systems care more about than their patients. That's not the point. The point is what do you do about it. And just like you can decide to be a good listener, you actually have to develop those active listening skills, you have to learn how to be consumer centric. You have to learn how to learn about what your consumers are looking for, what matters to them, what they value. And when we can apply all of that, to truly engage in them, in their own healthcare, that's when we're going to be able to create the most value by far that we could as healthcare providers. So to me this external orientation and customer science if you will, is what I would love for our industry to be able to embrace.

TAMMY:
Yeah. And for those of you who, that, who just really woke up to what she's saying, um This is so powerful and it's new, it's fresh, it's not being nice to your patients. It's so much deeper and wider than that, and Yelena mentioned the webinar that we have coming up. If you're listening to this podcast, you could be listening to it before the webinar or after, either way go to our website at www.tillerhewitt.com and check it out. You can download a recording or you can sign up if it's not already happened, but it is powerful what Yelena has to say around consumerism. I'm just captivated. I know recently just to give them a sneak preview, you talked on another podcast about share of wallet versus market share and the 30 versus 90%, will you just give them a sneak preview of that real fast?

YELENA:
Yeah, of course. So here is the surprising thing about consumerism, right? A lot of people sort of think it's all about kind of going out and being really good at selling services to patients. It's not. What it is at it’s heart is engaging the consumer and understanding how can you be their comprehensive health partner and the way that we measure that because you can't succeed at something unless you measure it or so says my very nerdy self. But I truly believe that.

It is by looking at a metric called share of wallet which is essentially looking at what proportion - at the level of each individual person - am I as a healthcare provider able to capture and what does that distribution look like across my customer base? So traditionally market share has been the true north metric that we literally live by, but market share tells us nothing about what our individual relationships are with a single customer. A market share of 30% could mean that we serving 30% of needs to 100% of patients in the market or we're serving 100% of needs to 30% of patients in the market. And there is a profound difference in terms of how much value we're actually creating depending on where we are on that range. And so share of wallet has been our true north right there along with the lifetime value that we're able to create for each customer as our guiding light.

What we're working on is helping health systems be a lot less transaction-focused and fragmented in the way that they're delivering care and much more focused on being comprehensive, true health partners to their patient customer base.

TAMMY:
So if I was to dumb that down for my sake, you're saying and correct me if I'm wrong, that you could have 30% of the market share but literally, you've touched some way in your health system 90% of the patients in your market, you're just not hooking them long term. They're there, it's a one and done or a couple instead of finding out who are the ones you want to have a lifetime relationship with and figuring out a way to make that happen. I know that's very simplified.

YELENA:
Exactly! And that's what we're seeing. I think that surprises a lot of health system leaders. They sort of assume that once they have a patient, they have them for everything. But actually the majority of cases, and marketing teams know this really well because if you go to marketing teams and ask them to find truly new consumers in the market, they know that it's really hard because, over a period of 3 to 4 years, an average health system will have touched the majority of the population in the market, which I know it sounds mind-blowing but that's the case. Because we're so fragmented and such a large portion of the relationships that we have with our patients is just incredibly transactional and casual. That's just like you said, the majority of patients that comes through and they leave and we never see them because they are splitting their care across all of the different health systems that might be within their geographic reach and that's what destroys the value.

TAMMY:
Listen to the webinar. She's going to go deeper and wider on what to do about that. So let's switch back to you, at the end of the day with everything coming at leaders so fast, how can leaders filter what's important through all the noise?

YELENA:
Great question. So, I always come from a position of putting people first and being really passionate about what it is that we're working towards. Following that why, and I know it sounds like a cliche, but I do think that in today's world being mission-oriented and knowing what is that ultimate vision that we want to create, it’s the only thing that can be the guiding force. And to me knowing how do I want to enable my team and how much do I want for my people to thrive and for the consumers to strive, to me that's the true north.

I alluded to this earlier, but as leaders we can't be everything. What we can be is we can get great to our people and we can delegate and rely on our people if we enable them appropriately to help us look through that noise and cut through that noise. So to me, those are the three milestones or stepping stones. It's our mission, having that passion for achieving the mission, our people and delegating, empowering our people, delegating to them and just making sure that they're in the best position to be the best that they can be.

TAMMY:
Well, given you're the innovation queen, I would be interested in knowing how you encourage creative thinking within your organization and your team.

YELENA:
So this is where actually my experience as an immigrant comes in incredibly handy. So of course, part of innovation is creating a safe environment and that is very high on my priority list. But there's something else, having been through that experience of crossing the cultures, one of the most valuable lessons by far that I learned is how to truly put aside everything that you believe about a situation and look at it through the other person's perspective to really understand how are they framing it? What is the paradigm shift that they're bringing into this? And to me, that's truly key for innovation. We don't have to come up with every single idea, new idea to create innovation and particularly in healthcare.

There's just so much that we can learn from other industries if we can truly understand how those other industries think. And so that experience of looking at it through the eyes of other industries, looking at how they're engaging the consumers or even looking at it through the eyes of other teams who might be working on something similar. I constantly encourage my team to look at these are the problems that we're trying to solve for, but let's focus on how can we reframe them. How have other industries or other teams have looked at solving the same problems and maybe looking at them as completely different problems, redefining what the problem is. And that's where I feel our biggest strength from my team and I want to make a shout out to my incredible team who's been there - all of us have been on this mission and a crusade to spread our message. But so much of it has been about learning how the retail industry is doing it and then figuring out how to communicate this very different way of thinking to the leaders in the healthcare industry. Again, now looking back through their eyes right, and breaking it down and making it a consumable piece of information.

TAMMY:
Yeah, I love the way you said looking at other industries. You know when I sit in the drive-through line at Chick-fil-A and how they can process so many cars so fast that I think OK, we need to get patient access directors out here to Chick-fil-A and start interviewing their managers on how can they process so many people so fast and have happy customers at the end. They keep returning day after day after day. So, I love that you're looking at not only your team, but you're looking through the eyes of other industries as well for best practices.

I know that you're very big on empowerment, which I think is a secret sauce of great leaders, tell me how you empower others.

YELENA:
Yes. No, that's a great question. I've been incredibly fortunate to have had some fantastic mentors in my life who have really helped me find my passion and what I'm good at and encouraged me to pursue what I'm really passionate about. And that's something that I love doing for other people. I love mentoring. And what I love more than anything is helping people unlock themselves, discover what their true strengths are and just really take advantage of that sort of flourish in their own capabilities. Because what I'm seeing is that so many people and Tammy, you wrote about it in your book, so many people have all these knots inside themselves, right, where they just don't believe in themselves enough or they don't even realize what their strengths are. And I just feel so strongly about helping people discover that, helping them untie their knots, unlock the incredible power that they have inside themselves, and really bring it to life and do incredible things with it. I don't know how many people have succeeded doing that with, but I certainly hope that a lot of people that I have mentored in my life feel that I've helped them on that path. At least somewhat.

TAMMY:
Yeah. I think again, sometimes people just need the permission because it, there, it's just you heighten their awareness that they have locked themselves up, that they're really the cause, they're the ones that are holding themselves back. So again, just setting people free from themselves.

YELENA:
Yes.

TAMMY:
Well, well, Yelena, you know, as usual, every time I talk to such an interesting leader, the time flies. We're just about out of time, but before we wrap it up, I like to close with our lightning-round questions. Are you ready for me to do some rapid-fire questions?

YELENA:
I am ready.

TAMMY:
All right. Number one. What's your favorite leadership quote?

YELENA:
I actually have two. So, my first one is by Teddy Roosevelt. People don't care how much, you know until they know how much you care. And I just, I love that quote.

But another one is a sign of a good leader is not how many followers you have, but how many leaders you create. These two quotes they literally define who I want to be as a leader who I aspire to be as a leader.

TAMMY:
That's good. That's good. What's your biggest leadership pet peeve?

YELENA:
Leaders who ignore the elephant in the room.

TAMMY:
Oh, that's a good one. I might have to steal that one. I see that happening more and more and it is so frustrating and you're like, are we going to address that first? Are we going to get on that first? Are we going to talk about that first? That's good.

Ok. What's the top value that guides what you do?

YELENA:
Authenticity? It's kind of the opposite of ignoring the elephant in the room, right, which makes it not surprising that it’s my pet peeve, but authenticity being real with people.

TAMMY:
Alright. And then last, when you looking for a new team member, is there one quality that you look for that stands out?

YELENA:
Hmmm one? One of tough but let me maybe name the top three. So first I look for people who are passionate to make a difference. People who are passionate about the area that they're going to be working in and sharing that crusade-focused mission, right?

But I'm also looking for people who are humble, that's very important to me and at the same time who are very driven, people who are the “ I can get it done” who have that attitude. So that's what I look for more than anything, more than any specific skill set: It's passion, it's the drive and humbleness.

TAMMY:
Love it, love it, love it. Well, Yelena, thank you so much again for being on the Leadership Lens Podcast and to all our listeners don't forget to check out our website at www.tillerhewitt.com to get the recording of this and other podcasts as well as get hooked up with our webinar that Yelena will be leading soon where she will deep dive into this consumer loyalty value that we've been talking about throughout. So, thanks again, Yelena.

YELENA:
Oh, thank you so much for having me.

CLOSING:
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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.