Review of leadership traits
In my last blog on leadership, I discussed the additional leadership traits that can catapult someone from being a good leader to a great one. There are almost an infinite number of traits that can be beneficial to a leader, but I consider these eight as the special skills one needs when trying to lead complex organizations to exceptional long-term results. To review, these are:
- Intuition and decision making with partial information
- Risk neutrality and navigating fear of failure
- Continuous learning
- Negotiation skills
- Being able to receive criticism earnestly and act on it when appropriate
- Building high-performing teams
- Mentoring/Succession planning
- Having fun, especially during stressful times
Today, I will describe individuals I have worked with and who I believe exhibited one or more of these traits in an extraordinary way. I will mention them in the chronological order of when I met them.
Thomas Burzynski (Software development, IT Consulting)
I met Tom Burzynski at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Michigan (BCBSMI). He was the Director of Information Services and oversaw developing user-driven analytical tools that could search through large amounts of data very quickly. Since this was the late 1980’s, he was also way ahead of his time in doing this.
While Tom was responsible for ensuring that analysts at BCBSMI could provide reports to a variety of internal and external clients, he was mainly focused on creating reports and analysis for BCBSMI’s largest customers, the domestic auto industry, which was composed of General Motors, Ford Motor Company and Chrysler Corporation.
The Big Three (as the automakers were then known) had an almost insatiable desire for data since health care costs were the most expensive component of every car. The software that Tom’s team created allowed individual analysts to pick the segments of the population they wanted to study, time frames and categories of care all while maintaining patient confidentiality.
So, what were Tom’s strengths in developing these tools? First, he created a vision for user access to vast data stores without the need for IT personnel intervention. Next, he incubated a high-performing team whose sole focus was in developing user-friendly tools on the mainframe that would provide nontechnical users with the ability to navigate the data and produce reports as they needed. But his true strength was in asking his customers for input, taking that input and modifying it in a way that could be implemented and then having his team execute his vision with great software. We joked that his team was composed of a bunch of long-haired guys who were kept in a closet (which was a fairly accurate description of his team).
I arrived at BCBSMI in 1985 as a computer programmer but two years later I was promoted to policy analyst in an area that used Tom’s software and data. I created a series of reports for Ford on the impact of AIDS/HIV on family members. Using the data, I was able to find that there were serious deleterious diagnoses for other family members that would show up after an AIDS diagnosis, including alcohol and substance abuse that occurred after the AIDS/HIV diagnosis of one of the family members. And to do all of this with an encryption process that kept every person’s identity a secret was an amazing piece of work for the time. This helped Ford to develop some of their internal health care programs for their workers and families.
But it was not simple for me to get to this level of detail, so I started bugging Tom with concerns but also suggestions of what could be done to improve the software. He never rebuffed my issues and almost always had his team develop a solution that made my job easier. After several months with me making suggestions, Tom offered me a job as a manager, running one of his other departments.
Tom’s ability to understand his customers’ needs combined with building a highly performing, empowered team cemented the relationship BCBSMI had with our largest customers. His humility allowed him to accept suggestions and build even better solutions. He is a great mentor that I still go to for advice.
Judi Peterson (Call centers, large scale virtual organizations)
Mediocre leaders think that since they achieved success with their own style and expertise, that to build a great team they just needed to hire a bunch of people who were like themselves. This works for a while, until you run into a problem that you cannot overcome with in-line thinking. Judi Peterson, who worked for me for several years, was not like me in most ways.
Initially, many executives I knew vastly underestimated Judi Peterson’s ability and style. After all, she was quick with a smile and a laugh. She was extremely humble so she never would take any credit for what her team accomplished, even if no one else could have done the same thing. She is smart but never shows off just to show how smart she is.
And then there is the fact that Judi is passionate about, of all things, call centers! Very few people are enthusiastic about call centers, but Judi is. She spent a lifetime learning as much as she could about running call centers effectively. She embraced the service aspect of great call centers and the people aspect of who to hire and run call centers. As a result, the teams she created were second to none.
We had just started together at Amerigroup, a for-profit Medicaid health insurance company, when our membership exponentially increased, without an increase in staffing as we requested, and our service suffered even though we tried to warn every one of the impending storm. Judi had precisely predicted how bad the service levels would get without additional staffing and created a plan for taking us on the path to great service levels once we received the staffing. It took us some time after service levels dipped to convince everyone of the required staffing, and as a result our customers suffered unnecessarily. If I could go back in time, I would have expressed my concerns even more forcefully than I did, but I was new to the company, and we were a young and growing business that had not experienced anything like this before.
Judi understood the six key aspects of great customer service.
- Define what great service looks like
- Hire the right people
- Give them the right tools to be effective
- Hold them accountable
- Treat them with respect
- Pay and reward them appropriately
The first thing Judi noticed was our turnover rate was too high (45% a year), which meant that with the six-month time period needed to get up to speed for most reps, we hardly kept any people who could provide great service. Next, we paid too little to the people who were in direct contact with our members, doctors, nurses and hospitals. But Judi realized that pay was only one reason for why employees did not stay. The tools our call center reps used were more than out of date; they made it more difficult to answer questions quickly. To answer a member or provider’s question, the rep had to navigate multiple screens in odd and unintuitive ways. In a couple of cases, 19 screens had to be navigated for the rep to answer simple questions.
The reps were not stupid; they just did not have a tool to make their job easier. So, Judi’s team designed and created COMPASS, a tool that provided 80% of the information needed in an intuitive way. In order to get funding, she had executives sit in on calls and see how difficult the process was to answer questions. After the executives watched how smart our reps were, and how they personally would have failed in trying to answer the calls with the tools available, we given the necessary funding. Once implemented, reps started to answer questions faster and correctly. Members and providers noticed and no longer started off calls by complaining about how bad our service was, which reduced talk times.
This allowed Judi to raise salaries and bonuses the next year. Turnover went down to 15%, which was manageable but still not where Judi wanted it. Judi decided that our call center reps were learning skills that could be used in the rest of the company and so instead of hoarding our staff and not letting them get promoted to other areas, she encouraged it. So, we became a breeding ground for other areas. Turnover went down all the way to 7%, which is almost unheard of in an inbound call center. In addition, she simplified the call trees that customers had to maneuver, which improved their experience.
Judi did this, even in difficult times, with a smile and a laugh. Whenever someone in a meeting would say something that included a couple of lyrics of any song, Judi, who has an eidetic memory when it comes to music, would start singing that song. She would do this in meetings with staff and executives alike, and it endeared her to everyone. Her favorite saying was “If you are going to spend all day at work, you might as well have some fun!”
Woodrow A Myers, Jr (Medicine, Running large scale operations)
There are just some people who cannot truly be captured in words on a piece of paper. Woody Myers, Jr is one of those people. Woody graduated from Harvard with a degree in Medicine and received an BS and MBA from Stanford.
Woody has a voice that James Earl Jones, the actor who played Darth Vader in many Star Wars films, would have envied. When I met him, he was this tall, large African American man with a personality that was even bigger. Intimidating, but with a huge heart to match. And his brain just worked faster than anyone else I have ever met.
One of the first meetings I saw Woody work his magic at was at Ford Motor Company. He was the company’s Medical Director, which was a huge job since we had medical clinics supporting Ford employees in dozens of countries. He wanted to ask the Ford production executives for around $25 million to develop data in support of our employees’ health, Workman’s Compensation and Disability needs. This was a great idea, but production people are usually reticent to donate their operational money for noble, yet theoretical causes.
Woody was sitting in the back of the room looking as the executives started sitting down. I asked him what he was doing.
“I am trying to determine who will be the decision maker today so that I can get him to yes (Ford only had males at the very top back then).”
I asked, “isn’t that the CEO?”
“No, he will rely on someone with more expertise. Look, everyone is walking up to that executive on the left with deference. I bet it’s him.”
Well Woody did his presentation, and he focused on that executive’s function to make examples of how the data we would gather would help his area in particular. When he was done, he asked for comments.
Everyone liked the idea, but no one wanted to part with the money. Finally, the CEO asked the target executive what he thought.
“I like it.”
We received the funding.
Woody could read people, customers, vendors and government officials like you or I could read a book. It helped him to negotiate deals that no one else thought possible.
One of Woody’s unique traits was pushing you to the edge of your comfort zone, which allowed you to do things you did not believe you were capable of doing. I describe it as Woody pushing you to the edge of a cliff. Just when you thought you would fall off the cliff, he would give you a push. As you started falling, Woody would grab you and bring you back to the safe side of the cliff. Then he would immediately start pushing you forward again…
He was also excellent at using partial information to make decisions when it was necessary. I learned something from him that I still use today. Everyone has an opinion and those opinions are valuable. But ultimately the leader must take the facts, listen to the opinions and then make a decision. Woody used to say, “Give me facts, not opinions. I will come to my own opinion after I hear the facts.”
You must trust your team and their opinions. But ultimately you are responsible for the decisions that you make and when there are disagreements, your opinion counts most.
Beth Ginzinger (Nursing, data analytics, large scale clinical and non-clinical operations, entrepreneur)
I met Beth in the late 1990’s while we were working at Ford Motor Company and Beth was a data consultant/analyst from a small company called MEDSTAT (a boutique data analytics company). Beth proved her mettle working on a variety of projects but especially in helping us negotiate contracts with the numerous HMO’s who contracted with Ford. We were all impressed with her negotiation skills and demeanor.
A couple of years later, while I was at WellPoint Health Networks in California, I needed someone who could lead 300 individuals in one of my clinical areas, most of whom were nurses. Beth had the intelligence, nursing background and demeanor to manage this high-stress job. So, I brought in Beth to do about 8 interviews. The first seven interviews went brilliantly, and each executive said we should make her an offer at once.
After the 8th interview, with our HR lead, the phone rang.
“Gary, are you sure you want to hire Beth?
“Yes, why?”
“Do you know how many people she has supervised in her career?”
“Yes, none.”
“And you still want to hire her?”
“Yes.”
And so, Beth joined our team about two months later, right on the last day of our budgeting process for the following year. Literally, the last day.
I met her after she got her badge and told her the bad news.
“Beth, I must cut $400k from your budget by 6pm, today. If you are uncomfortable, I will handle it for you.”
The response was leadership, exemplified.
“No, it’s my job. I will do it.”
So, she introduced herself to the team members who had not met her and explained what needed to be done. She let her leads decide the best places to cut and exceed the cost-cutting goal, all with her team’s buy-in. It was at that moment that I was sure we had picked an exceptional leader.
Beth was new to operations and so had a steep learning curve, which she climbed swiftly. But the next week was a shortened holiday week. For call centers, this means that customers do not call in during a holiday week, but you get slammed with calls on the Monday after the holiday. Beth had never experienced that before.
The next Friday she came into my office looking bedraggled.
“I am sorry, but our stats got clobbered this week and we missed our goals by a lot. Last week was a holiday and we could not catch up after a disaster on this Monday.”
So, I could not get upset with her because she was new. Also, if I had thought to mention it in advance, she might have mitigated the problem a little. I wanted her to remember this moment so she could plan for future holidays.
So, I asked her, “Was your team surprised that the Monday after a holiday happened?”
She smirked and never, ever had another bad Monday after a holiday again. She also went on to lead a couple of companies and have a great career.
Jim Carlson (Health Insurance, Growing companies, Improving operations).
Jim Carlson comes across as a caring person who wants to understand each person that works for him individually. And that’s who he is. But Jim also has the internal gravitas to make the tough decisions necessary to grow a small company into something special. He understands competitors’ strengths and weaknesses while ensuring they cannot exploit our weaknesses. Since he understood how difficult this is, I never once saw Jim mock or dismiss the decisions of other CEOs.
When you have huge growth in any business, the quality of service can become compromised. When Jim took over as CEO of Amerigroup, we were going to grow exponentially in a short period of time. I joined the company in February 2007, and we had contracts that would roughly double our membership by January 2008 (see story on Judi Peterson above).
After a month or two on the job, I became nervous that our planning and forecasting process for the following January was inadequate. I slowly started to speak up but by July I was in full-fledged panic mode. We were going to have terrible service metrics when our new business came on line which would not endear us to our State customers hospitals and doctors, or our Medicaid members. I spoke up but not strongly enough. As the new guy, I had not yet proven myself. Finally, I went to my boss in October and said we had to make some serious changes to our budget but could not convince everyone of the necessary changes to the budget.
January came and our service levels were ridiculously low. A meeting was called, and all CEOs of our subsidiaries came after me. Some of it was justified, some not, but it did not matter since I oversaw most of operations. I had a good plan in place with new leaders like Judi, but it would take time to improve service.
After two hours of getting pummeled by the CEO’s, I felt pretty much defeated. After the CEO’s of the subsidiaries left the meeting, Jim came up to me, put his hand on my shoulder and said “I know the situation. You got this. Hang in there.”
It was the best pep talk I have ever received. With Judi in place, we turned around our service levels and within a few months were beating the competition in most customer service and accuracy metrics.
Jim Carlson could hire and fire with the best of them. But he understood that if you have a good team, you need to give them a little leeway when they are in trouble or make a mistake.
Conclusion
The leaders I talk about in this blog are not perfect human beings. Just like me, they learned over time, sometimes the hard way. But I learned from each one of them and it made me a much better leader in the end. I am grateful to all of them and others not mentioned due to space limitations.
