Top C-suite executives didn’t get there by accident. The most successful leaders earned the role by building relationships, listening to others and observing the successful leaders before them. This is a special moment in healthcare and the top executives guiding their institutions through transformation are clear about the leaders they want to emulate.
Ahead of the Becker’s 14th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable, Nov. 2-5 in Chicago, health system CEOs, presidents, CFOs and COOs speaking at the event were asked a single question: Who is a leader you admire, from any industry, and why?
The responses ranged from Walt Disney to Warren Buffett to a coal miner father in West Virginia. Some named executives who reshaped their fields through discipline and vision. Others pointed to mentors who never held a formal title. The common thread running through nearly every answer was not industry, tenure, or credential — it was an orientation toward people over performance, and a willingness to stay in the work when it gets hard.
Here is what 13 leaders speaking at the roundtable said when asked who shaped how they lead.
Albert L. Wright Jr. President and CEO, West Virginia University Health System (Morgantown, W.Va.): I don’t know that I have one specific leader that I would identify. There are so many. We’re all reflections of our mentors in the places we’ve worked and when it’s your turn to lead, I think you try to take bits and pieces of the really good things about those people and places you’ve worked, and you try to emulate those, and you try to avoid the blind spots.
When I think of the collection of leaders I look up to, there are folks that are great communicators. There are folks that have a strict moral compass in what they do and the way they approach their jobs and their world. I believe the job of a CEO is really twofold. We have about 40,000 employees, and that’s going to go up soon. My number one job is to support those 40,000 employees. I can’t always do everything every one of them wants, but I have to make sure that we’re giving them, to the best of our ability, the tools and resources to take great care of our patients. Two is to make sure you’re laser focused on your mission. Why is it you exist as a healthcare system?
When I think of leaders and leadership, I tend to gravitate towards those leaders that do a really good job of taking care of their employees, building that culture, meeting their mission and really communicating about everything they know and are trying to do.
Terry Gilliland, MD. President and CEO, Geisinger (Danville, Pa.): It would be hard to pin it on one person. In a category, I admire courageous leaders who are highly effective, highly engaging. They’re doing well by doing good, who developed their ego strength so they can get their ego out of the way, so they can be a positive force for their organization and for the greater good. You don’t actually have to have a formal title or a role. Many times they’re simply out there just doing their jobs, because we all lead from where we stand.
For example, recently I heard about a very complex 14-year-old child who received just that from an anesthesiologist who had to back-ventilate for six hours, a PICU doc, a respiratory therapist, literally saving this kid’s life until they could be transferred to a higher level of care. That’s everyday care by heroic people on the front lines. No matter where people are, I respect that kind of leadership. I admire it.
Mark Sparta. President and COO, Hackensack Meridian Health (Edison, N.J.): It’s hard to say any one individual. There have been many great leaders, and I’ve had many great mentors along the way. I’d like to look at it from a leadership perspective — I admire the logistics operators. Healthcare is not delivering packages, but we can learn a lot from organizations like UPS and FedEx. They have really figured out that the customer doesn’t care how complicated things are. What’s most meaningful to them is they get their package when they want it, or the recipient of a package they send gets it when they need that recipient to get it.
Patients want exactly that from us. Healthcare has got a long way to go. Unfortunately, healthcare, we typically as an industry are slow learners, and then we’re slow adopters to change and new technologies. But when we look at accessibility, we absolutely have to be able to leverage what all those logistics operators have learned and be able to accept patients more quickly and more seamlessly. We need to be able to care for them more quickly and more seamlessly, and we have to be able to provide them with a much better experience because what we, unfortunately, often don’t recognize is the fact that people come to us when they have to, not because they want to.
The problem is that the only thing that patients actually come to us for, which is a happy event and something they look forward to, is when a child’s being born. Other than that, our customers, our patients, are in pain and they’re anxious, and they don’t necessarily want to be with us. So we need to be able to make that as easy and seamless as possible with the best possible experience that they can have.
Greg Damron. CFO, University of Missouri Health Care (Columbia, Mo.): There’s a lot of great people out there, but one person that always impresses me when I come across them — and I’ve had many opportunities to listen to them in different settings — is Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan. I think he’s a phenomenal leader, runs a phenomenal company that, when he took it over, had a great brand. The JPMorgan brand has always been very strong, but it wasn’t, amongst all the major banks, the strongest. It wasn’t particularly innovative at the time. He’s just turned that into the leading financial organization, arguably in the world. He’s super disciplined. He’s an amazing communicator. He’s led his organizations through great change over time, super focused on risk and balance sheet management, which I think is not always appreciated.
CFOs are often looked at to talk about operating margins and those sorts of things, but being very thoughtful about your balance sheet is one of those things that often goes unappreciated. I just think he’s a fantastic leader.
Marlon F. Levy, MD. CEO, VCU Health System; Senior Vice President, VCU Health Sciences (Richmond, Va.): I’d rather answer with what are the qualities that I admire in leaders and what do I want to emulate? I would say without question, number one is humility. Leaders that really think it’s about them have completely lost the conversation, lost their room, lost why they’re there. It’s not about the leader. It’s about the enterprise. It’s about, in our case, the patients and the families that we serve. That is a 100%, deep conviction of mine.
Another core value for me is empathy. We should put ourselves in place of the patients that we’re treating or serving and understanding whether we’re providing what we would expect in terms of the experience. Other really important attributes of effective leadership, especially in healthcare, is understanding that a lot of these things cost a lot of money. We need to be frugal. We need to be thoughtful. We need to spend the money where it needs to be spent, but not be wasteful about it. Those are some of the things that I keep coming back to.
Michael Stern. President and CEO, Tower Health (West Reading, Pa.): It’s Walt Disney. Not because he built theme parks, but because he understood something that most organizations struggle with today: people remember how you make them feel. I have a book that Fred Lee wrote 20 years ago called “If Disney Ran Your Hospital.” I give it to every leader as they come in at whatever level, any senior leader, because it’s had a profound impact on how I think about leadership in healthcare, and I share this book with anybody that asks for career advice, because one of the central ideas is that patients may not remember all the details, but they remember how they were treated, and how they were communicated with, and how they felt during some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives.
What I admire about him is that he wasn’t just building attractions, he was designing experiences. Every detail mattered because every interaction really mattered. I’ve always believed healthcare can learn from that mindset, and even though it was written in the ’80s, everything still holds true today. We run a contest every year with all of our employees about what they want next year’s kind of mantra to be. And this year, the employees — and it was overwhelming — “Because every patient is someone’s everything.” That was submitted by one of the employees. We ran a contest to get ideas, we narrowed it down to 10 choices, sent it back out to the employees, and I think almost 60% of 10,000 people chose, “Because every patient is someone’s everything.” How much better could that align with Walt Disney?
Patients deserve great clinical care, but they also deserve compassion, respect, and communication. The last thing is, he had a relentless focus on the future, never seemed satisfied. He was always asking about what was possible and how to make things better. Great leaders need to address those challenges and create a vision for what’s going to come next. He’s someone that I truly have followed my entire career.
Kathy Donovan. Senior Vice President and COO, Hospital Sisters Health System (Springfield, Ill.): Indra Nooyi. Indra is the former CEO of PepsiCo, which is the parent company of Pepsi Cola. What I admire most about her leadership is that she’s demonstrated that you can lead a very large complex organization that’s been around forever with both extraordinary business discipline and a deep sense of humanity. That’s what attracted me to her in the beginning. She was willing to make long-term strategic decisions, even when they weren’t necessarily the easiest or most popular decisions at the moment. She talked openly about the responsibility leaders have, not only to our companies, but also to our colleagues, their families, and the communities. That’s what healthcare is all about.
The leaders I admire most are those who can hold both things at the same time — high expectations of the folks that work for them and genuine care for the people. I really see that as my leadership and how I align. I put people and patients first, and the rest usually follows. And that’s why Indra was such a special leader and someone that I admire and aspire to live up to.
Jeffrey P. Gold, MD. President, University of Nebraska System (Lincoln, Neb.): I’ll give you two names if I may. I thought a bit about this question in advance. From any industry across the board, it would probably be Warren Buffett. I’ve gotten to know Mr. Buffett now being a Nebraskan, and he’s a unique human being. Always sees the bright side of life, is a very loyal and proud American, and understands business as well as anybody I’ve ever seen — understands how to buy and sell corporations, frankly, how to turn investments of anybody and everybody that chooses to invest in his companies into success. His approach to ethics of business — he’s very fond of saying things like he always bets on the people and surrounds himself with people that he trusts in various leadership roles, and he’s done a phenomenal job. I would tell you it’s been the honor of my life to get to know him.
But on the healthcare side, it actually goes back to the 1990s when I first met Dr. David Skinner. And Dr. Skinner is long gone, but he was a very prominent general thoracic surgeon. His fame actually was in the area of esophageal reconstruction for reflux. He and Mark Belsey did a lot of work on anti-reflux surgery back in those days. But I met him when he became the president and chief executive officer of the NewYork-Presbyterian health system at a time when there was a lot of need for shoring up the bottom line, major changes ongoing in the delivery of healthcare with aggregation of systems across the country. He is attributed with creating the NewYork-Presbyterian system, or at least being part of that creation, raising significant amounts of money for the expansion of the system, creating a network, and really remedying the finances.
By the way, at the same time, at least once a week, going to the operating room and still taking care of his patients. So he never lost touch with the on-the-ground, in-the-trenches leadership, which is one of the reasons I’m such a strong fan of physician involvement and leadership of health systems, particularly academic health systems. Because until you’ve talked to patients and had to share bad news, until you’ve participated in what I like to call first breaths and last breaths, you really don’t understand what this is all about as fully as somebody that has lived that for as many years as Dr. Skinner had. He remains one of my heroes.
Nick Barcellona. CFO, West Virginia University Health System (Morgantown, W.Va.): I’ve been very blessed in my career to work for some amazing leaders, including my current leader and the CEO at Temple Health and a number of CFOs in my UPMC days that are still mentors of mine to this day. But a good answer to that question without having to pick one of those folks is Jack Welch. He’s a leader that I admire. I started my career in the Jack Welch days at General Electric, and I was lucky enough to meet him three or four times in my days at General Electric. And he was so energetic, very smart, very engaged, approachable, but also very intense. He held folks accountable, and he was always very direct with his feedback. You felt like if you were lucky enough to get some of his time, you needed to make sure that you didn’t waste it. I think that’s something that has stuck with me throughout my career and something that I try to bring with me when I’m interacting with different leaders across our health system and across all sectors that I interact with. I also look for it in my team. There’s something to be said for being accountable and being driven. I think it goes a long way in really helping you in your career and helping your organization. So I try to emulate a lot of those things in my leadership style.
Rob Sumter. President, St. Joseph Hospital; EVP and Market COO, Ascension Illinois (Chicago): Eduardo Conrado, who is our CEO for Ascension. He has fundamentally transformed our culture while continuing to focus on operational excellence. He’s focused on proving that if you invest in your people and keep your people at the forefront, they’ll keep your patients at the forefront. They’ll take care of your patients. And his style is focused on empathy, being curious, and empowering your associates so that they are entirely compatible with doing what the mission is and making sure those things happen. It is not a focus on just the financial performance. But if you invest in your people, your people will invest in your patients. And then the results of that, of course, will be getting us to sustainability, financial performance, and the things that we need to be around for the next hundred-plus years.
Jeremiah J. Hodshire. President and CEO, Hillsdale Hospital (Hillsdale, Mich.): I look to individuals like Bob Riney. Bob Riney served nearly five decades as the president and CEO of Henry Ford Health. Starting as a security officer guarding some dorms at Henry Ford when they were running nursing schools, and then moving up the ranks and securing several years ago the top post at Henry Ford. The reason I would say he’s a healthcare hero is really looking at what he’s been able to do to transform healthcare, to look at it from a global perspective, not just what are we doing today, but what can we do tomorrow, to impact care, to ensure that our communities’ social determinants of health are met.
Not only looking at it from that lens, but also on the side of innovation, what can be done to keep patients healthier and safer, not only in their homes, but even when they’re at the hospital. Some of the work that he’s done to lead those global initiatives has just been incredible. It’s an inspiration that it’s worth the fight. I look at him as kind of Roosevelt’s “in the arena.” He has done remarkable things to stay in the arena and to fight for healthcare, and he’s created a national brand that’s high quality and very well known in our region.
Then I look at other leaders like our association here at Michigan Hospital Association — [CEO] Brian Peters, a great mentor and friend of mine. These are leaders that have been around for decades and who have great wisdom about infrastructure, about government interaction, about payers. It’s really just great to be able to, when you’re having one of those rough days, reach out to someone like that and say, how’d you do it? How are you doing it? Those are some of my heroes. There are a lot of them in the healthcare industry.
Outside the healthcare industry, I’m shaped by my faith. I think that’s very important. That’s what keeps me centered. I believe that there has to be some central point to my life in which the things that I do have to have a mission base, and I think that’s what is so special about Hillsdale Hospital because 110 years ago, as we celebrate 110 years of existence, [Dr. and Mrs. T.H. Midgley] came here with a mission, a vision, to create a place where individuals could seek care — low cost, high quality, in their backyard. We’ve continued that tradition, but we’ve obviously escalated it to the quality that it is today. So a lot of heroes, a lot of friends, and I would encourage those listening today: these are very difficult times, times in which we’re challenged by payers, communities, politicians. The list goes on. Stay focused. Stay in the arena. You’re going to get marred. You’re going to get knocked down, but let examples like Bob Riney and others go before us to say we can do it too.
Martha Henley. CEO, Unity Medical Center (Manchester, Tenn.): I’ve had so many influential people in my world. I started out as a scrub tech. I have mopped floors. I’ve learned from everyone. So this was a little bit of a challenge for me, but if I had to pick one person in my life that has shaped not just my inner self, but I believe my leadership style, it would be my grandfather, Bob Anderson, who is no longer with us. He had a working farm here in Coffee County that’s actually been in our family for more than a hundred years.
He never ran anything anyone would ever call an organization. But I remember very specifically that he had a loan once with a family member. It was somewhat a casual thing and nothing was really written down. There was no formal agreement. But at the end of that particular payment, this man thought that my grandfather still owed him a payment. And my grandfather knew he didn’t. I heard them talking about it. But he paid him that additional payment anyway. I remember so vividly asking him, why would you pay money that you don’t owe? And he said, “It is better to know that someone has cheated you than to have someone think that you cheated them.”
I was a young girl, and I did not understand that at that point like he did. He understood that his name was going to be carried on and it was going to mean a lot more. I’ve carried that, which is kind of like the whole job at a rural hospital. You’re not just passing through. Your patients are your neighbors. Your employees you see at the grocery store. Every decision you make gets remembered. Patients will forget the details of a bill. Employees will forget the details of a meeting. Nobody forgets whether they were treated with respect or whether they believe you by your word. That trust gets built one decision at a time and if you ever have that opportunity, you should take that road.
It took me a long time to realize the influence that my grandfather had by showing what his word meant and how he wanted to make sure that that carried through.
Karen Bowling. President and CEO, WVU Medicine Princeton Community Hospital; EVP, Government Affairs, West Virginia University Health System (Princeton, W.Va.): Albert Wright. He had the vision for our system. If you go back and look where our system was 11 years ago when I first started working for the WVU Health System and then where we are today, how we’ve grown, what we’ve done to serve communities, that takes vision. I’m a big believer in vision.
I’ll also say it’s interesting to say this, but I admire my father. He was a coal miner, and he worked very hard. But he really did have a lot of vision. He had a vision for me. He had good advice about how, as an individual, to make sure that I’m growing and developing and giving 110% to everything I do. And he may not have been a leader in the official sense, but for me he was, because he was my inspiration for a lot of what I’ve done in my career, and I am grateful that I had that family background that helped me get where I am today.
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