Health & Medical
Cindy Schamp
President and CEO, Alle-Kiski Medical Center
By Ray Marano
Smart Business Pittsburgh | March 2007
"Culture eats strategy for lunch every day." -- Cindy Schamp, CEO, Alle-Kiski Medical Center
When Cindy Schamp came to Alle-Kiski Medical Center four years ago, it was a battered institution. The medical center, which
had been a struggling community hospital, then became part of a health system that went bankrupt before becoming a satellite
hospital within another behemoth system. Schamp came in, listened and learned. She poured dollars into staff development and
prepared the institution for the changes it would need to make to survive. And in the four years since she arrived, Schamp has
led the hospital, which posted net patient revenue of $98 million in 2005, through uncomfortable changes while restoring the
confidence of its medical staff, employees and the community. Smart Business spoke with Schamp about being a storyteller,
what trumps strategy and confronting the pink elephant.
Listen — a lot. People want to know that you understand who
they are. Every place has its cultural pieces that are important,
and if you tramp on them, you tramp on the people, and that’s
never going to accomplish what you want to achieve.
You really need to listen for what the core values in place are
and do your own assessment of what things are missing that
you need to work toward. Immediate shakeup in management
and leadership is a bad thing that sends a message that you
don’t give people an opportunity to show their value. You can’t
possibly come into a place and three weeks later know
whether someone’s going to be able to do it or not.
Don’t use fear to manage. Fear isn’t the answer. I don’t believe
in management by fear. There’s too much of management by
fear, and I don’t think that brings out the best in people.
So the inspirational part of my job that I think is critical to
being a CEO is helping people find their voice again, helping
them find a way not to be afraid, to say, “Could we try this?”
and not be afraid to fail. Because if we’re afraid to fail at something we try, then we won’t try anything. But they have to feel
safe to try, or they will never go down that road.
Be a storyteller. I view my role as a number of different things.
I view myself as the institutional cheerleader, in many ways,
and as the storyteller. I’m the one who gets to articulate to the
community and to the departments and to the medical staff the
great things that are happening in the hospital.
If I’m afraid to tell their story, or if I’m too humble or too shy
to tell their story, then I’ve failed them. I’m also the person
who’s responsible for making sure we have a vision of where
we’re going, that we’re on a path to get to that place and that I
have a commitment to doing what I believe are the right things
all the time for the patients, our employees, and the medical
staff and the public.
Work on change in the middle. Twenty percent of the people are
OK with change: ‘Change happens, we’re going to go there.’
Then there’s that big part in the middle who aren’t sure: ‘Show
me why and I’ll go.’
And there’s the 20 percent who aren’t going to go there. It
doesn’t matter what you say, they’re not going to like change.
They’ll kick and scream and holler and say they’re not going to
go. But if you can get to the middle piece enough to have the
inertia go in your direction, then everybody makes that cycle
with you.
But you can’t run too far ahead and go, ‘Hey, where are you?
You’re supposed to be with me,’ because you’ve got to give
them a vision to see why they should change and you’ve got to
manage to do that, and be a little more tolerant of what it takes
to do that, than for those of us who don’t mind change.
Encourage a diversity of viewpoints. I look for people who are
not afraid to put the pink elephant on the table. For me, the
proverbial pink elephant is, we’re in the room, and because I’m
the CEO, nobody wants to tell me that it’s actually a bone-headed idea and I shouldn’t do it.
If I don’t have people around me who are willing and able to
say what they really thought about it, it’s only half done
because there’s this other part I need to consider. That’s the
pink elephant that nobody wants to talk about because everybody thinks it’s a done deal, or it’s something that I want to do,
and they don’t have any say in it.
If I only have ‘yes’ people around me who are too worried to
tell me what they really think, then I might as well not have
them around me. I need a nice blend of people around me who
are constructively critical.
Culture beats strategy every time. I go back to a phrase I learned
years ago: Culture eats strategy for lunch every day. You can
have the best strategy you want, but if you don’t have the culture that’s going to advance that strategy, it doesn’t really much
matter what your vision is because you can’t lift it.
You can lay out all that strategy and those tactics, but if you
can’t lift it because the culture won’t go to what you’re identifying as the strategy, it doesn’t matter. So working on culture
means bringing all those people along, bringing the organization along.
Invest in leaders. You have to assess your leadership group and
determine whether or not they’ve had the investment in them
that allows them to be able to lift things for you.
In this institution, we spent the better part of a year with
leadership development, investing in people we look to in leading the organization. You have to listen, you have to invest in
the people that you want invested in you.
And if you don’t invest in the people, where’s their loyalty and
commitment and drive and belief that they’re valuable?
HOW TO REACH: Alle-Kiski Medical Center, www.wpahs.org/akmc
