Health & Medical
Bob Kreider
President and CEO, The Devereux Foundation
By Matt McClellan
Smart Business Philadelphia | July 2007
A lot of executives stress the importance of communication, but how many of them have their own blog? At least one does. Bob
Kreider, president and CEO of The Devereux Foundation, keeps and maintains “The President’s Blog,” in which he keeps the
organization’s 6,000 employees updated on the current happenings and future goals of the nation’s largest nonprofit provider of
behavioral health care services. Kreider touches on everything from the organization’s mission statement to informational briefs
on Devereux-relevant legislation in his blog, which is designed to be useful for both clients and employees.
Smart Business spoke
with Kreider about why it’s a good idea to smile once in awhile.
Prove you know your business at every level. I
don’t think a strong leader can be afraid of
going into the details when necessary. You
have to give your people room to operate
and be successful.
But if it doesn’t feel right, you have to
understand your business at the detail level
well enough to go after a problem. If you
show that willingness once or twice, it
makes the quality of information you get in
other circumstances better, if people know
you can go into the details.
Keep your growth on pace with your resources.
The (pitfall) that seems most tempting in
our business is growing too fast. Once you
achieve a basic level of success, and you’ve
proven your product, and you have access
to capital, the temptation is to grow as fast
as you can finance.
In our strategic plan, we lay out a 6 percent to 12 percent growth rate as the maximum sustainable rate for Devereux based
on an analysis of our financial resources
and our human resources. If we outgrow
either one, that’s a formula for trouble.
You need an understanding of what limitations you have of your financial
resources and human resources, what
growth they can sustain as far as capital
and additional work capacity.
Smile every now and then. The toughest challenge I faced in a senior leadership role
was being a real person to my staff. I was
trained as a lawyer, an investment banker,
and I also am an introvert.
When I first joined Devereux, I was told
by a key person in the organization that
people couldn’t read me, and that was a
very bad thing. In my prior jobs, that wasn’t
a bad thing. But I was told I was scaring
people.
So I learned to smile a little more, be
more expressive, engage in small talk a little more. It’s made me more effective, and
I know it’s made my team more comfortable.
Take the blame. The most critical and difficult times are obviously when something
bad happens or a bad decision is made. You
need to acknowledge it, not look through
rose-colored glasses; then move on.
Nothing builds a team like the senior person shouldering the most blame, saying,
‘I’m most accountable.’ And telling your
team, you’re still batting .800, let’s minimize
the damage and move on.
Don’t look in the rearview mirror. Vision is
important. We all feel we’re in fast-changing markets, and the demographics of markets are changing.
You have to manage toward where the
industry is going, not in the rearview mirror. You can’t manage based on history; you
have to see the changes coming. That is
important, but even more important is
humility.
One of my favorite books is ‘Fooled by
Randomness’ [by Nassim Nicholas Taleb].
(Taleb) makes the wonderful point that
human beings naturally assume that when
something happens, it’s because they
caused it. My approach is, you’re never as
good as you think or as bad as you think.
That’s a hard thing to do as president of
an organization. When things go really well,
it’s easy to stand up and take credit for it
all. The flip side is if things go poorly, you
really got stupid quickly.
Try to keep things in perspective and not
react too much to temporary fluctuations.
Get feedback. When I joined Devereux, I had
never been involved in strategic planning.
But I found I really enjoyed that process. I
used that strategic planning process as a
way to communicate with the organization.
I used it both to communicate how I saw
the organization and the industry and
where it was going, and also to listen to all
levels of the organization and where they
saw it going. There are a lot of important
insights that our staff — who are working
with our clients every day — can help me
with.
Strategic planning is a wonderful way to
create a shared vision of where we’re headed.
Every five years or so, we go back and
put together where the vision is going;
what are the critical elements we need to
be ready to address. Then I go on the road
and get reaction from the organization.
We have the process take a full year. It’s
an iterative process that gradually hones
into something that we hope a good percent, if not all, of the staff can buy in to and
feel ownership of.
Offer a career, not just a job. Our strategic
plan is focused around three areas. We
want to be the provider of choice for the
services we deliver, we want to be the charity of choice for our communities, and we
want to be the employer of choice. In many
ways, that is the most challenging one.
The service industries are going to be
very competitive in terms of being able to
attract an adequate, high-quality work
force. We make a real investment in training and trying to offer all our employees a
career path, a way they can see an interesting future at Devereux. Even if they can’t,
the training will offer them a solid base for
whatever direction they go.
We attract them with what it is we do. For
the right idealistic person who wants to
save the world helping others who have
significant challenges, Devereux is a wonderful opportunity. We attract them with
our mission and keep them with the training.
HOW TO REACH: The Devereux Foundation, (800) 345-1292 or
www.devereux.org
