Turnarounds
Day by day
How William V. Day tackles the biggest leadership challenges facing St. Barnabas Health System
By Brian Horn
Smart Business Pittsburgh | January 2008
William V. Day describes his time at St. Barnabas Health
System as the man who came to dinner and has been there ever
since.
Back in the late 1960s, Day, who was working as a consultant
at the time, came to St. Barnabas after being contacted by the
organization’s board of trustees to determine whether the troubled facility should close.
“I got here and found a place that had a wonderful mission,”
says Day, now the president and CEO. “I think that’s part of the
reason it had been able to continue for 67 years but needed just
about everything you could imagine in order to go forward.”
Day and his team did a study and advised the place should not
be closed, and they devised a plan that could help the organization survive.
After putting the plan together, Day was set to leave when
the board asked the group to stay and implement the plan.
Day stayed a lot longer and has helped the company grow
into a $100 million organization.
He says his three biggest challenges back then are the same
obstacles he faces now — finding enough money, finding and
retaining good employees, and then getting those employees
to buy in to his plan.
“It’s the kind of thing I face today, as a matter of fact,” he
says. “They’re just bigger problems.”
Finding funds
Of course it’s important to find enough money to pay the
bills, but Day says he also has to find money to be able to
grow and invest in people.
“We try to invest in ourselves,” he says. “We’ve tried to,
rather than be in debt, we’ve tried to be debt-free and save
and use that money.”
Day says that’s as easy as simply not spending money you
don’t have, but it also comes down to balancing mission with
margin. The organization gives away just short of $6 million in
free care a year, and, while that takes communication to raise
the money and sell people on the company, it also comes down
to finding a good balance of what you can and can’t do.
“If we don’t have the money, we don’t spend it,” he says.
“It’s almost like a seesaw. If, at one end, you have mission
and, at the other end, you have margin — at one end, you
have responsibility, and the other end, you have authority.
“If one or the other is out of balance, it doesn’t work. In
other words, if a manager has too much responsibility without a commensurate amount of authority, he or she won’t do
well. Here, if we wanted, the only way I could give away that
much in free care is to be able to have it at the other end of
that seesaw. If I don’t have the money, I’m not going to do it.”
If you’re having trouble finding a way to obtain money or
how to spend it, Day says form a board, even if it is only for
advisory purposes.
“I think it’s important for a CEO, or anyone else trying to do
this, to surround himself or herself with the best people possible, and that’s both at the governance level, the board level,
and in the executive level,” he says.
“We all need people to open doors for us because there are
a lot of people out there with some very good ideas, but they
haven’t figured out how to sell the idea or to contact the people who can open the doors for them.”
Find and retain good people
When Day first took over as CEO, he tried to convince people he knew to join him at St. Barnabas, but a lot of them
thought he was crazy.
These days, he doesn’t quite get that response, but it’s still
a challenge to get good people to join the organization. St.
Barnabas is in the high-growth areas of Allegheny and Butler
counties where the competition for labor is ferocious.
Day says going to places where you can meet potential
employees, hear their story and then communicate yours is a
way to find solid workers.
Over the years, he says he’s talked with people about the
organization, where it is going and how it’s going to get there,
and describes the journey and how they and their families
would enjoy it.
“As we say, ‘If you want to shoot a moose, go where the
moose are,’” he says.
“It’s probably a poor expression, but I’ve used it over the
years. In other words, I’ve gone and obviously swiped people
from other organizations, but I would go to meetings and
seminars and luncheons and observe and listen and try to
find people that I thought would fit my team.”
Day says during a conversation, he is impressed with someone who wants to work hard. He also wants to be associated
with winners, and, when it comes to resumes, he focuses on
the results.
“So many of them talk about process rather than results,”
he says. “We hire people because they know how to do things
and how to produce results.”
Day says when you are looking for help to not only go out
and meet people, but to also try to find someone from a similar business.
“If you find someone who has been a winner in another
organization and has produced the results, you can save an
awful lot of time and effort and money by recruiting someone from a similar field,” he says. “If not, be out there, keep
the antennae up and find someone who has done well in
sales or finance or who knows operations.”
The key is not waiting for the good employees to come to
you, he says.
“You have to be proactive,” Day says. “I say it here often.
‘Get up off your seat, or whatever you want to call it, and go
out and talk to somebody.’ If it means go to Pittsburgh and
go to Harrisburg, I encourage my folks to do that. Go where
you have to go and find these people. Or, if you see someone at the chamber of commerce meeting, or whatever kind
of business association — American Management
Association, American Marketing Association, whenever
you see somebody, kind of listen, keep your antennae up.
I’ve found people that way — found some great people.”
While finding good people is vital to a company’s success,
Day says retention is just as important.
“I find to retain good folks requires effort and requires a lot of
communication,” he says. “What I’ve tried to do over the years,
which I think has worked, and I’d recommend it to anybody, is
if someone has done well ... I say something to them. On the
other hand, if they have not done well, I say lets sit and talk.
So, I don’t save up. I don’t save up on either the positive side or
the negative side. And again, it goes back to listening. I think
[the key is] listening and observing and not having so much ego
that I can’t notice that someone else is unhappy about something. Try to find out about it right away.
“I think it’s one of the key factors in retaining someone. It’s
more important than the money because eventually somebody
can make some more money someplace else. That’s an endless
ladder, if you will.”
Getting buy-In
No matter what you are getting buy-in for, Day says it is
important to try and use words that help people see what you
are communicating.
“I’ve tried to say around here, ‘There will be no improvement
without change,’” he says. “By in large, people don’t like to
change.”
Day says he believes average people work in average facilities, good people work in good facilities and great people work
in great facilities. Improving a good facility into a great facility
means the employees need to feel a part of the organization.
“We’ve tried to enable people to picture themselves working
in places where they are treated fairly, where they’ve got all
kinds of opportunity,” he says. “Nothing means opportunity
anymore than bringing people up through the ranks. Let people
know the organization will grow and do good things. If they
can see themselves in that, then I think they will indeed buy
in.”
Day says a major way to get employees to see themselves
as a big part of a growing organization is through recognition.
“Recognition is hugely important,” Day says. “We all walk
around with, you can’t see it, but I’m sure I got it on my shirt.
It says, ‘I am important.’ And, I got 600 people, and they all
have that same thing on their shirts. It’s amazing.”
At St. Barnabas, employees who have served 10 or more
years are welcomed into the 10-year club, where recognition
includes being taken out to dinner. Day says employers can
also reward employees with shirts or jackets as well as putting
some teeth into the employee of the month award and recognizing perfect attendance.
“There are all kinds of ways to recognize them,” he says. “If
it’s in the weekly newsletter, the list is endless if people will
only think about the employee, rather than thinking about
themselves or their own egos. We need to sublimate our own
egos and exemplify and amplify the employees. There used
to be a saying in the newspaper business that names make
news. Well, they still do.”
Day says it costs hardly anything to recognize an employee,
or even one of their kids for doing well, and the return is well
worth it.
“It’s the kind of thing that keeps people loyal and working
hard,” he says. “They buy in to the mission again.”
If recognition isn’t getting the job done, then making yourself
available to talk with employees can do the trick.
“There’s been this thing about management by walking
around and all that,” he says. “I’m not sure that is a good idea
because I think employees see through that. I’m not putting
it down. I walk around, but I don’t do as some of the textbooks have talked over the years about walking around
every day. Eventually, if an employee sees you every day in
one of the buildings, they wonder ‘Why aren’t you working?’
So, I don’t do that. But, showing a personal interest in each
employee, and that’s hard to do, is important — showing
appreciation for what they do and how hard they work and
the fact that it’s produced results. It still comes back to
results. We all want to be part of a winner.”
Recognizing employees not only gets employees to buy-in but
also creates a better environment.
“If I point at you and say, ‘Thank you so much for doing that,’”
he says. “You’re going to come back either directly or indirectly with the three more fingers saying, ‘He is a pretty good guy,
and this is a great place to work.’”
HOW TO REACH: St. Barnabas Health System, (724) 443-0700 www.stbarnabashealthsystem.com
