Insurance
Direct line
How Howard Kahn drove a culture of straight talk into L.A. Care Health Plan to get unfiltered opinions from his employees
By Mike Cottrill
Smart Business Los Angeles | October 2008
Page 1 of 3
In one of the first meetings Howard A.
Kahn sat in on after being named CEO in
2001, he noticed after every question he
asked there was a long silence in the room.
“When I asked questions, nobody would
say anything at all, and they all looked
toward their manager to speak first,” Kahn
says.
That moment of silence was symbolic of
a problem rife within L.A. Care Health
Plan.
“The management team meetings were
totally noninteractive,” Kahn says. “The
organizational culture was, ‘Don’t speak up
to leadership in the presence of your own
manager. Let those above you do the talking — it’s safer.’ ... That’s just a deadly way
of thinking.”
The more Kahn tried to get information
out of people, the more he realized that the
culture of L.A. Care wasn’t conducive to
clear communications. In fact, the community accountable health plan that serves
nearly 800,000 Los Angeles residents had a
history of problems because people didn’t
speak up or they didn’t fully understand the
often-clouded mission of the company.
“Before my arrival at L.A. Care, the staff
was buffeted by a number of surprises by
managers, leadership and the board,” he
says. “A culture of secrecy was developing.
It was a young organization, but felt old —
old style and old attitudes.”
It didn’t take Kahn long to come to the
realization that, without taking some bold
moves, this was going to be the company
culture that he had to live with.
“I said, ‘You know what, everything I hear
here is going to be filtered unless I change
that,’” he says. “So I started popping in
around the different departments and said,
‘If I start having these smaller group informal communications, the word would get
out.’”
And so Kahn started getting the word out
about having employees speak up and
speak more clearly. He wasn’t just trying to
get chatter going, he knew he and his
employees believed in the mission of the
$1 billion plan, the largest public health
plan in America, and he wanted the company to use that passion to get feedback
from people.
So Kahn took some symbolic actions and
did some daily things to change his company culture, setting a clear tone for more
straightforward communications from his
office and then encouraging his more than
350 employees to speak candidly in different forums.
