Leadership
Getting better
How Diane Holder uses a focus on quality to help UPMC Health Plan reach its goals
By Brian Horn
Smart Business Pittsburgh | May 2009
Page 1 of 4
Diane P. Holder wants more from her vision than to just create it, stick it on a shelf and then focus on the daily grind.
The president and CEO of UPMC Health Plan and president of the UPMC Insurance Services Division sees the vision as the company’s outlook on the future and as a creation that is constantly evolving. But, the creation of that needs to start with you, and as it evolves, others need to be involved, as well.
“Vision is something that your team helps to further,” says Holder, who oversees about 1,500 people at the company. “But I think the vision gets set at the top through boards and CEO levels. Then, your senior people — they help to shape it and evolve it over time. It’s a participatory process.”
In order to make it a process involving others, you need to articulate it simply so you can communicate it appropriately.
“You want to engage people in the process of actually understanding what it means,” she says. “It’s great to be at a 30,000-foot (level) in terms of where you want to go in the future and how are we going to get there. But, you need to be able to communicate that and engage people in that, and you then need to have strategies to actually employ it.”
Under Holder’s guidance and vision, the organization has grown from $2.3 billion in 2007 revenue to more than $2.8 billion in 2008 revenue. But vision isn’t the only thing you need to be successful.
Here are some other ideas Holder acts on to keep the company heading in the right direction.
