Health & Medical
Rising to the top
How Mitch Creem turns people into self-starters at USC’s University and Norris Cancer hospitals
By Mike Cottrill
Smart Business | September 2009
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Look, Mitch Creem already knows you’re going to ask him for the one-size-fits-all answer.
I mean, you don’t think you’re the first person to ask Creem about a career filled with victories in handling distressed organizations — highlighted by one bottom line turnaround of roughly $100 million — do you?
“Everybody always looks for the silver-bullet answer, what can they take away from it and use somewhere else, but there were so many factors,” Creem says.
But, really, there has to be one trend that keeps popping up in a 25-year leadership career, right? Perhaps something he’s used to push through tough times in his current CEO role at USC University Hospital and USC Norris Cancer Hospital.
Maybe a more concise question will help: Has he seen a root theme to those struggling organizations he’s helped fix?
“Part of the reason why they were losing so much money was the employees were feeling bad about themselves and the organization, feeling disenfranchised and neglected and even disrespected by the senior management team,” Creem says. “So much of turning around an organization is turning around the psyche of the employees and making them feel that they’re important, that the organization is wonderful and that they are, too. And that they understand the business, they understand what’s going on and we listen to them, and if we can listen to them, we do very well.”
Now we’re getting somewhere. There may not be a perfect answer, but employee empowerment is something that Creem has learned to laud over the years. It’s a lesson he was preparing to bring to the two hospitals, months before the April 2009 transition in which the University of Southern California took ownership and people had to adapt overnight. The hospitals and the roughly 2,000 employees weren’t quite in the dire straights that Creem has seen before, but they still needed an overhaul.
Here are a few thoughts from Creem on how to build an empowerment culture that can be a game-changer for any organization.
