Partnership, accountability, trust and high reliability.
It’s Joe Swedish’s path — or, more correctly, his “P.A.T.H.”
Those four qualities are the team-building characteristics that he
wants every person at Trinity Health to embody, from the senior
managers down to the lowest levels of the $6.1 billion, seven-state
health care service provider.
With partnership, accountability, trust and high reliability in
place among its people, Swedish says an organization is built on a
foundation of bedrock that will allow it to grow for years to come.
“For me, it’s that acronym,” he says. “That’s what a team is based
on. With all of us working together, if we can fit ourselves to that
team construct, I believe we can accomplish great things.”
When Swedish became president and CEO of the fourth-largest Catholic health care provider in the U.S. in 2005, he
had never led a multistate business entity that needed large-scale alignment of its people in order to accomplish long-term
objectives. Out of necessity, he had to undergo a self-directed
crash course on large-scale organizational management.
He quickly came to an overriding conclusion: The power of a
business is in its people. You have to be able to harness that
power in order to grow your business, and in order to do that,
you need your people to not only work together, but to want to
work together for the common good of the organization.
That is how Swedish started down his path to “P.A.T.H.”
“The challenge I quite frankly underestimated was a matter
of scale, with regard to geographic dispersion, program diversity and just the nature of managing infrastructure that oversees all of our locations,” he says. “What I have learned thus far
is that I have to be more trusting of people, my leadership
team, and I really have to become very knowledgeable about
the power of talent in an organization.”
The four qualities of partnership, accountability, trust and
high reliability are, as Swedish calls them, “vectors toward a
simple word, and that’s ‘alignment.’”
“There has to be clarity of purpose and a commitment on the
part of the people who are serving the organization,” he says.
“Fundamentally, people have to be able to trust the leadership
and commit to the team so they feel that sense of ownership
toward the organization.”
To define the path for a business, you must define where you
want to take your business, and to do that, Swedish says you
must isolate what it is you want to value as a leader.
He says strategy is one of the most important areas in terms
of defining an organizational path.
“I spend a lot of time determining the effective path of the
organization based on our strategic direction,” he says. “The
responsibility of the CEO to set strategy is a very significant
responsibility. Basically, it lets your organization know what
you’re striving to achieve and why that sense of ownership is
so important. We can only accomplish it if everybody is
aligned.”
For Swedish, the critical keys to alignment are making sure
you have strong communication within your culture and that
you intelligently manage risk.
Managing communication
Swedish says that without effective communication, your
best-laid plans will die on the vine.
And truly effective communication appeals to employees on
a personal level.
“Once you’ve defined the path, then it becomes the responsibility of the CEO and the team to communicate again and
again,” Swedish says. “You want to make sure certain people
are listening to your message, and in order to listen, that gets
back to the ability of the person communicating to cover their
personal commitment, not just to the organization, but to each
individual.”
It’s the philosophy behind Swedish’s second P.A.T.H.
acronym: passion, attitude, truth and heart. Those four qualities are essential for authentic communication that draws in
your team. Swedish says a CEO must be passionate about what
he or she is saying, and that must go along with large doses of
positive attitude, transparency of message and speaking from
the heart.
“Every leader has the responsibility to exhibit those qualities.
That is evidence of an organization where people can really
begin to get that sense of ownership because they believe the
owner is really trying to bring them into the organization with
that level of commitment and is an authentic leader.”
But delivering a message with passion, attitude, truth and
heart is only half the battle. If you are in Swedish’s situation,
with many employees spread across multiple locations, you
need to make sure the employees in Location A are interpreting your messages in the same manner as employees in
Location B.
With 45,000 employees in seven states, that is no simple task
for Swedish. That’s why he decided early in his tenure to begin
stressing what he calls “common language.”
“What I have found repeatedly is a disconnect, a breakdown
of common language,” he says. “I can go from one location to
another and the same word means different things to different
people.”
Shortly after arriving at Trinity Health, Swedish gathered his
senior management together for a series of culture-shaping
sessions that lasted for about six months. In those sessions,
Swedish and his leadership formed a template for uniform
communication across the health system, including common
organizational terminology.
“As an example, we all committed to the description of our
organization as unified enterprise ministry,” he says. “To us,
that means something more powerful. To others, it might not
mean as much.”
He says each word was selected with a particular quality in
mind. “Unified” represents a systemwide approach to communication and best practices.
“If you are a unified organization, you are better able to
cross-pollinate best practices, so that a hospital in Silver
Spring, Md. can benefit from the achievements of a hospital in
Boise, Idaho or Fresno, Calif.,” he says.
“Enterprise” is an acknowledgement that Trinity Health is a
complex, growing organization that must manage risk effectively.
“Hospitals within our organization are singularly very traditional but connected from the scale in this organization can
create a very powerful voice to promote the transformation of
health care in the U.S.,” he says.
“Ministry” speaks to Trinity Health’s mission in the communities it serves. The system has its roots in Catholic health care
providers extending back more than 100 years.
“Ministry means simply to serve, and we want to be able to
continue in the tradition of serving our communities,” he says.
“So those three words, that is an example of common language. No matter where I go in Trinity today, we talk about
being a UEM.”
The job of communicating to all parts of a large organization
falls, in many ways, onto the shoulders of the field management. Since a CEO can’t be in all places at all times, or even
some of the time, Swedish says he learned very quickly that
driving a message across an organization is heavily reliant on
those directly beneath the CEO.
“Certainly you become aware that the limit of your control is
probably about a layer and a half or two layers in the organization,” he says. “Beyond that, you are really trusting individuals who work with you to effectively guide the organization to
accomplish its goals.”
Swedish meets regularly with all leaders throughout the
Trinity Health organization, in person and by phone, to reinforce the messages that originate in the home office.
“I’m not disconnected from the organization, but we have
45,000 associates,” he says. “I have to have a team I can trust
and that is aligned with me and my thinking regarding the primary objectives of the organization.
“Leaders like me really pride themselves on that face-to-face
connection. But that is incredibly difficult in a far-flung organization. In some regards, it’s really not that different from a
multinational organization, which suffers the same issues
with regard to executive outreach. So you have to be able to
rely on the talent that immediately surrounds you to carry out
that message.”
Managing risk
Swedish says aligning a company for optimum growth means
managing risk in a uniform fashion. One wing of your company might lean toward playing its cards close to the vest, while
another might like to gamble a bit more.
However, if the conservative wing of your company is losing
money by missing out on growth opportunities while the
more adventuresome wing is making bad investments, it all
adds up to the net sum of pulling the company downward.
Swedish says the key word is “judgment.”
“If you don’t take risks, you don’t grow. Business risk is like
personal risk in that it’s a matter of seizing moments that, in
many cases, are opportunities that only come along once. As a
CEO, managing change is probably the hardest thing I do every
day.”
Swedish says it comes back to knowing what you want to
value as an organization, and then communicating that to your
employees. Through communication and feedback, he says
you will figure out what is an acceptable risk level for those in
your company.
“Taking risks means different things to different people
because people have different levels of risk tolerance,” he says.
“It’s the responsibility of the leadership to advance risk-taking
to appropriate levels to continue growth.
“I think it’s important to note that the most important risk-evaluating tool I have is the ability to know two plus two
equals four without knowing what the second ‘two’ is. That
was something that was taught to me many years ago by a
mentor. The judgment of the leader is what helps an organization discern the correct degree of risk to take on in any project
or activity that attempts to move the organization. Again, it all
distills down to judgment.”
HOW TO REACH: Trinity Health, www.trinity-health.org
