105_Defining Healthcare Excellence: Leadership, Strategy, and the Next Evolution in Performance

So what does health care excellence actually look like? That's a question I've asked a lot of people over the years. I've asked healthcare executives, entrepreneurs, clinicians. I've asked people leading hospitals, healthcare companies, community organizations, and businesses of their own.

And if you've been listening to this podcast over the past season, you've heard a lot of those answers. You've heard us talk about leadership, strategy, culture, career development, innovation, operations, community impact, entrepreneurship, personal growth. And even what it takes to turn an idea or a passion for helping people into a sustainable healthcare or wellness business? But as I started preparing for the next season of the podcast, I found myself thinking about a different question.

After an entire season of conversations about excellence, what do we actually learn? And maybe more importantly, what happens when we start connecting all of those lessons together? Because that's where I believe this podcast needs to go next. So before we turn the page, before we officially begin the Healthcare Excellence Masterclass, before I introduce you to everything that's coming next, I want to spend some time looking back.

Because there were some incredible lessons shared this season. When I step back and look at all the conversations together, I believe that they were actually preparing us for the conversation we're about to have next. So today we're going to close one chapter of the Excellence in Healthcare podcast, and then we're going to open another. So let's get into it.

Hey everybody, welcome back to the Excellence in Healthcare podcast. I'm your host, Jarvis T. Gray, and today's episode is a little different. There's no guest joining me.

There isn't a business owner sitting across from me waiting for a coaching session. It's just you and me, and you're going to be seeing a lot more of that moving forward. But before I explain why, I want to acknowledge what an incredible season that we've had. Throughout the season, I've had the opportunity to sit with a really interesting mix of people.

On one side, we talk with healthcare executives and leaders who have spent years navigating complex organizations, building teams, developing people, leading change and trying to improve healthcare. And then we introduced something very different with our Health Biz Spotlight series. Through these conversations, we opened the microphone to healthcare and wellness entrepreneurs who were building their own businesses. And I love those conversations because we didn't just interview them, we coached.

We talked openly about what was working, what wasn't working, who they were trying to serve. And how they could position their business so they could create better offers, how they could generate better leads, build partnerships, and increase visibility. And ultimately build something sustainable around the impact that they wanted to make. a healthcare executive leading a large organization, and an entrepreneur trying to build a healthcare or wellness company.

But the more I thought about this season, the more I realized something, the underlying questions weren't actually that different. Who are you trying to serve? What problem are you trying to solve? How do you lead people?

How do you make good decisions? How do you translate a vision into action? How do you measure whether what you're doing is actually working? How do you build something capable of continuing beyond you?

And ultimately, how do you create a meaningful, sustainable impact? Those are all questions of healthcare excellence. And as I went back through the conversation, there were six lessons that kept showing up. So I want to spend some time unpacking those today.

healthcare excellence starts with leadership, but leadership starts with the person. One of the strongest themes across the season was leadership, but not leadership in the terms of titles, not organizational charts, not how many people report to you. self-awareness, courage, growth, responsibility, Values, authenticity, and the willingness to keep developing yourself. I think back to the conversation with Kevin Gordon.

Kevin talked about being the captain of your own career, and I love that language. Because particularly in healthcare, it can be very easy to believe that somebody else is responsible for determining where your career goes. We're waiting for the promotion, waiting for someone to recognize us. Waiting on the organization to give us an opportunity, waiting on the perfect leader, waiting on permission.

But Kevin challenged that. You have to own your own career. and part of that ownership means being willing to take difficult assignments, seeking mentors, learning from great leaders, learning from bad leaders, allowing the people around you to challenge you, And sometimes even allowing the people you lead to lead up. And that's leadership.

speak up, use your voice. Don't be afraid to stand out. Don't be afraid to bring a different perspective. And sometimes be willing to shake the room up.

And again, I love that. Because health care doesn't need more leaders who simply know how to maintain what's already there. We need people who are willing to question whether what is already there is actually good enough. But here's the part that I think is important.

You can't lead organizations beyond the level that you're willing to lead yourself. You can't ask your team to grow while you refuse to grow. You can't ask people to embrace change while you're holding on to every old assumption that you've ever had. And you can't build an excellent organization without leaders willing to look into the mirror.

One of the biggest takeaways from this season is that healthcare excellence doesn't begin with a strategic plan, a dashboard, or improvement project. It begins when leaders are willing to grow. So lesson two is that great leaders don't just build followers, they build more leaders. This was another theme that really stuck out to me.

In my conversation with Dr. Elena McAdams, she shared a leadership philosophy that I think every executive listening to this podcast should consider. Leadership isn't about creating more followers. Leadership is about creating more leaders.

Think about that for a second. If you're a CEO, a chief nursing officer, a vice president, a director, Or even someone leading a small team, what would happen if we stopped measuring our leadership primarily by how many people depended on us? and instead started asking, how capable are the people around me becoming because of my leadership? Can they think independently?

Can they make decisions? Can they challenge assumptions? Can they solve problems? Can they lead when you're not in the room?

That's organizational capacity and that's also where leadership moves beyond personality. Because eventually every organization reaches a point where its future depends less on the talent of one leader and more on the capability of the leadership system around that person. I've seen this repeatedly in my consulting and coaching work. You can have an incredibly talented CEO, but if everything requires a CEO, that's not excellence.

have a brilliant CNO, but if every decision has to move up to the CNO, that's not leadership development, that's dependency. And dependency eventually becomes a bottleneck. So here's a question that I want you to take from this season. How many people are better prepared to lead because they worked with you?

That may be one of the most important measures of leadership that we have. So the next lesson is that strategy doesn't matter until people can translate it into action. This lesson showed up in several conversations. But I think about my conversation with Dr.

Daija Smith in particular, She talked about working across clinical care, operations, business leadership, and strategy. And what I loved about that conversation was the recognition that those things cannot live separately. Because one of the biggest problems I see in healthcare organizations, we create strategy over here, operations happen over there. Quality sits somewhere else, finance has its priorities, nursing has its priorities, human resources has its priorities, technology has its priorities, and everybody is incredibly busy.

But busy doesn't necessarily mean aligned, and that's the problem. I also think about my conversations with Austin Perky Pile. Austin described healthcare in a way that really resonated with me as a collection of interconnected gears. Physicians, administrators, operations, business, people, processes, everything turning together.

and that's how healthcare actually works. So when one gear isn't working correctly, the effects don't remain isolated. They travel through the system. That leads me to one of the ideas you're gonna hear me talk about much more moving forward.

Strategy has to travel. A brilliant strategic plan sitting in an executive conference room isn't healthcare excellence. A beautiful PowerPoint presentation isn't healthcare excellence. A list of strategic priorities hanging on a wall that isn't healthcare excellence.

Excellence happens when strategy travels, when the executive team understands it, when middle managers understand it, when frontline leaders understand it, when people can connect their daily work to it, and most importantly, when people know what they're supposed to do differently because of it, that's the difference between having strategy and having strategic alignment. And we're gonna spend a lot more time talking about that in the next chapter of this podcast. Lesson four, never allow numbers to make you forget about the people.

One of the stories that stayed with me from this season came from my conversation with Matt Dusick. Matt described being in a hospital and watching two elevators. One elevator could bring a family experiencing one of the most difficult days of their lives, and the other could bring parents leaving the hospital with a brand new baby. Same building, same healthcare system, completely different human experiences.

And Matt's point was that behind all the data that we look at on healthcare, there are people. I haven't forgotten that story because a lot of my professional life is built around numbers. Quality measures, financial performance, operational metrics, patient experience scores, workforce data, dashboards, KPIs, improvement targets. And all of that matters.

We need data. We need measurement. We need accountability. eventually, every number has a name.

Every metric represents an experience. Every process touches a person. Every operational failure eventually lands somewhere. Maybe it lands on a nurse who doesn't have what she needs to do her job.

maybe it lands on a physician fighting through broken processes, or maybe it lands on an employee who's burnt out. Maybe it lands on a family sitting in the waiting room, or maybe it lands on a patient. That's why healthcare excellence simply can't be about hitting the numbers. We have to ask, what experiences are those numbers actually producing for the human beings?

Because at the end of our strategy, all of our technology, all of our operations, all of our improvement work, there is a person, and we can't lose sight of that. So the next lesson excellence isn't a destination, it's a discipline. Another idea that came up throughout the season was continuous growth. Matt talked about sustained excellence.

Kevin talked about getting 1% better. Austin talked about how difficult periods can sometimes become some of the most important periods of a leader's development. and that's important because I think we sometimes talk about excellence as if organizations eventually arrive there and they don't. Healthcare changes too quickly, your workforce changes, technology changes, reimbursement changes.

Patient expectations change, competition changes, communities change, the regulatory environment changes, and now artificial intelligence is accelerating another enormous wave of change across our industry. so there's no point where an organization can sit back and simply say that we figured it out, right? What excellent healthcare organizations can say is that we've built the capacity to keep figuring it out and that's different. And I think that's one of the most important distinctions that we can make because excellence isn't perfection, it's the ability to learn, to adapt, to improve, respond, and to get better.

And we want to be able to do that again and again and again. excellence isn't a destination, it's a discipline. And the organizations that sustain excellence aren't the organizations that have figured everything out. They're the organizations that have built the capacity to keep learning.

Impact needs a vehicle. So I want to shift to another part of this season that I truly enjoyed, which was our Health Biz Spotlight series. We had the opportunity to talk with a number of healthcare and wellness entrepreneurs, and these conversations were different. These weren't executives sitting inside of large healthcare systems.

Many of these were people building something from the ground up. And in a lot of cases, they started their businesses because something happened personally. They saw a problem, they experienced a problem, they worked with the population that they cared about deeply, and then they developed the expertise and eventually they thought, I can help people with this. I think about my conversation with Ariana Reinhardt.

She had a very clear desire to help women dealing with burnout and exhaustion. And during our conversation, we started unpacking what it would take to turn that purpose into a stronger business. Who exactly are you trying to serve? What's the pain you're solving?

What's your value proposition? What's your offer? Where does your audience spend time? How are you generating leads?

How can you create a corporate wellness program to serve them? What partnerships could you build? What would a referral strategy look like and how do you create momentum? And what I loved about those conversations is that they reinforce something that I learned early in my own entrepreneurial journey.

Is that impact needs a vehicle? You can have an incredible mission, but if nobody knows you exist, your impact is limited. You can be incredibly talented, but if you can't clearly explain who you help, your impact, it's going to be limited. And you can have a service that changes lives, but if the economics don't work, eventually your ability to deliver those services become limited.

And so that's why business matters, that's why strategy matters, that's why positioning matters. And that's why sustainable models they matter. And there's actually a direct connection between those entrepreneurs who were learning and what healthcare organizations have to learn. Whether you're running a billion-dollar healthcare system or a one-person wellness practice, you're still answering questions like: who do we serve?

What problem are we solving? What value do we create? do people experience us? How do we differentiate ourselves?

How do we measure whether or not we're succeeding? And how do we sustain the work? The scale may be completely different, but the leadership questions aren't nearly as different as sometimes we want to think. So leadership, developing people, strategic alignment, human-centered performance, continuous improvement, sustainable impact.

Those were just some of the themes that came out of this season. And as I started connecting those conversations, something became very clear to me. For years, I've been asking other people, what does healthcare excellence mean to you? And I love asking that question.

You're gonna continue hearing me ask that question, but I realized something. never really taken this microphone, slowed down, and told you what healthcare excellence means to me. And after years of consulting, coaching healthcare executives, leading quality and performance improvement work, facilitating strategic planning, working with hospitals and healthcare organizations, teaching Lean Six Sigma, working in rural healthcare, studying organizational excellence, and interviewing leaders on this podcast, I think it's about time.

Because here's what I believe. I don't believe healthcare excellence is a program. I don't believe it's a quality department. I don't believe it's a strategic plan.

I don't believe it's Lean Six Sigma. I don't believe it's patient experience. And I don't believe it's employee engagement or technology. I don't believe it's financial performance.

And I definitely don't believe it's another initiative. Those things matter. But none of them by themselves are health care excellence. Healthcare excellence is a system.

And when I finally started looking at it that way, a lot of things began to connect. And that realization isn't just changing the podcast. It's actually changing my business. Many of you have known my company for years now as the quality coaching company.

That company has been an incredible vehicle for my work. It's allowed me to coach leaders, train healthcare professionals, work with hospitals and health systems, facilitate strategy, lead improvement initiatives, support rural health organizations, and build relationships with some incredible people across the industry. But over time, the work expanded. The vision expanded.

And honestly, I expanded. The work is no longer about just quality, and it isn't just about coaching. Those things are still incredibly important to me, but they're pieces of something larger. so the next evolution of the company is healthcare excellence advisors.

And I want to be really clear about something. For me, this isn't just simply a new name. It's a clearer description of the work. Healthcare excellence advisors is being built around a much bigger question.

what does it actually take to help healthcare organizations achieve and sustain excellence? Not just improve one metric, not just improve one strategic plan or just run another initiative, but build the leadership capacity, the strategy, the operating disciplines, the workforce, the culture, the patient and community focus, the data capabilities, the financial sustainability, and the innovation capacity necessary to keep getting better. And that's the work that we're building.

And the podcast is going to become one of the places where we openly explore these ideas. So let me tell you what that means for the Excellence in Healthcare podcast. First, you're gonna hear more from me, and I mean substantially more. For years, the podcast has been heavily interview-driven, and I love that the guests are not going away.

But I've realized that I've spent years building frameworks, coaching healthcare executives, facilitating improvement work, working inside healthcare organizations, teaching leaders, and developing my own perspective of what this industry needs. And I need to bring more of that directly to this microphone. So You're going to hear me do more solo episodes. Some will be teaching episodes.

Some will unpack the frameworks that I've developed. Some will be observations from work that I'm doing in the field. Some will change conventional thinking. Some will give you tools that you could immediately take back to your organization.

And some will simply be me thinking out loud about something happening in healthcare that I believe leaders need to be paying attention to. I want this podcast to become the place where healthcare leaders can come not just to hear interesting conversations, but learn how to lead healthcare excellence. Now let me reassure everybody who loves the interviews. I'm not getting rid of guests.

Actually, I think the guest conversations, they're going to get better as well, but the framework is going to change. Historically, a lot of healthcare podcasts, including mine at times, follow a very familiar format. Tell us about yourself, tell us about your career. What challenges have you experienced?

What's your advice to future leaders? Those can create some great conversations, but moving forward, I want to go deeper instead of just simply asking, tell us about your career. I'm increasingly going to ask, help us understand healthcare excellence through your area of expertise. So when I bring a CFO onto the podcast, we're going to talk about what financial sustainability actually looks like inside of an excellent healthcare organization.

When I bring a chief nursing officer on, we may explore workforce, culture, patient care leadership, and what it takes to create environments where clinicians can perform at their best. when I bring a CIO or a technology leader on, We're going to talk about data and analytics and digital transformation, artificial intelligence, and how technology actually contributes to organizational excellence. When I bring a CEO on, we're going to dig into healthcare leadership and governance, strategy, execution, culture, transformation.

Not simply how did you become a CEO? I want every guest to help us investigate a piece of the larger healthcare excellence puzzle. Think about them almost like guest faculty members. They bring expertise, they bring lived experience, they bring lessons from the field.

And together, we're going to use those conversations to build a much richer understanding of what excellence actually requires. And that brings me to probably the biggest change. I'm introducing a new solo series right here on the podcast, the Healthcare Excellence Masterclass. This is where we're going to start putting structure around the conversation.

We're going to go beyond saying We need better leadership, okay? what does better leadership actually look like? We're gonna go beyond saying we need better strategy. What does strategic alignment actually look like?

We're gonna go beyond saying we need culture of improvement. So how do we build one, right? We're gonna talk about the systems that support excellence. We're gonna talk about what breaks down, we're gonna talk about maturity, we're gonna talk about alignment.

Execution, leadership, operations, workforce, patient and community impact, data, financial sustainability, innovation, and transformation. And we're going to connect all of those things together because that's the part that I believe healthcare often misses. We have no shortage of initiatives. What we're missing is integration.

We have quality programs, patient experience programs, strategic plans, workforce initiatives. Technology projects, cost reduction initiatives, transformation offices, leadership development programs, and innovation teams. But if all of those things are moving independently, we don't have a system, we have activity. and activity isn't the same thing as excellence.

So that's what this masterclass is going to investigate. we're going to begin with the most basic question of all. What exactly is healthcare excellence? Because before we can build it, we have to define it.

And I'm going to challenge some of the assumptions that we traditionally make about that because quality alone isn't enough. Operational excellence alone isn't enough. Patient experience alone isn't enough. Financial performance alone isn't enough.

A great strategy isn't enough. Great leadership by itself isn't enough. because healthcare organizations are systems, and ultimately, excellence happens when the system works together. And that's where we're headed.

But before you jump directly into the masterclass, I want to give you a challenge. Go back, not forever. I'm not telling you you have to listen to every episode that we've recorded, but go back through the past season and pick a few conversations. And this time listen to it differently.

Don't just listen to the guest stories. Listen through the lens of healthcare excellence. Ask yourself, what did that person teach me about leadership? What did they teach me about people?

What did they teach me about strategy, about execution, culture, improvement, innovation, sustaining impact, and most importantly, what's the one thing that I can actually do differently because of what I heard? Go back to the conversation with Matt Dusik and listen for the connection between people, data, leadership, and sustained excellence. Go back to Kevin Gordon and listen for the career ownership, mentorship, difficult assignments, and what it means to lead up. Listen to Dr.

Elena McAdams and think about whether your leadership is actually producing more leaders. Go back to Dr. Deja Smith and listen for the connection between strategy, clinical care, operations, and execution. Listen to Selima Sagato And think about where you may need to use your voice more boldly.

Listen to Austin Percupile and think about healthcare as an interconnected system rather than a collection of separate departments. And go back through some of our Health Biz Spotlight conversations. listen to the entrepreneurs who were courageous enough to bring their businesses onto the show and let us coach them in public. Listen for purpose, positioning, business models, audience, impact, sustainability, and growth.

because there are lessons in those healthcare conversations, whether you run a health system or a small health care and wellness business. So as I close this season, I want to say something personally. I'm proud of what this podcast has become, but I'm even more excited for what it can become. When I started podcasting, I didn't have all of this figured out, and honestly, I still don't.

But that's part of the point. I've grown through these conversations too. There have been guests who have made me rethink something, guests who have challenged my assumptions, guests who have given me ideas that I took into my own work. Here's a quick side note, but if you go way back to the conversation that I had with Quint Studer, when he logged in for our recording session, we talked for nearly a full hour before recording the actual podcast.

And then for an extra 45 minutes after the recording was done. If you can imagine the life-changing and business-changing advice that I personally took from those three hours with one of the GOATs of healthcare leadership, I mean, come on, y'all. But even some of the health biz spotlight conversations, I'd be coaching with the guests and halfway through realize that's something that I might need to tighten up in my own business. That's the beauty of learning.

the teacher can still be the student, the coach can still be coached, the expert can still ask questions, and the leader should always remain capable of learning. So I don't want the next chapter of this podcast to become one of me sitting behind a microphone pretending that I still have all the answers. That's not what the Healthcare Excellence Masterclass is about. It's about creating a space where we can seriously investigate the questions.

I'll bring what I've learned, I'll bring frameworks, I'll bring experiences from the field, I'll bring research, I'll bring tools. I'll bring guests who know things that I don't know, and I'll continue learning right alongside you. Because if excellence is really a discipline, then that applies to me too. So my vision is pretty simple.

I want the Excellence and Healthcare podcast to become one of the places where healthcare leaders can turn when they're serious about making healthcare better, not just talking about it, but building it. I want CEOs listening. I want hospital executives listening. I want nursing leaders listening, quality leaders, operations leaders, physicians, emerging leaders, rural health leaders, healthcare entrepreneurs, and anyone who believes that our industry can be better than it is today.

I want you to leave episodes with questions that you are taking back to your leadership team. I want you sending episodes to colleagues saying we need to talk about this. I want you applying the tools, challenging the ideas, sharing your own perspectives, and ultimately contributing to the larger conversation. Because no one person owns the definition of healthcare excellence, And no one organization has it all figured out.

But I believe we can get so much closer if we start connecting what we know. So when I look back at this season, I don't just see interviews, I see pieces of a much bigger conversation. Leadership, strategy, people, operations, culture, data, innovation, Community entrepreneurship growth impact. And somewhere along the way, those conversations started connecting.

And that's what the next chapter is all about. We're gonna connect the pieces, we're gonna define what healthcare excellence actually looks like, We're gonna study the organizations and the leaders doing it well. We're gonna challenge the things that aren't working. We're going to build practical frameworks that you could take back to your organization.

how do we move healthcare forward? So to every guest that has joined me this season, thank you. To every executive who shared your experience and your lessons with us, thank you. To every entrepreneur who trusted me enough to bring your business onto the show and let me coach you in public, thank you.

And to everyone who listened, who shared an episode, who sent me a message, who followed one of our guests, who took something you heard and actually applied it, thank you. You're the reason that we keep having these conversations. And now we're ready for the next one. One season is ending, but the bigger conversation about healthcare excellence is just getting started.

I'm Jarvis T. Gray, founder and CEO of Healthcare Excellence Advisors, and your host for the Excellence in Healthcare podcast. I'll see you in the Healthcare Excellence Masterclass. Welcome to the next chapter.