Building Leaders at Every Level with Courtney Holladay

0:00The most important healthcare decisions don't happen in isolation. They happen when leaders come together. Becker's 16th annual meeting brings together more than 3500 hospital and health system executives this April in Chicago. With 800 speakers from Ascension, Cleveland Clinic, Common Spirit, and more, the conversations get real. Leaders will share how their scenario planning for policy shifts, breaking through value-based care barriers, and building clinical teams that translate new ideas into real-world care. Join top decision makers in the room April 13th through the 16th. For the agenda and event details, visit Becker's HospitalReview.com and click on the Events tab in the upper right. Welcome to the Becker's Healthcare Podcast. I'm Kelly Guch, Senior Editor and Enterprise Lead at Becker's, and I'm thrilled to be joined today by Courtney Holiday, Vice President and Chief Learning Officer at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Courtney, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us. I'm really looking forward to our conversation, especially because

1:03MD Anderson has become a national leader and redefining my leadership looks like in healthcare, not just at an executive level, but of course across the whole organization and from your work with the Leadership Institute, your impact on engagement, patient experience, and researchers a lot to explore today. So to get us started, Courtney, I was hoping you could briefly introduce yourself and share how you came into the role and really what drew you to focus on leadership development and a complex academic personnel like MD Anderson. Well, thank you for the opportunity to be part of the podcast today. I'm really excited to be here. I have been with MD Anderson now for over 20 years, and I have been drawn from to the role for both personal and professional purposes. From the personal front, my mom is a cancer survivor, was treated at MD Anderson. So I've known about MD Anderson pretty much my entire life. So the opportunity to give back and to support people whose intent and purpose is to eliminate cancer really does fulfill me from that personal lens of how I can

2:08give back to people who really gave to me so profoundly. And then from a professional standpoint, my background is industrial organizational psychology. And so that's all about applying psychology to the world of work and helping people thrive in what they do. We spend so much time at work. So the opportunity to really help support people in their work is important and that background of industrial organizational psychology really lined up with what this role, the Chief Learning Officer role, is all about in providing leadership development at MD Anderson. Absolutely. And yeah, that definitely segues into our conversation today to dive a little deeper into your role. And I know MD Anderson has embraced the idea that leadership isn't tied to a specific title, but really something anyone in the organization can step into from the front desk to the C-suite. And so Wes had to change culturally for that mindset to truly take hold across a 27,000 person

3:09workforce. Sure. That philosophy that everyone is a leader is truly it just is across MD Anderson. And part of what drove that is the buy-in from our president and our senior most leaders, our executive leadership team. And it wasn't just from them talking about it. They started talking about aspects of their own 360s that they had a coach. But what people started to see was that they were participating in leadership development. So it wasn't uncommon to see them in the room with you or in the session with you online virtually. And when people started to see that model, it really started to disseminate throughout the organization that it is for everyone. And it also has become part of how we select into the organization. So it's not just something once you're there. It's how we're hiring and that premise that we want to hire people who can demonstrate those leadership characteristics

4:09has really allowed us to say this is for everyone and how it permeates across the organization. I wanted to ask you to a little bit about the leadership institute, which of course has produced measurable outcomes from higher patient experience for increased research impact and lower burnout. So it was curious how you really designed leadership development that we've been talking about just so it translates into real performance and engagement gains rather than feeling like maybe extra or additional training. Sure. I think one thing that's really important as we're talking about leadership development is thinking about it more broadly than simply training. Training is a key component what most people associate with leadership but is so much broader. There's the mentoring component, the coaching component team development. And I think that's what's allowed us to really produce those measurable outcomes is looking at the total comprehensive package around leadership development because we're trying to address it through a model of learn practice

5:12apply. Often in the course and the training, that's where you're learning. But it's through those mentoring and coaching opportunities that you're really able to practice and apply the content. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention, as we're designing any of the programs that we're doing, we're very intentional about the objectives that we're trying to achieve. What is it we're trying to move the bar on and help people up skill in. And so those are kind of the decision points and how we really provide a rounded experience around leadership development. We know that systems often also struggle with silos and long sending tensions across roles and disciplines. And so how is MD Anderson's situational collaborative view leadership that we've been talking about really changed the way clinicians, researchers and operational teams work together. So the first thing that I would point to is that we view leadership as discipline, agnostic. And what I mean by that is it doesn't matter whether

6:13you're a clinician, a researcher, an operational leader, the same leadership characteristics that you need in those disciplines are true across them all. So for example, being an emotional intelligent leader, you need that regardless of which discipline you're leading. And following that premise at MD Anderson, we start from the from the standpoint that everyone is first in MD Anderson leader. And we have eight characteristics that we have defined that really showcase what we're expecting from our MD Anderson leaders. And then you can build on that with the particular discipline that you lead and what may be nuanced or specific to that discipline that you need to support. Absolutely. And looking ahead to you should have a forward looking question. We know of course organizations across the US are facing continued workforce training and rapid change. And so how do you see leadership development need to evolve over the next maybe five to 10 years just to prepare the next generation of healthcare leaders?

7:19I think that's a great question. And I would actually press us to say we have to start that evolution sooner. We have to be thinking about how to really skill up the next generation in terms of their leadership and the skills and the toolkit that they have available. At MD Anderson, we're doing that by focusing our leadership development efforts with our trainees and our fellows, our residents, our graduate students, individuals who are going to be the next practitioners within our environment. We're even starting a high school program. We've started a high school program that we run in the summer where we have students coming in and we're focusing on those leadership skills, trying to get them earlier. I think it is a big focus for us. And this kind of gets to the point when today when I ask individuals, you know, how much time have you spent training in your discipline? And when they come into our organization, they're often

8:19saying, you know, in the hundreds of thousands of hours to really hone their craft home, their discipline. And then I'll ask them, so how many hours have you spent on developing leadership skills or interpersonal skills? And they'll look at me for a moment and then they might answer something in the, well, you know, maybe 50 to 100 kind of hours. And I think that's where we need to focus is really increasing that time spent earlier on leadership and development of those interpersonal skills so that you walk into the workforce with that skill set, with that toolkit already available to you and you're not having to develop it after the fact. Because when we see issues arise, when we see complicated interactions, it's often because we're not able to draw from the toolkit that we need to help us engage in that interaction effectively. And many times the things that we're talking about are not difficult.

9:20They are often common sense, but what we'll say is they're not common practice. And so what we're trying to do by spending time on the training and getting those dedicated time and attention to them now is really getting them to be common practice. And so the earlier that we can focus on them as we look to that next generation and getting it into, you know, high school, middle school, elementary school, I think it's just going to help that next generation as they move into the workforce. Yeah, it really sounds like the bottom line being get those fundamentals and have those set coming into the workforce, like you said, and really building from there in an efficient way essentially and just continue to continue to use those skills. Thank you so much, Courtney, for sharing. Is there anything that you would mention that we do you want to add about what we've discussed so far? Anything else you want to mention for those listening?

10:22I think though one thing I would add is going back to something you mentioned about seeing the training as extra or seeing leadership development as extra. And it really, we have to change that line of thinking to see how is it complementing, how is it serving as a strategic lever to accomplish whatever we're trying to do within the healthcare system, within their healthcare organization? Because people are our greatest asset. We are going to be the ones that are able to cure cancer, we're going to be the ones that are going to be holding the hands of our patients. And so that leadership development, how we're helping our employees, our workforce really be the best that they can be is what's going to enable us to achieve those really hard objectives that we're trying to as an organization. Thank you so much, Courtney, for this wonderful and interesting conversation today.

11:22I really do appreciate your time and I look forward to working with you again soon. Thank you for the opportunity. It's great to connect.