AdventHealth CEO David Banks focuses on the front line

David Banks, the president and CEO of AdventHealth, sits in a nice office, but he understands that’s not where the organization’s mission takes place.

“I actually have one of the worst seats in the house,” he says.

Banks leads an organization with 57 hospitals and more than 100,000 team members in nine states. So he says he knows it’s important to get out of his office to find out what’s happening.

“I spend a lot of time rounding in our organization,” he tells Chief Healthcare Executive®.

Because even with the best of intentions, he says, it’s not easy to gauge what is working - and what isn’t working - without talking to people on the front line.

In a recent interview, Banks talks about getting insights from the staff, maintaining the well-being of the workforce, maintaining purpose, and the experience he wants for AdventHealth’s patients.

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The value of listening

Banks began his career as a psychiatric technician on a nursing unit, and later became a psychiatric social worker.

Early on, he says he realized, “Administration doesn't always know what's happening.”

Now that he’s leading the organization, Banks says he goes out to learn what’s happening from those working with patients.

Banks also says he’s worked to create mechanisms to get feedback through leadership and understand the frontline experience of team members.

He says he’s looking at data to gauge performance, and the responses of consumers about what they’re getting and what they’re missing. And he says that he asks questions of caregivers and staff.

“There's no ‘gotchas.” We're all trying to get the same thing done,” he says.

He cites some lessons from Margaret Wheatley’s books on leadership, including one key tenet: People care about what they create.

“We try to get our front line in on the creation of the work we're doing,” Banks says. “Because when people can see themselves in it, they're much more able to help the organization do what it's trying to do for patients. And they know. The front line can tell you what's really happening in the organization. You gotta listen.”

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Investing in staff

Banks points to the importance of maintaining the well-being of staff. In AdventHealth’s strategic plan, Vision 2030, the system set a goal of building “wholehearted” teams.

The system has examined pay closely. “We want our team members fairly compensated,” Banks says.

Employees get benefits from the day they begin working for the health system.

Banks also cites opportunities for employees to advance in their careers, noting that employees have moved from technicians to nursing roles.

“We invest a lot in the education of our folks,” he says. “We can take a young person from high school and get them as far as they want to go educationally.”

AdventHealth also is spending time in the development of the system’s leaders and managers. Banks says that when people leave a job, it’s often because of their supervisor.

“We've invested a lot in our leadership development, we have 11,000 frontline leaders, really helping them to have the tools they need to better support their teams,” he says. “But it's a full-time focus. We're blessed with some wonderful team members. They carry the mission of the organization forward. And so we invest a lot in their well-being, because without them, it just doesn't happen, right? It just doesn't happen.”

‘A very specific experience’

Banks also talks about the importance of purpose in AdventHealth and connecting intention to results.

“We're here to deliver whole person care,” Banks says. “We want to be clinically excellent, and we want people to have a very specific experience while they get care inside of an AdventHealth facility, and that's care that sees them as a person. They're not just a procedure or a diagnosis or the next patient to move through the lobby.”

Patients coming to an AdventHealth hospital or clinic need help, and they need to be seen as whole people, he says. And he says that’s vital in fulfilling the system’s mission.

AdventHealth team members wear badges that include a promise to care for patients like a loved one (for example, “I care for you like my wife Jane”). He sees it as a way to help connect caregivers to patients.

“It's really the team being in tune to the needs of the patient, both clinically, but then also psycho-socially, spiritually, maybe, that we want to make sure we're really listening for,” he says. “Keeping that in front is what helps us really kind of live into the purpose of our brand promise.”

Even with the challenges facing the healthcare industry, Banks says he’s an optimist.

“I love what we get to do,” he says. “The messiness of the healthcare industry is what we signed up for. I don't find it discouraging. It's just the complexity we work in, and keeping focused on patients gives us the motivation to just power through all that.”

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