Choosing ‘we before me’ | Lessons for Leaders

National Harbor, Md. - Tina Freese Decker says healthcare leaders can’t underestimate the importance of teamwork to help an organization reach its goals.

Freese Decker is the president and chief executive officer of Corewell Health, which operates 21 hospitals in Michigan. The system employs more than 60,000 workers and reported more than $17 billion in revenue in 2025.

In an interview with Chief Healthcare Executive at the Healthcare Financial Management Association conference earlier this month, Freese Decker talked about the strategies that led to the successful merger of Spectrum Health and Beaumont Health to form Corewell Health. She also shared some insights on leadership during a time of rapid change in the healthcare industry.

“I think one of the great lessons is that we should make sure that we're choosing we over me,” Freese Decker says. “If this is a team sport in healthcare, we need to be focused on collective success, especially as we have so many headwinds coming forward and focusing on how we collectively can be successful for the people that we're serving.”

Freese Decker says one of the key factors that helped Corewell Health being operating as one system was what she called “over-communicating and over-listening.”

She also says leaders can foster an environment of teamwork by being clear about objectives.

“You can have aligned system-wide goals that are about how you win collectively and aligning through what we're trying to do, how the teams come together to do your work, so you have individual goals and you have system-wide goals, and I think that reinforces where you're going,” Freese Decker says.

Freese Decker has served as president and CEO of Corewell since the merger of Spectrum Health and Beaumont Health was finalized in 2022. Previously, she was the president and CEO of Spectrum Health beginning in 2018 until the merger, when she began leading the merged organization.

She began her healthcare career working in the admitting department of a community hospital in Iowa, and she began an administrative fellowship at Spectrum Health in 2002.

After joining Spectrum Health, Freese Decker took different roles every few years.

“Almost every three years I had a different job,” Freese Decker says. “And what was really beneficial about that is I tried something different. I was always pushing myself to get different experiences, to be curious, to have the courage to do something I didn't really fully know I could do, and that helped develop me as I went through. And I think that has stayed with me, that I can do hard things.”

Freese Decker also says she thinks about the difficult road of patients to retain perspective, and she encourages others to have that mindset as well.

“I think about them and what we can do to help them every day, and we can do those hard things,” she says.

Matt Cox, the chief financial officer of Corewell Health, praised Freese Decker’s collaborative approach in a discussion on the main stage of the HFMA conference.

“Tina will come to me and ask questions, and what I've been surprised about is how she wants to dig in and she wants to understand and she wants to know the why’s,” Cox said.

He also said that Freese Decker will sometimes relieve Cox of the responsibility of bearing the bad news about turning down some initiatives, since he is often the one that has to say no.

Even with some of the challenges facing the healthcare industry, Freese Decker says she is optimistic about the future and Corewell’s ability to adapt and succeed in a changing environment.

“I think there's a lot of opportunity for us to make changes and to make it better for the next 20, 40 years from now,” Freese Decker says.

“Right now, we are faced with an environment that is very challenging, very difficult,” she continues. “In my view of it, let’s take it head on, let's find solutions that we need to take, whether it's regulatory, legislative, or internally, that we can move forward. Because our patients are going to demand it and we need to make sure we’re there for our patients.”