Finding and coaching the experts in a hospital | Lessons for Leaders

When he became a CEO, Marc Gorelick says he learned that there is a difference between being a contributor and even a frontline leader.

Marc Gorelick has been president and chief executive officer of Children’s Minnesota for seven years. He says it's important for executives to find and cultivate leaders with expertise in areas outside their own areas.

Gorelick has been president and chief executive officer of Children’s Minnesota for more than seven years. He’s planning to retire this summer, and he reflected on his experiences in a recent interview with Chief Healthcare Executive®.

Clinicians and frontline leaders need to be an expert in their subject area, and at certain levels, that’s sufficient, Gorelick says. He points to his own experience as a physician in the emergency department.

“I could be a really good leader of the pediatric emergency department by being a really good pediatric emergency physician,” says Gorelick.

“But enterprise level leaders succeed not by having expertise, not by being experts, but by identifying experts who are usually people who are closer to the work, and then coaching those experts,” he explains. “And that shift is not necessarily a natural one, that shift from leader as expert to leader as coach. One of the things I learned is it wasn't a natural shift and it needed to be developed intentionally. I often find myself needing to let go of what I think I know.”

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Gorelick says he doesn’t remember the exact moment he understood that he was going to have to tap and cultivate other leaders in the organization.

“I do recall that at some point I realized people were bringing me problems that I really didn't know anything about,” he says.

“I didn't know anything about supply chain,” Gorelick says. “If we have a supply chain issue, I better find somebody who knows about it, because it's coming to me, but I'm not the right person to answer that question. And that kind of thing happens a lot. You know, people bring me problems all the time, and I realized anything I learned about in the rest of my career, I better find somebody who knows about it and then work with them to solve the problem.”

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Healthcare executives also need to get out of the C-suite and get around the organization to get to know the experts and leaders and what they bring to the table.

Gorelick talks about the value from what he calls “go-and-sees” across the system. He says he’ll sometimes spend 30 minutes or an hour observing different leaders.

“This isn't a substitute for their expertise,” he says. “I'm not going there so that I can say, ‘Oh, well, now I know how to do that thing because I watched you do it.’ That's not what it's about. It's about having an appreciation for the complexities and seeing who are those experts that I can tap into when problems come up.”

Gorelick also draws on some important lessons from his 25 years of work in emergency medicine. As an emergency physician, Gorelick says that doctors have to think quickly and make quick decisions.

He says that experience helped him as a CEO, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. But he says emergency medicine prepared him to make tough calls.

“I think you develop a certain comfort level with making decisions, even when you don't know everything,” Gorelick says. “An emergency environment is not conducive to having comprehensive information over a period of time. You do the best you can with the information you have. And I think that's really important for leaders, because we were never going to have all the information we'd like to have, and yet we need to act anyway.”

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