Creating the Organization's Future—One Leader at a Time
As outgoing and incoming CEO, respectively, at Boston Children's Hospital, James Mandell and Sandra Fenwick have developed strategies that will enable the institution to thrive in an industry undergoing incredible change. Recognizing that these strategies demand leaders who can think broadly and strategically, the hospital partnered with Harvard Business School, creating custom Executive Education programs and enrolling more than a dozen people in the Program for Leadership Development. Below, Mandell and Fenwick explain how Program for Leadership Development (PLD) has catalyzed short-term and long-term change across the organization.
What led you to seek executive education for your leaders?
Mandell: The future is going to involve challenges and opportunities we never thought about, and we need to be ready to adapt. About six years ago, we recognized that we would need people with a lot of new skills and experience. We had a very good training program internally, but it was clear that we also needed outside exposure.
Fenwick: We've built this institution into the best children's hospital in the world. The question now is how we preserve our excellence while reinventing ourselves. Everyone's leadership skills are going to be critical as we move forward. Through executive education, we are investing in our people's growth and giving them new ways to participate in the institution's future.
How has your relationship with Harvard Business School evolved?
Mandell: Initially, we worked with HBS to create a custom Executive Education program specific to Children's Hospital. The cream of our leadership—87 nursing professionals, physicians, and administrators—went to the HBS campus and lived and worked together in an intensive program where they were challenged to really think about how to develop a culture of patient safety and quality. That experience changed the organization dramatically.
Soon after that, two of our people attended the Program for Leadership Development (PLD). Based on their experience, we began to approach executive education as a formal, iterative program. We've now sent 14 people to PLD over a period of five or six years. Overall, 68 of our physicians have attended PLD or another HBS Executive Education program, and some have attended several programs.
How do physicians feel about attending a business program?
Fenwick: There was resistance at first, but people now see executive education, and particularly the HBS opportunity, as a benefit. This focus on executive education has been valuable for retaining talent, encouraging people to engage in a broader way, and addressing specific business challenges.
How does PLD help physicians address the challenges they face as leaders?
Mandell: Very few of our physicians have had exposure to what I would call behavioral thinking or organizational thinking, or business competitive thinking. They have never had the opportunity to find out whether or not their opinions in realms outside medicine were very accurate. In PLD, our physicians participate alongside people from multiple countries, multiple backgrounds, and industries far outside medicine, and it really does broaden the way they think. In PLD, our physicians have an opportunity to consider medicine as a business in a world of competition and increasing regulation. PLD is not designed to give answers to specific questions. It's designed to make us resilient as an organization so we can adapt to whatever comes, while also prompting us to take the initiative in some areas and become game-changers.
What impact has PLD had on your emerging leaders—and on the institution as a whole?
Mandell: I have seen changes in how individuals present themselves, how they work in a group, and how they try to influence opinions inside the organization. Other people see them performing differently and begin to emulate that behavior, so it spreads throughout the institution. The culture of the organization is changing.
Fenwick: PLD is providing leaders throughout our organization with new skills and tools, new approaches to problem solving, lessons from other industries, and a common language that helps us approach our challenges collectively. It has been valuable for them to learn that health care shares challenges with many other industries, and that rather than reinventing the wheel, we can apply solutions that have worked elsewhere.
As chief executives, how do you weigh the costs and benefits of executive education?
Fenwick: Executive education is an investment for everyone—from the participants to their supervisors and departments to the hospital as a whole. PLD has been universally beneficial to the participants and to the institution. The participants have come back with a new point of view, a stronger voice, a confidence in their ideas about how to approach problems and issues, and every one of them has created a project or a plan that has benefited the institution. I can clearly see the change and I will continue to make that investment.
What kind of organization would benefit from the kind of commitment you've made to educating your leaders through PLD?
Mandell: I recommend it strongly for organizations in an industry like health care where changes occur every day, consolidations are taking place, and challenges are emerging both in the marketplace and on the regulatory side. With PLD, we're growing and taking on new challenges, not only here but also across the country and internationally.
Fenwick: Making an investment in people—in current and future leaders—is probably the smartest thing any chief executive could do. I would absolutely encourage other organizations to make this kind of investment.