This is the second of three blogs looking at leadership lessons learned over my career.
Ages 31 to 40: These were the formative years of legal practice when I chose health care over securities as a practice specialty and built my firm’s health care practice. I learned how to: develop a business strategy (I wrote a business plan - unheard of for lawyers at the time!); develop and market a practice differentiated from our competition; recruit and manage talented support staff; establish a reputation for client service and trust; and capture administrative efficiencies. Looking back, it all came down to value creation for clients and my law firm. Value creation for customers became a theme essential to leadership.
Ages 41 to 50: During these years my health practice grew and I then joined a large university hospital in a business capacity to help develop a regional health system. Recruiting talent to support this initiative was crucial. I found that identifying smart future stars with great personalities and strong values, selling them on partnering to achieve a dynamic vision of growth and excellence and then cultivating their personal development and careers was a winning formula. Great people are often destined for great things. So, when they were promoted or left for better jobs, it became an occasion for celebration rather than protestations of disloyalty or cause for regret.
Ages 51 to 60: The CEO of our health system, which was growing in a very competitive market, told our senior team that “we don’t need to become the biggest, we just need to be big enough to be the best.” As I helped executed the growth strategy, in a kind of on-the-job MBA mode, I realized that growth for growth sake, without a focused purpose and plan, is a formula for failure. Having the best product or service, top talent, best management, superb strategy execution, phenomenal customer impact and strict accountability are more important than volume or growth increases. Scale is important, but only if it yields profitability. Over-expansion is folly.