The Christmas party Rick Chiricosta attended on Dec. 3, 2008, was supposed to be merry — a celebration of the holiday season and the company, Medical Mutual of Ohio. But something was awry.
The insurance provider’s CEO, Kent Clapp, had yet to show up and while people tried to have a good time, they couldn’t help but wonder where their esteemed leader was — he wouldn’t miss his own Christmas party.
“We’re like, ‘Wow, this feels weird,’” Chiricosta says. “It was a very weird night.”
By the end of the evening, their worries were replaced by horror as they learned the truth — Clapp had been killed that afternoon when his chartered plane crashed.
Shell-shocked, the entire organization mourned.
“You pull in here, and frankly, I would tell you, first, we had to deal with the shock of that, but not just the shock of we lost a dear friend, but what’s going to happen to this company that we all work at and depend on for our livelihood,” Chiricosta says.
Clapp had turned MMO into a solid business and had left it in great shape financially — $2 billion in revenue — but the suddenness of it all created a period of chaos.
“We went through about a month of, I guess there’s no other way to describe it, weirdness,” Chiricosta says. “We had lost a revered leader. We had a number of senior executives that were trying to figure out, ‘Who should be running the company, what was going to happen to them, what was going to happen to the organization?’”
The board recognized the need for stability and opted to not perform a lengthy, textbook CEO search. Instead, it moved quickly and set up interviews on Jan. 11 and 12 — just five weeks after the accident — and Chiricosta was on the list. While many didn’t know him, he had worked at MMO for 23 years, including starting and leading the life division, so he caught the board’s eye.
“To be perfectly honest, the idea of succeeding Kent never went through my head,” he says.
The board made its decision the day after the interviews: Chiricosta would serve as the new president and CEO, and he accepted the role, not knowing if he was cut out for it. While he was lucky that the company was in good financial shape, there are always challenges — employees uncertain of the new leadership, one of the worst economic downturns in full force and health care reform, in some unknown and changing-daily form, looming on the horizon.
“For me, personally, it was very overwhelming to take that role on,” he says. “I wasn’t sure how I was going to do. You’re confident in your abilities, but it was a pretty daunting task.”
It would have been different if Clapp had known health problems or was planning to retire — the company could have prepared — but Chiricosta knew it would be a challenge to gain trust and make necessary changes to steer the company through the downturn and prepare it for whatever happened with health care reform.
“I wanted to make sure that the company was doing the things it had to do without creating the impression, ‘OK, old leadership is out, new leadership is in, there’s a new sheriff in town, and we’re going to bash people over the head with all this change,’” he says.
He decided to institute change subtly, and three principles guided him in doing that — using data, communicating reasons and standing his ground.
He says, “Let’s try to blend stability so when you’re sitting here two years from now, and you look back, … you think, ‘Wow, when I compare January of 2011 to January of 2009, there are some pretty significant differences, but I didn’t even realize they were going on as the change was occurring.”
