When G. Michael Bass walked into his role as president and CEO of what is now Piedmont Newnan Hospital a little more than five years ago, it was caught in a downward spiral.
Revenue was in the red. Patients were migrating out to competing hospitals. The management team was dysfunctional. While it did go on to become part of the Piedmont Health system in 2007, at the time, there was much speculation and debate about whether it would join a larger entity and whether to build a replacement hospital for the outdated facility — which caused many negative headlines in the local news and made employees embarrassed to work there.
“That’s what I walked into,” Bass says. “I must be slightly masochistic, because I’ve walked into three situations like this in my career where it’s just terrible. I thrive in that kind of environment. I don’t know what I’d do if I walked into a hospital and all I had to do was come into work. You look around and say, ‘How do we get this aircraft carrier turned around?’”
Replace disengaged managers
In his first 30 days on the job, Bass didn’t do anything except observe. In the first department directors meeting, he sat in the back and listened as the chief financial officer ran the meeting. He couldn’t believe what he saw — apathy. Even when it was announced that the hospital had lost $500,000, he said it seemed like yawns through most of the room. At the end, he asked the CFO if he could speak for a few minutes, to which he agreed.
“I went to the front of the room. I said, ‘I’ve been here 30 days observing, and let me tell you my perception of the management team here in front of me.’ I started using adjectives that they had never heard before. I said, ‘Basically, you’re disengaged, you’re not committed, you’re not accountable,’ and I went on and on and on.”
It was an interesting atmosphere after that as he looked around the room to gauge reactions.
“Half of the room would have stabbed me if they had a knife,” he says. “The other half, I could see them nodding in agreement, and you could see it in their eyes, ‘He’s right.’”
One of the first things he did was let two vice presidents go. A few months later, he worked with the vice president of human resources and the vice president of patient care services to create a leadership training institute.
“You give everybody every opportunity to develop the skills and be successful, and it’s up to them to seize the opportunity or not,” Bass says.
The purpose of the institute was to teach his managers the skills they needed to be successful. There were about 12 different learning modules that were offered covering the basics that he wanted to see in his managers.
“We basically walked through what we thought were some of the key tools that any manager needed to be successful, whether it be counseling or hiring, coaching skills, anger management, conflict management, professional presence,” he says.
The institute required mandatory attendance by all department directors and above, and that’s when the positive changes started to occur.
“Some embraced it and everything about it, and some thought it was a waste of their time,” he says. “Those are the ones that are most likely no longer with us.”
The next step in determining who to replace was to hold people accountable. Each fiscal year, goals are set by department, and those include everything from financial to patient and employee satisfaction to personal development. At the end of the year, if scores aren’t where they need to be, then that’s an indicator that the manager needs to be replaced.
Bass looked for A-plus people to bring onto his team as replacements.
“The A part is technical competence,” he says. “The plus is that intangible that truly differentiates an incredible leader and an excellent manager.”
Bass stays away from asking about technical qualifications and instead digs into what cranks them up on a Monday morning and how do they feel successful. His goal is to sort the canned answers from the real ones.
For example, when he was looking for a replacement for that disengaged CFO, he interviewed many candidates who had all the right credentials and were highly competent, but none of them seemed to have the plus.
But then one woman came in. She talked about not only what she could bring to the table but also what she believed her role in an organization was, what her role on an executive team was and what her role as a CFO was and how she would depend on other team members for her to be successful.
She was easy to speak with and had a comfortable confidence — not cockiness — about her. When she left, they looked around at each other and said, “That’s the plus.”
“The individual who is comfortable is relaxed,” Bass says. “They pause, they think about their response. They’re inquisitive but yet they are knowledgeable.”
He says that person will seek to understand the culture of the organization he or she is coming into instead of just learning what the organization can do for them.
“The cocky person is usually the person who you can’t get a word in edgewise,” he says. “They just want to go on and on and on.”
Another key that Bass says was crucial was the willingness to be patient. With that CFO, she was honest and said that if she were offered the position, she would need to give 90 days’ notice to her current employer. The hospital was losing money like crazy, so this was a tough decision. Bass and his team looked at each other and asked if they could afford to go another three months — for a total of nine months — without a chief financial officer.
“The answer was yes,” Bass says. “We could pick an A player, because there were plenty of them and hope for the best, or we could pick this A-plus player and wait the time out and have her come on board and know that she was the person, and that’s what happened. Sometimes you have to wait until you find that plus. Sometimes it takes a little longer.”
