Forget that Dr. David T. Feinberg has more college degrees than
the average small company’s staff, the best lessons he got in life
didn’t come from a professor — and they didn’t cost him a dime
in student loans.
Growing up in Burlington, Calif., Feinberg’s father taught him a
very important lesson about business: Refuse the desire to get
sidetracked.
“He said, ‘Stick to your business; don’t get sidelined,’” Feinberg
says. “So he really taught me about being single-focused and
sticking to what you do because that’s the business you know.”
On his path to becoming CEO and interim associate vice chancellor for UCLA Hospital System, Feinberg realized that in his
profession the main focus of his job was his patient care. When
he took over at UCLA, he had the realization that he had the
medical technology to do his job, so if he could get the staff at
the $1.3 billion hospital system, the hospital portion of academic
medical enterprise UCLA Health System, focused on that people-first attitude, then there would be an improvement in patient
care.
So Feinberg has created a culture where he leads the charge
for taking care of people by making sure that he and his leadership team are out touching the front line, and then circles
back to meet with employees to ensure that they’re happy so
they’ll take better care of patients, then he continues to add
people-oriented staff members to keep the culture going.
“We are in the business of taking care of people, and leadership has to show that, just like the nurses or other staff, we’re
just people, with strengths and weaknesses, but with this common goal of coming in every day to make sure we take care of
our patients,” Feinber says.
Pushing that culture led to UCLA Medical Center being
ranked as one of the top three hospitals in America — including the best in the Western U.S. — by a 2007 U.S. News &
World Report survey that ranks hospitals on various care factors, including patient care.
Here’s how Feinberg maintains his winning culture while
continuing to move the organization to new heights.