When a request to help the
community comes across his desk, Mickey Smith
has a hard time saying no.
But that’s OK: If Smith can
show his 850 employees how
being involved in the project
would benefit them as a person,
there is a good possibility
someone will volunteer.
And not only does volunteering
help both the community and
the individual, it also gets the
hospital’s name out in a positive light.
Smith says that if an employee
is out helping the community
and saying good things about the
hospital — which posted 2006
revenue of about $126 million —
that becomes the organization’s
face in the community. Volunteering also offers a great opportunity for employees to do something together outside of the
intensity of the workplace, he
says.
Smart Business spoke with
Smith about why communication
has to be an ongoing thing and
how being a basketball referee
helps him lead.
Believe in yourself. I attended
some excellent schools and am
very proud of the academic part
of my training. But, the very best
training I received for this job
was as a basketball referee. Because, as a basketball referee,
you spend a lot of time studying
the rules — don’t even get to call
a game until you pass a test on it.
Every two weeks, everybody
gets together and does rule review together. You are put into
the position where you are out
there making decisions based on
rules that you’ve really studied,
and you have a bunch of people
who never bothered to look at
the rules who want to second-guess what your decision is.
As a referee, at least half of the
people aren’t going to like the
decision that you make, and
they are going to scream and
yell at you about that and you’ve
got to basically learn to make
quick decisions without being
affected by a bunch of people
screaming and yelling who, by
the way, don’t know the rules.
And also, if I am doing a good
job in my mechanics, I’m within
a few feet of where I am making
the decision, whereas all these
other people who are screaming
and yelling are hundreds of feet
away. It really was great training
because you have to make the
best decision you can at the
time, you need to make it timely,
and you can’t worry too much
about the other folks and the
screaming and yelling that goes
on. You’ve got to do the very
best in that situation.
Repeat your message. In any
communication, what I’ve
learned over time is that, No. 1,
you can’t just tell the message
once. If it’s an important message, it’s got to be repeated multiple times. And the other thing
is, you can’t just use one mode to communicate the message.
You need to do it in writing; you
need to do it in person.
You’ve got to use multiple
modes if you want to reach that
wide and diverse a group. About
once a month, I send an e-mail
out to everybody in the organization and just give them an
update of what is going on.
Use a multiple interview format. If
it’s a case of a department manager, the senior management
team would interview that individual. We’d get a group of our
department managers or peers
who would interview that individual, and then we would get a
sampling of the folks that would
directly report to that position
and they interview, as well.
It’s really effective because
sometimes I’ll interview somebody, and I’ll think, ‘Man, they
are really slick,’ and then they’ll
go in and be interviewing with
the folks that report to them
and either treat them poorly or
say something that may be different than what they told me.
So, the more heads you have,
probably the better decision you
are going to make.
The other thing is when the
peers and the direct reports
interview and then make a recommendation to me about the
hire; all of a sudden, they’ve got
some skin in the game, in terms
of that person being successful,
as opposed to, I go out and hire
somebody and I throw them
into a position, and then everybody sits back and waits to see
if they sink or swim. So, there is
more of that vested interest in that person being successful if
they’ve been the one recommending that that’s who we hire.
One of the huge challenges for
me is that I’m the baby boomer
generation, and so I do not
understand the Generation Xers
and Yers. I’m from the generation that I live to work; they’re
from the generation where they
work to live. So, the things that
might motivate me don’t motivate them. So, I always need
help in terms of making sure
that we’ve got the environment
that’s also attractive to that group.
Keep yourself grounded. I had a
real interesting experience.
After being a CEO for many
years, I left that to start consulting. I had been CEO long
enough that I had a fairly high
opinion of myself because people seemed to do what I asked
them to do, and they were
always friendly and wanting to
meet me and have lunch with
me, and I must have been a very
popular and good-looking person for all the attention I got.
So, all of a sudden, you go out
into consulting and you think
that all of this is not because
you are CEO or your position,
you think it’s because, ‘Hey it’s
me.’ That’s not the case.
You get deference due to position. I try to always remember
not to take all that stuff so seriously or think that I’m so great
because I had the experience of
folks that would do anything to
spend time with me, but then,
when I was out in consulting,
they didn’t have the time of day
for me.
HOW TO REACH: Oak Hill Hospital, (352) 596-6632 or www.oakhillhospital.com