Stand your ground
Chiricosta had no idea how MMO had gotten away with it.
He would never tolerate his cable company not being open to help him at 7 p.m. on a weeknight or on a Saturday, so how had his company gotten away with it for so long? He knew he needed to make another change.
“I’m thinking about families where there’s only one parent, or there’s two, but they both work,” he says. “Wouldn’t it be great if we were more accessible with other hours? The immediate response was, ‘Oh, no! It’s never been an issue. Nobody has ever demanded it. Nice try, Rick, but that’s silly.’”
Even with data and communicating why he thought it would be great, he was alone. Instead of letting it drop though, he decided to stand his ground, which is something you often have to do.
“I said, ‘Humor me; let’s just look into it,’” he says.
They came back with a million reasons why it wouldn’t work — you don’t understand, there are safety issues with people working late, what about people with kids, what are we going to do on Saturdays, and the list went on.
“Sometimes you have to have a thick skin, or you just got to be — I don’t know what the right word is — maybe it’s diligent or maybe it’s gutsy, to stand back and say, ‘OK,’” he says. “Because it can be daunting when you’re getting the, ‘No, no, no,’ and, ‘You don’t understand,’ and ‘Yeah, it sort of makes sense, but you don’t get it.’ It takes fortitude, frankly, to sit down and say, ‘I know, I might just be being an idiot, but humor me.’”
The initial thought was that employees would be up in arms and revolt, but in reality, quite the opposite occurred. So many employees wanted the new hours that he had a waiting list for people wanting to sign up for a variety of reasons, ranging from decreased child care costs to more time to not having to use their lunch breaks to take care of errands. And now customers had more accessibility.
“Sometimes you ask four times, and you ask one more time, and ultimately, you always do have the opportunity to say, ‘Look, I really need this to be done,’” he says. … “It’s hardest in the early going, but once … you get a win or two, a couple times when people thought you were so far off the deep end, and once the facts came out, it turned out you weren’t, now the tables are turned and it’s harder for them to think you’re so crazy.”
Chiricosta says that it didn’t come natural for him to stand his ground and disagree with people, and if you’re the same way, he offers a piece of advice.
“Ultimately, you realize there are people whose jobs and livelihood depend on the success of this organization — that’s where you get the strength to say, ‘I’m going to do this because I have an obligation to those people and to our members and to our board to do the things that I think are right,’” he says. “Somehow, it gets you the ability to do it — even when it’s not something that comes really natural, which it doesn’t. Who wants to come into work and have a disagreement with someone? Who wants to do that?”
That was difficult, and in early 2009, he had a lot of days when he went home feeling overwhelmed instead of fulfilled, but as he got more wins, that started to change.
“As the year went on, that shifted, and there were a lot more days that I felt I was getting my legs under me than the opposite,” he says.
… “Every day I feel more at home in it and enjoying it more. Now there’s only a few days a month when I go home thinking, ‘Why am I here?’ There are still a few because it can be daunting, but the tide’s really turned, and it feels really good.”
In addition to feeling more confident in his own abilities, Chiricosta is now confident that MMO is better poised to handle health care reform and that he achieved his initial goal.
“It never really seemed like that big of a change as we converted to it, but now we’re sitting here two years later, and it is,” he says. “That was my objective and goal because coming in and beating people over the head, whether that was me or any other leader, it would have been difficult to be successful that way.”
How to reach: Medical Mutual of Ohio, (216) 687-7000 or www.medmutual.com
