Hire the right people
When Mansfield came into his position, he was new to the area, having just moved from Arkansas, so he recognized his weakness — not knowing the market. He needed to hire a development officer who knew people, knew the area well, could look for growth opportunities and had the relational acumen to facilitate complex transactions. He hired someone in, and that person made a lot of connections for Mansfield very early in his tenure.
“You plant a lot of seeds and not a lot of them grow, but we planted a lot of seeds in those early weeks and months and a lot of them did grow,” he says.
That person got a group of physicians in McKinney, Texas, to agree to do a joint-venture hospital there. Shortly after that, he brought another group of physicians in the community on board that was already assembled and looking for a partner to do a joint-venture hospital. The city of Richardson also approached Methodist about merging its hospital into their system. On top of all those efforts, they also opened two other hospitals.
The system was also facing a physician shortage, so Mansfield got the board to agree to an aggressive employment recruitment strategy, so hiring was a major part of his position when he started.
But hiring can be tricky, so Mansfield was very particular in his process and says that’s the way you have to do it if you want to be successful. To start, he first looks at if there’s anyone he knows that could do the job well.
“The best way to make sure you make a good hire is when you hire someone you already know will fit in that job if you can just convince them to take it,” he says.
That was the case with the development officer, as well as with the CEO for one of the hospitals, the new system COO and the human resources executive. Despite knowing these people, though, he knew it couldn’t be all up to him.
“Even if it’s someone I think will work, they’re not going to be effective if they can’t work with the rest of our team,” he says.
So despite having a front runner for a position, he still did searches and put each candidate through a hiring process that makes them interview with teams of board members, medical staff, employees, senior executives and middle management.
“It helps to do a team interview,” Mansfield says. “I’m not sure if it helps you so much with your selection process as it helps you with that person’s assimilation … to have key people who would have to help that person be successful involved in the selection process.”
He says to ask behavioral-based questions, such as what have they done, what’s the worst decision they’ve made and what they did about it, instead of what’s their management philosophy.
“Those kinds of questions you can get a little bit deeper than ‘What’s your management philosophy.’” he says. “Don’t ever ask that question.”
All together, a candidate can meet with about 120 to 150 people in his or her interview process.
“It’s a scheduling nightmare trying to get that many people together, and it exhausts our candidate,” he says. “If that candidate is still perky at the end of a day and a half of being asked the same question that many times, they can probably handle a typical day at Methodist.”
With that many different people scoring a candidate, it’s easier to get buy-in for whomever you ultimately hire.
“Through that process, we select a person — it’s not just Steve Mansfield’s person, it’s all 150’s person,” he says. “We’ve all got a vested interest in that individual being successful and quickly assimilating to our team.”
Beyond sheer numbers in interviewers, there are other keys to hiring. He also suggests, especially for senior executives, for you and your spouse to spend time with them and their spouse in a dinner setting to see how they interact together, what kind of support they have in their life and how they are in social settings.
He also makes it a point to look for diversity and likes to have at least one of the final four candidates come from a racial or gender minority.
“That doesn’t mean we select the diverse candidate,” he says, “But if you’re not seeing them, you certainly can’t select them.”
After that, Mansfield likes to get an off-the-record perspective on that person by speaking to someone he may know that might have worked with that person. And then the final step is to use an outside company to complete a psychological profile of that person, which is what he calls Myers-Briggs on steroids.
It’s a long process, but he’s successfully recruited more than 100 physicians that have helped Methodist grow.
“Despite all of that, I think the interview process is still just a little better than a coin toss,” he says. “It’s like getting married. No matter how long you date, when you get married, you find out some things you just didn’t know. Usually those are mostly pleasant things, but that’s just the nature of it.”
How to reach: Methodist Health System, (877) 637-4297 or www.methodisthealthsystem.org
