It takes a village
Thiry says a major part of rebuilding DaVita was forging a new identity for the company.
He wanted more than a workplace. He wanted a community, something that behaved, in some respects, like a village.
“We think of ourselves first as a community of human beings that just happens to be organized in the form of a company,” he says. “In a village, people have both rights and responsibilities that go beyond doing an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.”
When DaVita started back on an upswing, the company was recast as a village, and employees became teammates.
“It implies a much deeper social contract between the teammates and the leadership,” Thiry says. “We didn’t just want to provide a job and have people do a job.”
It’s important that employees take emotional ownership in the company, and they do that when leadership gives them a sense of belonging, a sense that they should care about their
co-workers because their co-workers care about them.
“We wanted to create a real-world community where our people would take care of each other in the same way you’d want your neighbors to take care of each other in a real, physical village.”
Communicating the village concept helped show employees that the turnaround was going to be about more than just making the company financially healthy again. It was the beginning of a new outlook on business.
“It demonstrated that it’s not just about profits, that we wanted to share any prosperity that did happen with the broader team, and we were going to be a qualitatively different place
to work than other health care companies,” he says.
The village concept is part of what Thiry says is DaVita’s “soul,” and the sense of community shouldn’t just stop at the employee level. It’s something that employees should extend to
customers.
“No one, no matter how well you’re doing financially, can feel good about cash and low turnover unless it’s supported by excellent customer care,” he says. “You’d have a sustainable
enterprise, but you’d have no soul.”
Providing excellent service is something most employees want to do if enabled. While turning the company around, Thiry says he wanted to tap in to his employees’ desire to do good
work.
“Most people want to provide great care, and all I had to do was give them the freedom to do it,” he says. “We spent six months and involved about 900 people in selecting our core values. We regularly discussed our mission and values openly, about whether we were living up to them.
“By doing that kind of communicating, we liberated thousands of people to follow their own inner voice. After that, we didn’t have to do very much other than get out of the way.”
Today, the El Segundo-based company has bounced back to become an industry leader.
From $1.45 billion in net operating revenue in 1999 with a net loss of $147 million, the company posted $2.97 billion in annual net operating revenue and net income of $229 million in
2005. It is projecting revenue will approach $5 billion for 2006 and has swelled to 27,000 employees.
Refocusing the company’s outlook on business also gave Thiry a new perspective on being a CEO. He says he learned that if CEOs want to change their company for the better, they
must be the ones to take the reins and make that change happen.
“There is a quote by Gandhi, ‘You must be the change you want to see in the world,’” Thiry says. “It applies not only to life, it applies to leadership in a turnaround.”
He says the experience of saving his company taught him several basic lessons that will stay with him for the rest of his career:
- It is important, no matter how dire the economic situation, to discuss your mission and values from Day One. “Don’t postpone that until you’ve achieved economic stability,” he says.
- You learn more about yourself during the tough times than any other time. “You see the decisions you make and how you respond to bad news,” he says. “I think I grew more as a human being during those couple of years.”
- A company will produce the most of what it honors the most. “If you just honor profits, that’s what you’ll get,” he says. “If you honor other things, you’ll get other things. So you better damn well decide what you are going to honor.”
HOW TO REACH: DaVita Inc., www.davita.com