Lisa Rubino loves a good joke.
Asked about spending 30 years in her profession, she’s quick to point out that makes her 35 — since she started working when she was 5.
OK, that’s probably not doing the joke justice. The point is Rubino has used humor throughout her career to help make everyone’s job a little easier.
But when she moved into the role of president of Molina Healthcare of California, a subsidiary of $3-plus billion Molina Healthcare Inc., in 2008, even she turned off the laughter for a minute. What she saw at the company was 370 employees moving in about 370 different directions. And though she’d had success in another leadership position at the managed care organization that delivers health care services to people eligible for government-sponsored programs, the California subsidiary had been through nearly a president per year from 2004 to 2007.
“That was hard because there was an absence of leadership, not only in the president and CEO but throughout middle management,” she says of her unit, which posted 2007 revenue of $379 million. “And when you have an absence of leadership, people will decide for themselves what’s right, and everybody was doing what they thought was right, it just wasn’t coordinated. So it was really shifting working hard to working smart and creating what I call a culture of accountability — aligning their work against a vision and delivering on it.”
Creating and laying out a vision is tough, but Rubino’s plan at Molina was straightforward. Before she dove in, she used her humor and social skills to build some credit, working with employees of all levels to get feedback and talk shop. When she had a handle on that, she created a rough outline for her vision and worked with senior leaders and managers to tweak it. Once she rolled it out, she used it as a road map through all the good and bad that Molina faced.
