Revise as needed
Before Rubino could sit back and enjoy successfully rolling out her vision she hit the same bump you did in 2008: The economy fell apart. Suddenly realistic expectations were meeting a new reality that included a $42 billion state budget shortfall. Rubino handled it with her usual humor — it was a great storyline for ‘As Sacramento Swirls’ — and also used the strength of the agreed-upon vision.
“As a leader, you’ve got to be able to create clarity out of chaos because there are so many things that could cause people to get out of focus,” she says.
Instead of turning her back on the vision, Rubino began to use it as the original road map that now had detours in it. She explained those detours with instructions on how to get through them instead of having her people worry about the whole path.
“We get in front of people and just tell them the brutal reality, there is a $42 billion shortfall in the budget, it is a $50 million problem for Medi-Cal in this state, and for us in California, it was a $3 million problem,” she says. “Break it down from the macro to the micro, to how it impacts us and what it means to have a $3 million problem. We said, ‘Here are the things we’re doing about it.’ So it was just taking the outside, bringing it in, and then focusing on what answers we have for a $3 or $4 million problem.”
The fact that there was an active vision gave everything that Rubino did a backbone. When she laid out a slight course correction, she was able to lean on the original vision to show how the adaptation put the team back on the path.
“Before, we didn’t have a plan, now we have a plan, and once you have a plan, you can go back,” she says. “I look at it as a recipe. I’m not a cook, so I’m going to mess this up, but if I’m going to make a cake and it’s for six people and instead it’s going to be for 24, I’m just going to add more ingredients. So it’s just what ingredients do you add, what ingredients do you take away.”
The end result is that Rubino’s people are using her vision to grow the company. While many companies were crying for help, Molina grew to $417 million for 2008, an improvement of more than 10 percent from 2007. And while that was celebrated, Rubino is even more interested in how the vision continues to unite people.
“We grew in a flat market, so that’s exciting,” she says. “But what I’m most excited about is the cultural shift — really seeing people focused on the business, understanding the details of the business, starting to use data more easily to solve business problems or coming up with business solutions, hearing people say, ‘It feels different; I’m glad you’re here. It’s not the same company.’”
How to reach: Molina Healthcare of California, (800) 526-8196 or www.molinahealthcare.com
