The CEO of a major health care system and a head coach of a college football program don't have much in common except managing of people. Which, in reality, means they have a lot in common.
Kevin E. Lofton has been the CEO of Catholic Health Initiatives in Denver for the past 17 years, a hospital CEO since 1990, and a hospital executive since age 24. He shared a few of the management lessons he's picked up along the way in a recent Q&A with the New York Times.
On leading people: At the end of the day, people really want to do the right thing. I saw my job as removing barriers and then celebrating successes. I also brought people into the process. When you bring staff into a meeting and you talk to them about the things we can do to improve, and then you actually act on their ideas and they see that their input made a difference, people will follow you.
You also have to be able to relate to people, and not look down on them or talk down to them. I may have a title, but that’s not the reason that we need to do this. We’re here to do A, B and C. Here’s the way you can help with that. What suggestions do you have to make it better? Those are the secrets to success.
On combating groupthink: In our senior management meetings, we appoint a designated devil’s advocate, as we call it. So if we’re discussing a critical issue, we’ll appoint someone — and the role rotates — to be the devil’s advocate, no matter what their personal point of view is. That helps you avoid groupthink.
On hiring people: I start with the “why” — why are you here, why would this role fit into your career path, and why are you interested in coming to our organization? I then focus on the “what” — what are the things that you’ve done that relate to what you might do here, and what are your ideas for how you can help us?
And then I move to the “how,” and that’s where character comes in. How do you do business? Somebody might be a cardiovascular surgeon who is going to put a lot of money on our bottom line, but if they yell at nurses in the operating room, then we don’t want them.
On advice for personal advancement: I give a lot of talks to students, and I usually close the sessions with this advice: They should take a blank sheet of paper and an envelope, write down a goal of something that they want to do over the coming year, then seal it. Nobody’s ever going to see this except you, I tell them — it’s not for your teachers; it’s not for your parents; it’s just for yourself.
Then a year later, you take it out and grade yourself on whether you worked toward that goal, and then you set a new goal for the next year. It’s really just to get them in the habit of looking at the things they need to work on, setting a personal goal and then seeing how they’ve done against that goal. I still do this myself every year.