Summa Health’s CEO Dr. Thomas Malone says he will do better.
In a memo sent to staff Monday, Malone said he looks forward to improving “engagement” with the health system’s physicians and staff and that he is proud to be their colleague. This was Malone’s latest message to employees following a no-confidence vote on Jan. 5 by hundreds of doctors after Summa abruptly changed the physician group that staffs its emergency rooms.
The new communication from the chief executive also came one day after the Summa board announced it will hire an executive coach to work with the system’s executive leadership team. The board is making other changes, including how it handles doctor contracts and the creation of a medical staff panel that will report directly to the board. The board statement did not name Malone or refer directly to his position.
“For the past two years, it has been my privilege to work with you, our wonderful, highly skilled team of physicians and employees,” Malone wrote. “Summa Health has accomplished a great deal during this time — in the midst of a turbulent local and national landscape for healthcare — towards meeting our goal of improving the health and wellness of our patients and communities today and for the future.”
Malone did not directly address the changes announced by the board.
“I have come to recognize, however, that with the speed that these changes took place, I did not sufficiently engage with physicians and employees,” he wrote. “I now realize that my work had become unaligned with the vision we all share for our leadership culture, and I appreciate the board’s involvement in helping us chart a new course.
“I look forward to working with the medical staff panel on developing ways to improve our engagement with physicians, and follow with a separate but complementary plan to engage all employees, so that we can benefit from the wisdom and insights you all possess about our organization and our communities,” Malone said.
Summa Health declined to elaborate Monday regarding the hiring of an executive coach.
Organizations often hire executive coaches to help top leaders make needed improvements, said two people who work as coaches elsewhere in the nation.
“An executive coach is really about performance improvement,” said Dougles McKenna, CEO and co-founder of Seattle-based Oceanside Institute, an executive coach firm. “We are really focused on performance in the workplace.”
McKenna said executive coaches, while they develop confidential and intimate relationships with the people they are coaching, are not therapists.
A coach and an executive must be a good fit and develop trust, he said. The coaching process also involves getting feedback from others in the organization on the executive’s performance, he said.
“The client, the CEO, really has to feel the coach can help them,” he said. “You usually don’t want to take on anybody who is being forced into this by their board. That is sub-optimal.”
McKenna said he doubts one coach can effectively work with an entire leadership team.
An executive coach usually works with someone for a minimum of six months, said Bob Porter, senior vice president and executive coach with St. Louis-based Morgan Executive Development Institute, or MEDI, a firm that specializes in providing coaches to health care organizations.
“It’s really about coaching high performers,” Porter said.
An objective coach can, for instance, help an executive improve self awareness and understand how his or her tendencies impact the people around them, he said.
“We do coaching exclusively in health care. It’s a turbulent industry by any measure,” he said.
Coaching can help executives strengthen and develop skills so they can better work with physicians on making needed changes in an organization, he said.
Neither Porter nor McKenna said they had been contacted by Summa about providing coaching services.
Critic reacts
Dr. Dale Murphy, an internal medicine physician who has been among the more outspoken critics of Summa’s recent actions, said the board’s decision to hire an executive coach is “an interesting solution to where we are now.”
Murphy said Summa has previously hired executive coaches for its management team. Some of the coaching worked, some of it didn’t, he said.
“It did allow us to talk about things,” he said.
Hiring an executive coach appears to put Malone in a difficult position, Murphy said. “This is a huge, huge change for a person who in our opinion wants to tightly control things.”
“Maybe it will work,” Murphy said. “Maybe in a year from now it will be great. … It will take time. Time is precious now.”
Jim Mackinnon can be reached at 330-996-3544 or jmackinnon@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow him @JimMackinnonABJ on Twitter or www.facebook.com/JimMackinnonABJ