Servant Leadership and History in a Healthcare Career

At first blush the ideas of servants and leaders seem distinct, even mutually exclusive. How could an individual be a servant and a leader simultaneously? Perhaps the initial reaction to the juxtaposition of servant and leader is the issue. When approached from the correct perspective, the contradiction fades and connections come into focus.

This transcript of their discussion has been edited for clarity and length.

Michael Sacopulos: My guest today is David Zechman. David is CEO of Zechman Group. He is a seasoned healthcare executive with over 37 years of experience, including 20 years of executive management and CEO tenure. David is the author of Driven By Compassion: 8 Values For Successful Servant Leaders.

David Zechman, welcome to SoundPractice.

David M. Zechman, BSE, MPA: Well, thank you Michael. I am glad to be here. I appreciate the opportunity to talk about my leadership passion and my experience implementing that.

Sacopulos: Well, it is our pleasure to have you join us. As we get started David, could you please describe your career path as a healthcare leader?

Zechman: Sure. I think I am a little bit of an exception to the rule, Michael. First, I started my professional career as a high school biology teacher and football and track coach in Cleveland, Ohio, in my hometown, and I loved it, but I was making $10,000 a year. So, as you can well imagine, it is hard to raise a family on that. So, I decided to get into healthcare, and I started my career as an on-the-job trainee respiratory therapist. Working nights, and I worked for a year in a hospital-based training program, so I was eligible to go to Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago for an accelerated RT program to be credentialed.

So, I started with that, and then I moved. I decided I really wanted to be in leadership, so I decided I really did have a vision and a goal of being a CEO. I started working nights as an on-the-job trainee, and then I took different jobs throughout the Midwest. I have left Cleveland to Toledo to Kansas City for 10 years at St. Luke's to Jewish Hospital Healthcare in Louisville, Kentucky, back to Rome, Missouri, and then ended my career in northern Michigan working for McLaren Healthcare.

One of the things that I think is a little bit unique that was a key to my work with the team was the fact that I understood what they go through. I had empathy for their work at the bedside, especially on the night shift. And so, I think that really played well for me in terms of my relationship with the hospital staff. I started at the bottom and worked all the way up to the top.

Sacopulos: Well, very impressive. Before we get into the eight values set forth in your book, I would like to know about servant leaders. Who is being served?

Zechman: Who is being served are the people that you lead. The pandemic did a lot of things for our society. One of those things was the fact that employees exacerbated their frustration with leadership. They want today, now they want leaders, servant leaders who will provide the resources for them to be successful. It is not about the leader anymore. The priority is the people you lead. And you cannot do that unless you have the culture of serving them for their success.

Sacopulos: Well, certainly over time leadership styles have changed. I think you would agree with me. Does the top-down hierarchical leadership style still work in today's healthcare systems?

Zechman: No, I don't think so. There are still people out there with a hierarchical view, but, and sometimes Michael, you have to have a hierarchy. In a crisis somebody has to make the decisions and very quickly. So that part is still there, but that is true of any organization.

But now the healthcare workers came into the pandemic tired, and they came out even more tired, for lack of better words there. And they are asking for more. They want more, and they want their leaders to support them personally and professionally. So, the best decisions are in collaboration with the people who are directly affected by a decision. And just coming in and saying, "Hey, we're going to do it this way. That's it." Well, yeah, that might work. Depends on the culture, but generally it is not the best way to make a decision.

Sacopulos: Fair enough. Let us move into the eight values you discuss in your book, Driven by Compassion: 8 Values for Successful Servant Leaders. Please select a few of the values and give me examples of them in action if you could.

Zechman: Sure. Let us do the first one, and that is walk the talk. Walk the talk is defined as living and breathing love and compassionate values in your daily leadership journey. And it is obvious. I guess the question I always ask the people I present this to is, do you think there is a crisis in leadership today? And resounding the answer is yes. And that is throughout everything in our society.

People are now like if you don't walk the talk, which means you do everything your employees do. Now, again, I am not a technical person. I could not go into IT, or I could not be a nurse, or I could not be an operating room doc, but I could still provide those resources to them that they need and have empathy for what they do.

The simplest example I use is when I am walking the talk is if you tell somebody to be at their desk by 8:00 a.m. in the morning, okay, and it is required and then you stroll in at 9:00 a.m. or 9:30 a.m., what do you think they think? I mean, that is just a very simple decision. But as I said, I had a discussion with some college students yesterday at a local school here. And as a leader, you are always on stage. People are looking to see what you are doing, how you are doing it, whether you like it or not. That is the way it is. So, walking the talk is critical.

By the way, that was the number one value when I surveyed the people that I interviewed for the book. That was clearly to them the most important. So, if you don't do that, it doesn't work.

The second value that I would say is most important is honesty and integrity. Of course, that is being open and truthful with individuals and for anything regarding the organization.

And the last one I will mention is communication. And it is practicing regular and consistent communication tactics that include genuine encouragement and honest feedback. And there is so many ways to communicate. For example, I will give you just one that I find incredibly important and that is writing thank you notes. Now, people have been writing thank you notes for a long time, but there is an art to it. And you send it to their home. You copy the manager who recommended that employee via thank you note. And people love it. People absolutely love it. They put it on a refrigerator at home. They put them in their workspace. I have seen it, and it is just, their eyes light up and their family gets to see it. They got a note from the boss at home. It just means a lot to them.

And the last one that I am proud of, I did a simple little communication email every day to every employee that included a little inspirational quote, a little news about the hospital, and the most important part, a corny joke. And I will tell you, they loved that. I used to get notes in the afternoon. If I didn't send the messages out in the morning because I was in a meeting or something, they would go, "Where's the daily message?" And some of the people said, "Thank you for that joke. It made me laugh."

Sacopulos: Did you get submissions? Did people put in candidates for 20 jokes?

Zechman: Yes. Yes.

Sacopulos: Oh, great.

Zechman: That was the most fun. I would get submissions from employees both for quotes and corny jokes. And what I would do is I would say on it “submitted by such and such.” And oh my gosh. Now their work colleagues would say, "Did you really send that to Zechman? Man, that was really good."

So anyway, it was a lot of fun. But those are things that are so important. There are so many other things, but I would say those are really the top three.

Sacopulos: Do the values that we have just been discussing also apply between physician and patient? And by this, I guess I am asking if they are more universal, or do you think that they are restricted to the employment sphere?

Zechman: Oh no. The ideas are definitely universal, and physicians have to do this every day in their daily work when they interact with patients, and they interact with patients' families. Obviously, the three of those that I have mentioned, communication is so critical to patients and their families today. And it shows the patients that the physician really does care about them and is willing to talk with them and also be polite with them and courteous. And that is just really very, very important. So yes, it is universal. All the values are actually, Michael, very universal for physicians as well.

Sacopulos: Nice. You think back, is there a particular leader that has inspired you?

Zechman: Actually, I have three of them. They were my mentors, one of them was somebody I met when I served at a hospital in Florida who was the deputy director of the Federal Reserve Bank during the Reagan administration, one of the smartest people I know. Well, one of the things about him, he was very smart, but he had compassion for people. That was his number one thing. And that is the number one thing he encouraged me to do.

The second one was the President of Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky who reminded me how important communication is when one day I was talking with him about an issue and he looked at me and he said, "Put away the computer, get it off your desk and call them." He said, "Stop sending notes. Call them. Meet with them." And I will never forget that conversation. It just struck me that he was right, and he is right. Sometimes as a servant leader, we sometimes forget just talking to people, calling them up, meeting with them for five minutes to work through that. And it is really important.

The third one was the President and CEO of McLaren Healthcare in Michigan. Phil Incarnati started the system in 1986 with one hospital in Flint and grew it to an $8 billion company today. And one of the things about him that is so critical to being a servant leader was that he was accessible. I could call him anytime and if he were available, he would take my call, or he would call me back within 24 hours.

Now think about that. Somebody running an $8 billion company would be willing to call me back that soon. And he was open, he was easy to talk to, he was accessible. And I think one of the things that is so important to be a successful servant leader is to be accessible.

Sacopulos: Great. Great point. David, you and I have been in the healthcare world for many years. Looking back, is there anything you wish someone would have told you in your early years?

Zechman: I wish they would have told me how complicated healthcare is. Peter Drucker once said that to be in healthcare is the most complicated business in the world. And I know people don't want to hear the word business for healthcare, but the fact of the matter is, it is a business whether we like that or not, but there's no reason why we can't have a successful healthcare business and treat people with compassion and kindness. It works. You can do it.

Everybody gets into healthcare, Michael, for one reason, and they get in there to heal the sick. Now as they go through their career, sometimes that attitude changes, of course, but almost everybody gets into healthcare, got into it to heal the sick. And I think what I wasn't told was, well, to heal the sick, a lot of these other kinds of things have to happen. And there are so many political issues and complexities with the community, the payers, the physicians, the administration, the nurses. So that would not have stopped me from going into it, but it is clearly complicated.

Sacopulos: Absolutely. Your book is exceptional, David.

Zechman: Thank you.

Sacopulos: What makes Driven by Compassion: 8 Values for Successful Servant Leader unique to other leadership books?

Zechman: Well, what makes it unique is that it is based on real-life experiences. There's little theory in it. There is some obviously, but as a foundation. But generally, most of it is about real-life experiences and that people want to hear that. They want to hear those stories. They want to hear, well, how did you do it? When did this happen? How did this happen? What did you do to fix it? And I think that is what makes it unique. It is very pragmatic. It is an easy read. It is 140 pages long, and the people that have read it have loved it. And because again, it is an easy read, real-life examples and things that they can take back to their leadership journey. I mean, that was the goal.

Obviously, you could tell this is my passion, this is how I led, but now I hope that the people that read the book or listen to or attend a program that I present are excited. My slogan for the book is that I hope the book provides the information leaders need to "remember, renew, and refresh" as to why we got into leadership, enthusiasm and passion. And it is a privilege and a gift. I want leaders to recapture that.

And as an aside about physicians. Physicians are trained. When they go to medical school, they are trained to be individuals. They train to make decisions. But physicians can be leaders. If they are not leading a group, you are a leader for yourself. Somebody told me, they recently said, "Everybody's a leader. Whether you lead 1,000 people, whether you lead 10,000 people, whether you lead 10 or whether you lead one, which is yourself, you lead yourself." And so, for physicians, this is absolutely applicable. And it is applicable to their work with their patients, but also applicable with their colleagues and the hospital staff.

Sacopulos: It certainly has a lot of very practical information inside those covers. You alluded to something earlier about people. I think your term was tired and became more tired after the pandemic. And as you know, burnout is a problem faced at many levels of healthcare. Do the eight values in any way assist with this issue?

Zechman: Absolutely. Because I think again, what employees are looking for in healthcare, and it is the same for physicians because they are looking for this too. They want to feel valued. And I cannot emphasize that enough, they want to feel valued. And we have lost that in healthcare. We lost valuing the dedicated great people that we have in that profession. Whether you are in accounting, whether you are a nurse, whether you are a physician, whether you are a surgeon, we have lost that. And I think the eight values of servant leadership here encourage, it shows that you do value the people that you lead.

I mean, there is a huge staffing crisis in healthcare, Michael. You are probably aware of that, of nurses, doctors everywhere. And part of it, and it is not just nurses either, it is other respiratory therapists, it is everyone, and part of it is that they are burned out. But how do you prevent that burnout? If you value them, you provide resources that they need. You are a servant leader. You support them. You get to know them.

One of the things I talk about in the book is that you need to get to know the people you work with, not prying into their personal life, but getting to know them. What do they like? Is there something great going on in their family or did they have a crisis in their family you can help them with? Those are the sorts of things that leaders represent.

I had an operating room director when I first got my last job whose five-year-old son has leukemia. Pretty serious stuff. And I found out, and when I saw her, I said, "Hey, I just want to ask you how your son's doing, and can I do anything to help you?" And her face just lit up. And I saw her again and I said the same thing. And she looked at me and she said, "You know Mr. Zechman, I can't tell you how I appreciate you asking about my son. It means a lot to me." That is it.

Now, do you think that she is going to be more engaged in her job? Absolutely. And that is true for everybody. Same thing with docs. Having conversations with physicians about what is going on in their family life? How are their kids doing? Maybe one is a star athlete at high school. I start following them. So, I will say, "Hey, I saw your son had 200 yards on Friday night," and that kind of thing. They like that too.

One of the things I know physician driven is that we cannot forget physicians. We have to include them in all this process and make sure that we are meeting their needs so that they can be successful in their practice and not just dump them out there. That just frustrates physicians to no end, and that is just not right. We have to treat physicians just as well as we do the employees.

Sacopulos: David, I suspect that after our conversation here that some of the audience members may wish to interact with you. Two questions: what does that look like as far as an interaction? What services do you provide? And how might they find you?

Zechman: The services I provide are executive coaching. I coach some executives currently. I also provide a leadership development program. I am currently teaching this course, the book as a course to middle managers for a large healthcare system in Florida, and that is a 10-week program. I do keynote presentations, I do workshops, based on this model. So those are the things that I do.

You can get hold of me at david.zechman@gmail.com, And I would love to talk to you. As I told the students yesterday, I said, "I'm here. I'm excited to be here because I'm going to learn from you." And boy, they asked me some good questions. So that was great, and that is what really excites me.

Sacopulos: Well, I think with that email address, you just hit two of the eight with accessibility and walking the talk. So, I cannot thank you enough for being on SoundPractice and your good work as a healthcare leader. My guest was David Zechman. David, thank you so much for your time.

Zechman: Thank you. It was a pleasure to be here.

Sacopulos: My thanks to David Zechman for his time and insights. His book, Driven by Compassion: 8 Values for Successful Servant Leaders should be on your reading list.

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