Tag Archives: lessons learned

What makes an effective sales approach?

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HIMSS23 is less than two weeks away. The second annual ViVE event happened last week. It is a busy time of year for healthcare vendors and their sales staff. I’ve been on both sides of this relationship – for many years as CIO and buyer and for fewer years selling services. It gives me a unique vantage point.

Buyers attending these conferences will be looking at vendors who have solutions they need now (and have budget for) and vendors who are new and interesting with innovative and niche solutions that they may want to explore further in the coming year (explore is the key word here). And they will be meeting with their current vendors to strengthen connections and get educated on what is newly available or coming soon as they leverage their existing investments.

Sales staff will be working hard to get the attention of potential buyers. They may even reach that stage of annoying and overbearing. We all know that kind of salesperson.

In my work as principal at StarBridge Advisors, I recognize it’s all about relationships. As I said in a previous blog post, it’s not just about who you know. It’s about who you are and how you show up with people. You need to be capable and competent with the right knowledge and experience, but also honest and authentic with high integrity. That’s what it takes to be successful in a business that is all about relationships. One of the best pieces of sales advice I got from a colleague was the “know-like-trust-need” model. People need to know who you are and what you can do, they need to like you, and they need to trust you. If you have all that, when they need you, they’ll call you. Simple. That’s why I focus on relationships.

My husband and I were recently on the buyer side of a sales discussion. By the end I thought, this will blog, meaning, there’s a kernel here to learn from and share. So, what happened? Continue reading →

What advice would you give your younger self?

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I love this question. It was one of the questions for a panel I was supposed to be on this week. The NEHIMSS chapter has an annual Women in IT conference, and I was one of four invited panelists for the three-hour event. But 40 miles into my 100-mile drive to the venue, cruising fast on the freeway, my left front tire totally blew out – down to the rim. Scary yes, but I got myself over to the shoulder and called AAA. My second call was to the panel moderator explaining I wouldn’t be able to make it. An hour and a half later I was again on the road with the spare tire that is designed for maximum 50 MPH taking the back roads home to avoid freeway speeds.

I was looking forward to the event and the panel. I love sharing stories with next generation leaders so this was going to be a fun night. I was ready after the usual panel prep call to cover the range of questions we had agreed on.

While I didn’t get to do the panel, I don’t want this question to go to waste – here’s what I was ready to say when asked what advice I would give my younger self:

  • Know your big rocks – I’ve written on this in the past, “Do you know your big rocks?”. It comes from Stephen Covey and it is a spot-on analogy. Our families and closest friends are our big rocks. Don’t let all the little stuff take up your space first leaving no room for your big rocks.
  • Don’t take crap from anyone – In my 30s, two of my peer managers seemed out to get me. One even threatened me. I was the only woman on the management team for a 5-year period. After a lot of stress and wasted energy processing it all at night talking to my incredibly supportive husband, I decided enough was enough. I let our boss know what was going on and told him that I would let him know of any further incidents. He was going to have to deal with it because I couldn’t. In another situation where a male manager from another department got overly friendly with sexual advances, I reported it to compliance. Hard as reporting something may be, it is necessary to stop the behavior if you can’t stop it yourself.
  • Have a strong support system – Whether it is family or friends, everyone needs a support system they can turn to. I could tell plenty of stories about my incredibly supportive husband and how he has been there for me back when I was a young working mother in management and going to school at night for my MBA as well as the decades since (our 47th wedding anniversary is in a few weeks).
  • Accept that you can make choices – One of my staff wanted to consider coming back from maternity leave after she had her first child in a part-time role but worried about how it would stall her career. She was a project leader on a management track. We talked about her options and I encouraged her to keep in mind that she had choices. After a period of part-time work, she eventually came back full-time, picked up again in a leadership role and then had two more children a few years later. She made choices right for her and balanced growing a family with growing her career.
  • Own your own career and be open to the possibilities – Before I left my CIO position at Brigham and Women’s Hospital for a similar role at Michigan Medicine, we were going through major staffing changes in IT. My staff were concerned about their future in supporting legacy systems vs the new EHR coming in. I told them they had to own their own career and be open to the possibilities. When I make that second point now, I emphasize that there are jobs today that no one heard of 5 or 10 years ago and there will be new ones in the future we can’t even imagine now.

There you go – I had plenty more to say on the panel given the other great questions we were going to discuss but wanted to at least share this one.

And after this car experience, my parting advice is keep your AAA membership current and keep your cell phone charged.

Related Posts:

7 Ways to develop the next generation of leaders

10 tips for next generation leaders

 

Leadership lessons at sea

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How do you handle or deal with unmet expectations or changes that are outside your control? Do you complain and spread negative energy or accept it and make the most of it? More importantly, as a leader, how do you stay calm, instill confidence, and take care of the people impacted?

My husband and I are just back from a 13-day Viking cruise called “In Search of the Northern Lights”. Did we see them? Yes, check. Did we see and do everything that was promised in the itinerary when we booked the cruise? No.

A few hours into our first night at sea the captain announced that there was a medical emergency onboard and that we were heading back to our port of origin, Bergen, Norway. Within an hour he announced that there would be a medical evacuation by helicopter instead. A sign that the guest’s medical situation had worsened. He and his team handled it effectively as they were trained to do.

For the rest of us, the next few days were sailing north of the Arctic Circle with stunning scenery plus tours and excursions on land in Alta and Tromso, learning more about Norway’s history, culture, social systems, the impact of climate change in the Arctic, and the life of indigenous Norwegians, the Sami people.

On day 7, the captain announced the bad news that would affect all of us. Due to a weather system with hurricane level winds, we were going to stay in our current port, Tromso, an extra day, skip the next two ports altogether (Narvik, Norway and Amsterdam), and have an extra day at sea once we could safely start to sail again. So, we were faced with three sailing days from Tromso heading straight to London where we were to disembark. On the first of the three sea days, the captain gave us more bad news. We weren’t surprised, we physically felt what was happening on the sea.

We had left Tromso when there was a break in the storm but ended up at sea in very high winds. We later learned that the winds were up to 60-70 miles an hour and the waves were up to 25-40 feet. That meant very slow going. Continue reading →

Considering a career move?

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The start of the new year is often a career transition time for people. We’ve heard much in the recent period about the great resignation, silent quitting, and remote work options being in demand. And we’ve seen significant layoffs in the tech industry and to an extent in healthcare providers dealing with significant financial challenges. If you or a colleague are considering a job change, some of my previous posts may be useful to revisit.

Career advice revisited is a list of posts providing career advice that I wrote prior to May 2021. I consider many of them “classics” that are still useful – they cover dealing with a competitive market, questions to ask yourself, interviewing and resume tips, and more.

Two more recent posts since that time provide additional perspective and advice. I wrote Reflections on recent career conversations after talking with many colleagues at the 2022 CHIME Fall Forum. And the post Paying it forward with career advice from late summer 2022 includes links to useful articles and tools for comparing opportunities and deciding whether to stay or go.

For more focused posts here are two more to check out – STEM or not, own your career and Know someone interested in a nursing career?

If you are looking for a career coach to help you through a transition, the post, When to use a career coach, could be helpful. I am happy to talk about how I might assist you.

Note – I am taking a short break from writing new posts the next few weeks. With all the blog posts I’ve written over the past 8 years, I’m using this break to share some of my “classics”. Thank you for being a subscriber – I hope you will encourage your colleagues to subscribe in the coming year.

Lessons from the road

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This is not a consultant’s or salesperson’s road warrior set of lessons. But rather observations and a few life lessons after a two-day drive home from Florida to Massachusetts. While my husband napped during one of my driving shifts, I had plenty of quiet time to think and observe. Here goes on my lessons from the road:

  • Without the big picture and context, it’s easy to make a mistake. That’s what happened when going around Washington DC day two. I lacked context for the different options. I took an exit based on how I interpreted the signage that caused us to get rerouted and sit in the rush hour traffic we were trying to avoid.
  • You need to ask yourself if shortcuts are worth it and at what cost if you are unsure of the outcome. Near DC, I took the express lane with high tolls when I wasn’t sure if I could exit in time for the next highway that I was supposed to take. My goal was to avoid DC rush hour traffic as much as possible, so it seemed worth it.
  • Estimated hours and schedules for anything is just that, an estimate. You never know what obstacles will get in the way to change it. Watching the ETA on your navigation system can give hope until you run into heavy traffic, accidents, or construction work and the ETA starts bouncing around. We ran into so much of all this on the way down to Florida that we had two 15 hour driving days instead of what was expected to be closer to two 10-hour days.
  • Alerts are great for awareness and/or taking action but you never know the true impact until you get in the middle of the situation. Our map/navigation app gives crash and hazard alerts, whether they have been cleared yet or not, and the number of minutes delay they will cause. In most cases, the delay was far longer than the initial alert said it would be.
  • The higher you go in an organization, the more uncertainty you face requiring a steady hand and focus on the goal. On the way home, we decided to take a route that avoided the big Northeast cities and all their traffic even if it meant more miles. At one point driving through Pennsylvania, we had about 45 minutes at 1600 feet altitude with very heavy fog and near zero visibility. My husband’s steady hand on the wheel was reassuring.
  • Everyone you talk to will have an opinion or advice, but you must decide what is right for you. People who make this trip regularly are willing to start off in the middle of the night to avoid rush hour in a big city. That so didn’t sound like something we would do so we left early morning each day.
  • Even two people make a team and teamwork is critical. Friends who have done this drive talk about doing 5 hour driving shifts before taking a break. Not us. My husband and I would drive as long as we each were comfortable and switched drivers often making our pit stops as efficient as we could. Fortunately, our two furry team members were perfect in the back seat – happily sleeping in between each stop.
  • Technology has changed the way we live and travel – duh! I’m old enough to remember when we used a paper trip tik book from AAA for family vacations as a kid. Probably many of you are old enough to remember when we used to have spiral bound paper map books for a state or city with the tiniest of print. Now we rely on smart car navigation systems and apps on our iPhones.

We spent two relaxing weeks visiting friends at their condo overlooking the ocean. The balcony was an awesome office with a view for keeping up on email each day and doing some time sensitive work calls. Daily morning beach walks and afternoon pickleball, lovely sunsets and moonrises, a few museums and some shopping, and seeing a midnight space launch from a 35 miles distance down the coast. Our two dogs behaved and got along well with their two dogs. Good news – we’re invited back next year. Now that we’ve done the long drive that many northerners do in the winter months to spend time in sunny Florida, we know what it takes and learned a few travel and life lessons along the way.

From an oversubscribed podcast fan

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If you’re a podcast listener like me, you probably have subscribed to a lot of different podcasts. You get a recommendation from a friend or colleague, somehow you hear about a new podcast on a topic of interest, so you search for it and subscribe. At least that’s what I do. It results in being way oversubscribed. Let’s be honest, you can only listen to so many different podcasts regularly whether on your commute, when you’re working out, or walking the dogs.

It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of the This Week Health channels. I subscribe to all three – Newsroom, Community, and Conference. I am a regular listener of the Daily News shows on Newsroom to keep up and because they are nice and short – about 10-15 minutes each except for the Monday show. I listen to many of the Community Town Hall interviews and humbly note that I’m one of the hosts committed to doing one a month. My interviews so far this year have included John Glaser, Kisha Hawthorn, Lisa Stump, Scott MacLean, and Pamela Arora – leaders in our industry you probably recognize.

Since it’s conference season, Bill Russell and his team at This Week in Health have been doing the Interviews in Action series again – 10-15 minute interviews with many health IT leaders which can be found on the Community channel.

If you want to keep up and learn from others, check them out and encourage your team to listen as well. As in past years, Bill will be doing the end of year highlights shows – they are a great way to introduce others to these podcasts. There will even be one with all the Town Hall hosts covering highlights from our interviews this year. And as Bill has done every year for the past 5 years (congrats Bill on an awesome 5 years!!), we can count on tweaks to current channels and maybe some new programs in the coming year.

Back to the oversubscribed challenge and a bit of a diversion. Continue reading →

Reflections on recent career conversations

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I’ve often written about career advice. After talking to several people in transition while I was at the CHIME 2022 Fall Forum last week, I decided it’s a good time to revisit the topic. Here are some of those interactions – anonymized of course – followed by my general advice given the common themes:

  • I asked a colleague who I knew was unhappy with their situation a few years ago how things are going these days. I got the same response as before – still unhappy. I say, time to do something about it. No one should stay in an organization or position where they are truly unhappy if there are options out there.
  • I met a CIO whose position was eliminated due to a merger. While actively looking for the next position, there are concerns that lacking Epic experience at the CIO level is an obstacle. Yes, there are benefits to having worked with a particular vendor and understanding the challenges and issues with their products and services but as I like to say, the CIO is not doing report writing in the tool so in the end, does specific vendor experience matter?
  • I met a CIO who is concerned about ageism. Will they be given a chance if they are 60 years old? There are laws against age discrimination but unfortunately, we know it’s a reality. I say go for it and focus on your experience.
  • I spoke with someone who is mid-career and unhappy in their current organization given cultural issues and limited opportunities. They are actively looking at a wide range of options as they should be.
  • I got an email from someone at a vendor whose position was eliminated and wanted help networking. I connected that person with someone who is well connected in that specific part of our industry.
  • I spoke to a couple CIOs who have retirement dates set. They will be thinking about the next chapter and whether to go cold turkey or stay involved in some way. The beauty of that phase is you can pick and choose, say “yes” to what you are passionate about and “no” to what you no longer want to do.
  • I spoke to a CIO who isn’t ready to retire but is open to working less and considering alternatives. This may be a growing trend after the pace and demands of the past few years.

And I spent time with some of the people I have formally coached in recent years. Hearing how they are doing and seeing how they have grown in their roles and careers is very rewarding. I’m honored that I helped in some small way. Continue reading →

A post vacation teaser for future posts

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I am just back from a long vacation in Europe. Probably too long away from home but it was wonderful overall. I learned a lot, saw a lot, took hundreds of pix that I now must organize, kept in touch with family back home, and made some new friends.

And I have a lot of takeaways for future blog posts such as:

  • smart technology in everyday life (Europeans seem ahead of us)
  • importance of infrastructure (can’t say enough positives about the train system in Europe)
  • value of language translation tools (Google translate is a great tool for basics)
  • learning value of travel (part of trip was Road Scholar cruise with professors lecturing onboard and local experts on tours)
  • email management (the art of monitoring while on vacation)
  • and yes, some political commentary (Europe knows what it takes to fight fascists and Nazis)

I will be writing some of these posts in the weeks to come as I am still catching up and getting back into work and routines.

I leave you with a quote we saw on a small riverboat in Narbonne, France (which looked like a wonderful place for retirement if you didn’t have family and grandkids you wanted to see often). I used the Google translate app to get this: “If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine, it’s deadly!”

Related Posts: 

Vacation season reminders for a more balanced life

4 tips when you must work on vacation

Paying it forward with career advice

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I get a lot of calls, emails, and LinkedIn messages asking for career advice. Knowing that people have been very supportive of me over my career, I try to pay it forward. I do a short call, find out where the person is at in their job search and career transition, ask some key questions, and give whatever advice makes sense for their situation. For people I know well and keep in touch with during their search, I often share useful articles that I find. These may include resume writing and layout, prepping for the interview, how to follow-up after the interview, dealing with rejection, how to identify red flags, or building your personal brand.

Many of the resources I have found and shared are from LinkedIn which as we all know is the “go to” for professional networking and content.

A Fortune article by Jennifer Mizgata in March of this year addresses a key question many people are faced with – “Should I take a fancy new career opportunity or stick with the old job I still like?”.  In it she references a great HBR piece, “A Scorecard to Help You Compare Two Jobs”, written in 2017 by a former colleague of mine from Mass General, Allison Rimm. It includes a scorecard tool similar to one I have used when doing career coaching.

I’ve written a lot on career management over the years. My post, “Career advice revisited” from May 2021 has links to most of them. Check it out and share with anyone you know who might find it helpful. In other words, let’s pay it forward!

Note – I am taking a short break from writing new posts over the next month. With all the blog posts I’ve written over the past 8 years, I’m using this break to share some of my “classics”. Thank you for being a subscriber – I hope you will encourage your colleagues to subscribe in the coming year.

What can we learn from sports – part 2

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If playing pickleball is considered playing sports, then I can actually draw on my own personal experience for this part 2 post. I didn’t play sports when I was young – Title IX was passed the year after I graduated from high school. As young adults, my husband and I played a lot of volleyball with friends. But that was it until I took up golf about 20 years ago playing with girlfriends on weekends for a few years and then sporadically after that.

I played my first pickleball game in April when visiting friends in Florida. They had gotten into it a few months earlier and said I had to try it. They are addicted and play almost every day. Now I’m getting addicted and meeting people who play whether at the YMCA we recently joined or in the townhouse community we live in. And my husband even tried it this past weekend and liked it. That opens the potential for us to find other couples who play. A good thing!

Unlike the “bottom of the 9th” pressure that I described in the post, “What can we learn from sports?”, back in 2018 after seeing a couple of Red Sox games, pickleball is about having fun and trying to get better each time. It has become a popular sport for all ages in recent years.

From my pickleball playing friends, I’ve been told we’re there to have fun. I’ve been told you never have to say that you are sorry when you miss the ball or have a bad serve. The regulars I play with at the YMCA who are quite good are incredibly reinforcing and affirming when I do something well and give me tips and advice as we play. Two of the best ones played elsewhere recently with people who were so competitive it shook their confidence. That’s unfortunate. So far everyone I’ve met playing pickleball has been nice and just there to have fun.

For people my age, it’s also about not falling. That’s my mantra – don’t fall. Everyone I play with and have learned from says don’t back up, that’s when you fall. I also tell myself, don’t get so competitive that I hustle in ways I shouldn’t and end up falling. Not sure what happened, but I did fall on Sunday when I was playing. I backed up a bit to hit a low ball and lost my balance, stumbling backwards and landing on my bum against the fence surrounding the court. People were at my side immediately checking if I was ok. I was. I got right back up and kept playing. When I got home few hours later though I realized I had bruises on both forearms and a sore thigh. Could be worse. Continue reading →