What happens when a teacher's passion evolves into a healthcare leadership role? On today's episode we welcome Quint Studer. Quint is a former special education teacher, lifelong student and teacher of leadership. He is the author of 15 books, including his latest book Rewiring Excellence, and serves on numerous healthcare boards, and is a frequent speaker, workshop facilitator, and mentor to individuals and organizations. He has a gift for translating complex strategies into doable behaviors that allow organization sto achieve long-term success.
Recently, Quint co-founded Healthcare Plus Solutions Group with longtime colleague Dan Collard. HPSG specializes in delivering Precision Leader Development™ solutions to healthcare organizations across the continuum of care and their teams.
This episode is a conversation about the influence of educators in shaping leaders. Quint offers insights into the profound impact of educators on his life and career as well as highlights the importance of teaching in healthcare leadership. Quint goes on to discuss a leader's role in nurturing their team/faculty by offering individualized support and investing in them to help retain talent and reach their fullest potential.
What happens when a teacher's passion evolves into a healthcare leadership role? On today's episode we welcome Quint Studer. Quint is a former special education teacher, lifelong student and teacher of leadership. He is the author of 15 books, including his latest book Rewiring Excellence, and serves on numerous healthcare boards, and is a frequent speaker, workshop facilitator, and mentor to individuals and organizations. He has a gift for translating complex strategies into doable behaviors that allow organization sto achieve long-term success.
Recently, Quint co-founded Healthcare Plus Solutions Group with longtime colleague Dan Collard. HPSG specializes in delivering Precision Leader Development™ solutions to healthcare organizations across the continuum of care and their teams.
This episode is a conversation about the influence of educators in shaping leaders. Quint offers insights into the profound impact of educators on his life and career as well as highlights the importance of teaching in healthcare leadership. Quint goes on to discuss a leader's role in nurturing their team/faculty by offering individualized support and investing in them to help retain talent and reach their fullest potential.
Melissa, thank you very much for that introduction and a warm welcome today to Quinn Studer. Quinn is a member of the CAHME board and, Quint, thank you very much for joining, master of your Healthcare Career.
Quint Studer:Well, thank you. You know I'm a big believer in CAHME. I always tell people when they are thinking of going to a university to make sure they look at the accreditation, because I think that assures that they're getting not that you can't in a non-CAHME accredited university in college, but I think when you have a CAMI accreditation you can be assured that it's a high quality program.
Anthony Stanowski:Yeah, thank you, quinn. I think it's that level of surety that we kind of help employers understand when they hire students from an accredited program they're more sure of success. But I want to talk about that a little bit because the focus of today's session is going to be maybe a little different than a lot of other podcasts that you've done. I want to focus on a part of your career that was very early in the journey and it was when you were a special education teacher, which again requires an accreditation and a certification to have a teaching it. But could you talk a little bit about what were some of the lessons you've learned, why you went into special ed and what were some of the lessons you learned around that?
Quint Studer:Well, I went into special ed really because of the impact of a teacher on me. I'm hearing impaired. It's not unusual for somebody that's hearing impaired to have a speech impediment which I have better than it used to be by far and to be behind in academics because you miss verbiage, you miss what's being said. It's not unusual for someone with a serious hearing impairment, which I have on deaf on one side here, a little bit on the other side to end up two or three years behind in school. So that means you're always struggling. I had a soccer coach named Coach King and I had two study halls. If you had two study halls you could go out, get out of one study hall and you could go do something else. Coach King had me come to his classroom and sort of be what you would call a student assistant and my job was to literally take the boys in special ed because now we're in a regular high school to the library, sit with them and then take them back, and the reason they wanted somebody walking with them in the hallway, sadly, is to keep them from being teased or ridiculed or something like that, and I've always had great empathy for people that maybe have challenges.
Quint Studer:So when I went to college I didn't grow up in a college background, so I majored in undecided. I didn't know. So if anybody wants any advice on Western civilization, let me know. Did you take all these courses? And at the end of my sophomore year I had 60 credits and you need 120 to graduate. And the University of Wisconsin Whitewater said you're now going to go where you could take credits that won't count toward a major, because you've taken all the basics. You need to pick a major. You know, I was stymied because I didn't know a lot about college degrees and didn't grow up in a college degree community.
Quint Studer:So I started thinking about who's had a huge impact on me and it came down to teachers. And so when I thought about the teachers that had a huge impact on me, coach King came up. So I said I want to be a teacher. They said what do you want to teach? And I thought about I can't spell well, and what do you teach? The whole bit.
Quint Studer:And I said I want to teach high school kids and I don't know exactly how I described it. But they said oh, you want to be a special education teacher. And I said yes. And they said well, what do you want to teach in special ed? Well, high school, because Coach King taught high school. So I really had a role model of a fellow named Coach King and I also found out something magic when I was in that classroom. I don't know if I helped the kids, but they helped me Because I felt helping those children made me feel purpose, made me feel like I was doing something worthwhile and made me feel I was making a difference. So and I think that's what we do in health care every single day. It's it's a different world, but it's still making a difference and doing worthwhile work and serving with purpose.
Anthony Stanowski:You know it's. It's funny. You mentioned the impact of your teachers and your teachers and how that kind of meant so much to you. I there was a quote on your website when let me let me kind of repeat it you said in rewiring leadership development, the goal is to help each person optimize their own uniqueness to achieve the outcomes they want from their career. And rewiring leadership development. And I thought that really is the definition of a teacher.
Quint Studer:Well, and teachers of healthcare administration. I mean you're having a huge impact because, basically, if you're again in a program for healthcare administration, you're obviously there, because the good news is you're self-aware, that you need to learn, which is number one self-awareness. Number two you're going to be able to share things in the classroom situation that you might be reluctant to share in an actual, really work situation, because there is that feeling of I don't know, you know, I don't want to look silly or stupid. Plus, you're exposed because you're in with other people. So if you're in a classroom, you're going to be with people that work at different organizations, different parts of their career. So it's almost like getting best practices for nothing.
Anthony Stanowski:You know, what I want to talk to you about is not necessarily the role of the faculty in healthcare management, education, teaching the students about what it means to be a healthcare leader, which is an important role. But you and I kind of talked a little while ago about the role of healthcare leaders and one of the things that you said is that healthcare leaders need to learn how to be teachers. Healthcare leaders need to learn how to be teachers. Go through that, those kind of thoughts, with our listeners today.
Quint Studer:I think, as healthcare has become more sophisticated, we've had people that specialize in things. So I'm not sure. But you know, today, when I look at what's happening, you have all these new people in healthcare, you have all these new leaders in healthcare. And what we've really discovered in working with organizations is you can't delegate development. Larry Bossidy, who wrote the book called Execution, says there's two things you don't delegate. One is selection of talent. Two is development of talent. Now, it doesn't mean that you don't have other people providing these resources. So what I've learned in that I think everybody in a leadership position needs to realize they're a chief development officers. Now, it doesn't mean that the people you work for might not go to a course on training or selection, but when they come back, you've got to be the one that makes sure that you're supporting it and anchoring it and so on.
Quint Studer:And we've really learned that, Anthony, and working these last couple of years with CEOs, it's like a light bulb goes off, because if you've got managers that aren't performing well, it's not. Oh, let's blame HR for not developing, it's not, let's blame OD organizational vote for not developing. They can provide resources. The person that has to be in charge of developing the talent is the person that is supervising them, and I think that's a real in a bit of a shift. I think people have always said I'm involved in it, but if you go around and just ask every single leader, I tell CEOs, go around your executive team and just say everybody that reports to you what's the number one skill that you're working with them on developing right now and tell me how you're helping them develop that skill. There's a bit of a gap and I think that's what we're trying to bring back. Or in the health care. Real seriously is how do you help develop these individuals that work for you, because they need development.
Anthony Stanowski:And in your book, a rewiring excellence, you talk about the n equals one in terms of that development, that it's not a mass development thing. Hey, let's, everybody, let's go down to the auditorium and learn about what it takes. But it's really the leader working with each person individually and understanding where they need to develop.
Quint Studer:Yet when my book. The reason I wrote the book is because what we've been doing isn't working all that well. And now, if it is working, don't change it. That's what I say If it's working, don't change it. And I love the fact I'm going to be tomorrow in a big health care system for an LDI and they'll have 800 people in this room from all over their whole system, and I love that. They're going to hear from the CEO. We're going to do some great table activities, but it's really, even though it's called a leadership development institute, I would like to say it's more like leadership awareness institute. And they're going to and it's all good, they're going to hear from the CEO and they're going to walk out with some more awareness.
Quint Studer:But where does the real learning occur? The learning occurs when they get back to their job and they sit with their boss and they talk about okay, what's the outcome we're trying to achieve? Okay, with that outcome. So one of the things we're talking about at this session is retention of talent. Okay, so because we have a lot, it's a big challenge. How do we retain talent? So, when they come back, then not everyone, but leaders that have challenges with turnover should probably be talking about. Okay, so what did I learn and how do I practice it and how do I put it into play and what are the barriers that you can help me remove so I can achieve what I want?
Quint Studer:So what it basically says is don't change the current development you're doing. But it might not be working if you still have high turnover, if your employee engagement isn't looking good, if your length of stay is too high because length of stay is correlated to turnover too, because you have too many new people in the organization who have a longer length of stay is your patient experience, which hasn't moved since 2016 in most organizations. So everything you're doing makes sense, but it's not enough, and what I mean N equals one. It means everybody's a unique individual. So Anthony's going to learn differently than Melissa's going to learn different than Dana's going to learn. You're coming in at different experience levels. You're coming in different personality traits. You're coming in with different potential. So I need to sort of do almost like you do for a patient, a pathology. I need to look at an individual's pathology, their DNA in a way, and say how do we maximize their learning potential, which is what you do again when you teach you maximize people's learning potential.
Anthony Stanowski:You know, quinn, you made me think back. I was like you. I was a fifth grade teacher many, many years ago, and there's an old saying that if a teacher, then by your students you'll be taught, and I'm sure you're familiar with that. I think about that N equals one, because what I learned during my several years as a teacher was to really start to look at the individuals and what they need, what was important to them in that class.
Anthony Stanowski:One of the stories I tell is there was this student who was a little bit of a troublesome student and I noticed that when I would say to him, joey, you know you really aren't doing your work, you need to stay after school. I noticed that when I said that to him he actually liked that, and so all of a sudden it became Joey, if you get your work done, can you come back after school and stay with me? I want to talk about the Flyers game last night, did you see it? And it turned the whole relationship with the student and I think also I like to think kind of help turn some of his outcomes in the classes around as well too. That N equals one is almost kind of a part of being a teacher.
Quint Studer:Well, it is a teacher for special education, for example, for every student you have something called an individualized education plan and it's taken that student and saying we as an individual, where are they at? What's the outcome we're looking for? How are we going to all coordinate so we help provide that outcome? How are we going to track it on a regular basis? So if you look at a lot of my work, when I talk about 90 day plans, I talk about something right now we're calling the OSAR. What's the outcome? What's the skill? What's the action with the resources?
Quint Studer:It really comes to how we in education we individualize the train, the development. So we need to do that in health care to individualize the leadership training. And I got a nice note from a CEO who read Rewiring Excellence, michelle Fortune, and she said you know, I can't wait to go back to the managers and start narrowing the scope of what I'm asking them to do to make it doable. And I know I'm going to actually see signs of joy in their faces when I go through this. And I think, as a teacher you and I talked about this in the pre-call there's certain things, of course, as a teacher that when you're into health care that you've got to learn that you didn't learn a teacher. I didn't worry about productivity in the class or I didn't worry about cash balance. I didn't worry about process improvement all that much days cash on hand.
Anthony Stanowski:Let me argue with you there, because I know one of the things I had to do candy sales. So I had to make sure, right.
Quint Studer:But as a teacher, there's many things we do. Number one is we set a lofty goal because we want our child to do children were teaching to do the best we can. Isn't that, in health care, what we do? We want our people we lead to be the best they can be. We set goals, we reward and recognize performance. We talk about consequences.
Quint Studer:So I think there's just many things as a teacher, and one of the mistakes I made, anthony, when I got into health care, is I sort of thought I'd put that away. I put that away, and it wasn't until I was at Holy Cross Hospital in Chicago that I realized that merely my job is to continue to take not everything, but many of the techniques I used in the classroom and bring them into health care and help. Now the whole goal is to have the best middle management team. Whoever has the best middle management team wins. Well, these are people that probably don't have a master's, don't have a health care leadership degree, because they're good at a certain set of tactics, but then our job is to help develop them in the leadership. And God, what a wonderful thing that we can do when we help people become better leaders, because it's a tough job and we want them to go home not thinking what they didn't do. We want them to go home feeling joyful for what they did.
Anthony Stanowski:Yeah, well, and Quint, you know, when you talk to your team you know Healthcare Plus Strategies Group and the Studer Community Institute and all of the organizations you really get the sense that each of them feel you care about them and you really want to develop them better and they know that investment that they feel from you.
Quint Studer:Here's a little technique we've learned recently which is pretty cool, and I was sharing this with Terry Helen Bremer at TriHealth the other day. Sometimes in a big healthcare system we give a deadline, like, okay, everybody gets this done in two weeks, but everybody's got a different job. So, for example, if maybe I've got three direct reports, I can roll out the Employee Engagement Survey in two weeks. But if I'm a med-search, I always use med-search because I usually have the biggest ban of control. And I said if you're a med-search nurse manager and you've got people that might work two days a week, you've got people that might have different schedules, you've got 24 hours a day, seven days a week how long is it going to take you to roll this out? And they might say, well, it's going to take me six weeks.
Quint Studer:And I just did that with actually with three wiring excellence, with three wiring excellence, you know, even though our staff was reading it, knowing it, we wanted them to fill out a review of it. What did they like? What could it be better? And so the question was when do you want this review back? And I said why don't we ask each person? I said have things going on in their lives. When do they think they can complete the review? Well, some people said a week, some people said two weeks, some people said three weeks, and you know, normally they come in in a game plan that's going to fit your need and if there's an outlier you say, can you make it a little quicker? We've never had that. So this is a small example. But when you ask people, when do you think you can complete this, you're listening, you're having empathy for their schedule and they're very appreciative and in healthcare we just tend to give a you know, get this done by this, not realizing everybody comes in with different, different loads, different spans of control. Maybe I'm going away for a week, so now, if you tell me two weeks, you've split it down to one week. So I just think it's trying to have empathy.
Quint Studer:And again, I'm a huge believer that we can learn from precision medicine. Precision medicine looks at the individual to create a treatment plan based on that individual's biomarkers, mutations, age, everything. And that's what we can do with leaders. And there's a sense of relief when you talk to leaders about individualizing it. But going back to what we've also talked about is what we're finding is certain leaders that have been promoted, got promoted because they're subject matter experts but they've never really had a lot of training, development on developing people, developing change.
Quint Studer:I was on the curriculum committee with Regina Hertzinger at Harvard and we said the number one skill set a person needs is change management. So this last week I was at Ohio Mental Health and Addiction Services because they're putting an EPIC and they wanted me to come in and help them get the change process right. With the EPIC they're not worried about the technology implementation, they're talking about how do we get the people to be compliant with what we're asking for. And I thought that was really neat on Lori and Marissa's part to think about the people component. And because what happens when we're in an organization is we plan the facility change, the technology change and we just think the people will happen and it doesn't.
Anthony Stanowski:Yeah, and that's. I think you've kind of hit on one of the secrets of management. You hear a lot of people go. I really don't like being a manager and it is tough. I mean it's an understanding of who the people are and creating an empathy and then ensuring that we're all kind of working toward the same common goals of what we want to accomplish. And again, how much is that really kind of taught in the curriculums and how does that get?
Quint Studer:I think the neat part is it's starting to. We're starting to see that, as you know, with Baylor, with Forrest, and that Is that relooking at the people component. I have a new book coming out with Dr Catherine Mease from the University of Alabama, birmingham, called the Human Margin Building the Foundation of Trust. Because if you look at the newest research, because of the pandemic, trust in the healthcare organization is really gone way, way down. So you've got to be able to look at how do you create tools and techniques to address the situation in healthcare, and so I think it's pretty cool that the book's called the Human Margin, because really, if we don't get the people right, we're not going to get the compliance right. If we don't get the compliance right, we're not going to get the rest of it right.
Anthony Stanowski:Just a little note about Catherine Mease. There's a little thread going in there. We're putting out a new about Kami video and the voice of the about Kami video will be Catherine Mease, and I just thought it was so appropriate and the team let me kind of not take the credit for it One of the team members kind of suggested Melissa Cross and said you know, she really resonates with what I want to accomplish and where I am with my life and we just felt it was a really fitting voiceover to kind of do for the about Kami. So it'll be something for you and our listeners to see in the next couple of months is we're still kind of nearing the ending stage of the development of it. We're real happy about the work with Catherine.
Quint Studer:Yeah, I know we've had a great time working together on this book because you know it was an academia meets an operator and I think what happened is she was did a great job with here's the research and she had some solutions to and then to me my job was to say okay, if people are not trusting the senior leadership team, what are some tools and techniques we can go to build that trust back. So I think people really like the book because it's a. It's a different book because when I give a solution, somebody says do any research for this. Now, when Catherine does the research, they say do any solutions for that research? Well, we tried to bring them together in one book.
Anthony Stanowski:Well, I'm looking forward to reading that and I also want to say to the, to our listeners out there I've read rewiring excellence and I was. I was someone who's got actually two copies of hardwiring excellence up on my bookshelf and assigned one from you, quint and I. That was to me a breakthrough book. When it initially came out it was a New York Times bestseller. It really was in the hands of a lot of hospital CEOs. But you really kind of taken a different look at it with rewiring excellence and what you learned over the past couple of decades.
Quint Studer:Yeah, it's 20 years and there's many things that are really good in the book what you need to still have the same pillars you should still, of course, do purpose. All that stuff's there, but I did it because the results haven't been there, and if you've just based gun results, so why aren't they there? So we spent two years in the field looking at why aren't the results there and what we learned that we've got to take a fresh look at some things and we sort of combined precision medicine, which is looking at individuals with precision leadership. I think one of the neat chapters in there is rewiring well-being, as we talk about well-being but less than 3% of employees in health care access mental health, so we really talk about relooking at that. All of a sudden, many of the physicians are now part of a they're a W2 employee or something part of a system.
Quint Studer:How do we rewire, how we engage physicians? So there's some really more biggest change items and then there's some just some tweaks, like a set of five questions to a patient. Ask one question and instead of filling out an iPad and a software tool, it's okay to have a note card right on a note card and follow up later, because you don't want. You don't want your relationship building to look transactional. You want it to look like it is. You want to look. What it is is to get to know you better and to make sure that you have what you need to do your job today.
Anthony Stanowski:You know it's funny, I think, about performance reviews that you do with people and across my career I've had performance reviews where it was like a hundred questions and I was rated on each of them by, you know, my manager and we'd go through it and everything. And we've kind of changed it at CAMI. We have three questions. Number one what have you done that's been really well and you're proud about. Number two where are there opportunities for you to improve? And number three how can I help you achieve your goals? And what I found with a performance review like that is it really the employees kind of fill it out first and then the manager makes comments about it and then. But I really kind of feel like that sets the stage about where you know you, the employee, both need to go into the future and to be very effective.
Quint Studer:Well, I think it's a real fact. If I try to tell people you know we love to talk about evaluation, why don't you call them development reviews? And one of the things we found out through our work with the ANA and AONL and our recent studies on the insight for care model studies with 3,100 nurses, 92% of people in nurse leadership that they skill development is vital to them, and 80% of frontline employees, yet many of them don't feel they're getting it to where they would like. So, really, what I tell people and I think this is great for your audience is our message has to be to people we want to invest in you. We want to invest in you. It's not an expense, it's an investment and we want to in your skill development.
Quint Studer:I was asked George Washington University for a capstone course certain of my thoughts on CEOs and I said well, there's two words I listen to with the CEO when it comes to training and development. If they use the word where it's an investment, they're probably a dang good CEO. If they get caught up in training and development as an expense, they're probably not, because you have to look at building your talent as an investment, not an expense.
Anthony Stanowski:Yeah, yeah. So let me talk about that investment in one second. And, quinn, you've been very generous to Cami and to the future healthcare leaders, and one of the things that we're really proud of this year is the development of a scholarship, the Cami Wind Studer Scholarship for students, for students in graduate healthcare management and education programs, and it focuses on those students who have a passion for education, and what we're looking at there is a passion for developing others, not necessarily that these are folks who want to be a faculty member it could be but really what we're looking for are people who really want to help develop others. And talk a little bit about the genesis of the creation of that scholarship.
Quint Studer:And one of the things that I noticed about people is there are certain people that get really excited when they see people that they've touched actually sometimes perform better than they did or achieve goals that they didn't have. And there's also people that will develop someone and get threatened by if they get really, really good. And one of the things I noticed is, you know, I own a couple of minor league baseball teams, and what's really neat about minor league baseball teams is many of the managers maybe weren't successful at the major league level, but they played minor league baseball. Maybe they touched mine. You know our manager, the principal of the law, who smoke gainers a great manager, I mean, you're great. He's won 200 games with the blue. Why who's? Last year they won the championship and he gets talent and makes it so much better. Now he never played in the major leagues, Yet when one of his players gets called up, if he is so excited. So I'm looking for the type of person that gets joy out of helping other people be successful.
Anthony Stanowski:Yeah, well, well, quinn, thank you for doing that and we're looking forward if there's folks listening out there If you go to our website, camiorg, and under the awards area, we'll provide more detail on how you would apply for the scholarship. Quinn, as always, this has been a fascinating phone call for me, you know. Again, thank you for all you do. I don't think people really kind of understand the impact that you're making on the future leaders of health care, and you know your, your commitment to higher education and what you're doing there is just phenomenal, so I appreciate all that you do.
Quint Studer:Well, it's always been important to me, anthony, and I think I know how teachers change my life, where I went to college, also how they changed my life, so it's been a huge impact for me. And being part of CAMI, being part of AUPHA over the years, being part of all these organizations, I have unbelievable respect and it's sort of cool. I ran into a new chief operating officer of West Florida Medical Center the other day and he came up to me and he went to to Virginia Commonwealth. We talked about what a great program that is and and he said to me you know, your books really is what made my career. And wow, is that ever a cool feeling. Now he made his career, you know, but it's nice to know that I've had a small impact and I want to continue to have it. And CAMI allows me to reach out to people that have unbelievable great love and respect for.
Anthony Stanowski:Thank you. So let me leave a quote that you said the only legacy we leave behind is those we teach. So, quinn, thank you. Thank you for being a phenomenal teacher, a great supporter of CAMI and all that you do for us. Thank you, anthony.