On January 7, 2002, Paul Levy became CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, a hospital reeling from a difficult merger and years of deficits. Levy was an unusual choice to fix it, not a doctor, no clinical background, an outsider walking into a building full of specialists.
The obvious move for an outsider CEO is to arrive with a new playbook: fresh language, fresh metrics, a personal version of “turnaround discipline,” imposed from the top. Levy did something smarter. He looked at the culture he had inherited and noticed it already ran on two values worth trusting, candour and care. Doctors don’t build trust by softening a diagnosis; they build it by naming what’s wrong and then staying with the patient through what comes next. Levy didn’t install a new value system over that one. He borrowed it, and applied it to the business of running the hospital.
Within his first weeks, Levy wrote to the entire staff about exactly where the hospital stood, the deficits, the losses, and his belief that they could get through it together. A month later, he posted the hospital’s Recovery Plan publicly, for staff, media and competitors to read and hold him to. In 2006, he began publishing infection rates most hospitals kept hidden, and challenged rival hospitals to do the same. When a wrong-site surgery occurred, he wrote about it publicly, including what had failed.
He even published his own salary and the reasoning behind it.
None of this was a communications tactic bolted onto the business. It was the profession’s own standard: name the problem accurately, then help people navigate it, extended to leadership. The result: a hospital headed for a $58 million loss returned a $37.4 million net gain from operations by 2004, well ahead of plan. Nursing turnover fell from 15–16% to 3%.
Levy’s efforts worked because he didn’t ask the organisation to adopt values from outside. He mined for the ones it’s best people already lived. A good example of how organisations thrive – at the intersection of culture, purpose, strategy and leadership, held together by values that are both binding and appealing.
A useful question for any leadership team, mining for values: “what is the thread that already holds us together, why do we actually do what we do?”
At The Core Questin, we are passionate about helping leaders, teams and organisations thrive. And always doing work to learn more. So if you’re curious about how your organisation, teams and leaders can thrive – do reach out for a chat.
