Extraordinary Leaders: Rising through Resilience

Podcast Transcript

Michelle Lampton: Welcome to Learning to Lead, a leadership development podcast from Cleveland Clinic. I'm Michelle Lampton. Today's episode is on Extraordinary Leaders. The idea of extraordinary leadership and how we can become extraordinary leaders is one we will turn to repeatedly in this podcast as we speak to leaders across the enterprise and hear their stories.

A few months ago we asked divisions and institutes to share with us the names of leaders who demonstrate extraordinary leadership in their positions. Today we're hearing from 2 of those leaders, from 2 different Cleveland Clinic locations in very different positions. Let's meet them now.

Dan Thompson: My name is Dan Thompson, and I'm a Lieutenant with the Cleveland Clinic Police Department. My role right now is I oversee all of the police officers at main campus. It's first, second, and third shift, and the Detective Bureau, and some other specialized units, but that's the basic. It's about 70 officers or so that I'm responsible for.

Albert Roque: My name's Albert Roque, I'm a registered nurse here at Cleveland Clinic Weston. I currently work in chronic care management. We’re like a one person connect all for the patient here at Cleveland Clinic.

Michelle Lampton: While Dan manages a large number of caregivers, Albert actually doesn't have any direct reports. However, as we will hear later on in their stories, he instead stepped up and took on a leadership role when called upon. Before we get to that, though, we asked both leaders to describe what their roles were like on a typical day. Dan described a department that specializes in responding to and fixing a wide variety of situations and problems.

Dan Thompson: We typically, at main campus, we have anywhere from 12 to 15 officers working per shift that are responding to calls and helping people out. It could be anything from they're lost to they've had something stolen or missing, or there's a car accident, or there's disturbances. We work closely with the clinical side too, making sure that they're safe with what they're performing throughout the day. It's hard to describe. A typical day is usually something interesting happens that we all can can say, "Yeah, that's a strange one," until... And then something else happens the next day.

Michelle Lampton: Albert, on the other hand, spends most of his time working closely with his team and interacting with patients.

Albert Roque: Well, usually, at least for me, my day, I get in around 8:00 AM, we have schedules. So we have appointments with patients that we reach out to on a daily basis.

But my mornings typically start in the clinic setting. I round with the doctors, I'm a part of the huddle with the team over there in internal medicine, just so I know what's going on in the clinic, just to know different changes that I can make the patients aware of as far as which doctors area in, which doctors are out, any type of protocol that's changing with the appointments so that I can let my patients know when they call or when I call them.

Michelle Lampton: Two very different leaders doing two very different jobs. Then, of course, COVID came. And, well...

Albert Roque: Everything changed. 

Michelle Lampton: They both found themselves in situations that none of us have ever experienced before. But despite the differences in their work and roles, what they both experienced was massive amounts of change, and both of them not only stepped up themselves to meet the demands of those changes, but helped lead their teams to step up, too.

Dan Thompson: Yeah, it's had a major effect on our overall department. First off, I'd describe our department as probably be one of the few departments at the clinic where work didn't slow down for us during this. Our responsibilities, and roles, and mandatory posts that we had to cover really doubled and tripled overnight. It was a challenge. We were heavily involved in the initial thermal screening process. We had to stand up a drive-through testing site at the Walker building. We're heavily involved in restricting access into our buildings. We really went from our officers working 40 hours a week and not a crazy amount of overtime to at the beginning of March, our officers were mandated to work four 12-hour shifts with one day off.  And that lasted for a long time.

Albert Roque: I went to my manager and said, “hey I know we’re preparing for this pandemic, this virus, I just want to let you know I’m available. If you need me for whatever the case may be, anything, you let me know.”

We all came together, they asked, “Hey Albert, we need you to help out.” They pretty much pulled nurses from every department. So we had nurses from internal medicine, geriatrics, from my department. Every manager from every department came in pretty much because we had to freeze The hospital. Every department was closed. Outpatient surgeries were canceled. It was pretty much a ghost town and there was no patients coming into the clinic. We transitioned from, I want to say, I don't know the exact number on how many appointments we have daily, but we went from, let's say 1,000 a day in the clinic to zero. So it was pretty much from in-person visits to virtual visits like that. All the nurses came in and we had our marketing leaders and our upper management leaders come in and say, "All right, this is the plan. This is what we want to do. We're going to do a drive through testing." And we've never done the drive through testing. We saw what everybody was doing on TV. How can we make this work?

We had the tents ordered, we set up the different stations and we had to figure out the flow. So the best way to, in my opinion is to just get in there. You can put everything on paper, you could plan it out in your head, but when you actually put things in motion is when you're going to see where you're lacking, where the kinks are, what needs to be corrected.

Dan Thompson: We have this plan here. This is what we need you to do. These are the new posts. These are your responsibilities, go do it. And then, we're coming back two hours later sometimes, and going, "Oh, scratch all that. Things have changed. This is now what we're doing." And that happened many times to them. And everybody had to instantly become very flexible and just be able to make those adjustments very quickly.

Albert Roque: There's nothing set in stone when you're hit with this pandemic. Everything was changing by the day. Every day you came in, there was 30 emails. Hey, this changed, that changed, policies need to change. Workflows change. Nurses are working in one unit on Monday and a different unit on Tuesday. So that was all a part of it. The most important part is just being flexible. And you come into it in a situation where unprecedented times that no one has ever encountered before, you've got to be flexible. You've got to do what's good for the group, for the Cleveland Clinic as a whole. And that was the most important tool to have as we're faced with a pandemic. Just being flexible and brainstorming, being in a teamwork setting is so valuable because by yourself, you can't, you cannot tackle this.

Dan Thompson: I'm pretty impressed with the amount of what we can get done as a team at the Cleveland Clinic. The takeaway would be that we can do a lot. I was involved on the team setting up the Hope Hospital and handling the security plan over that. That was an amazing project that you can turn a building into a thousand-bed hospital within a few weeks. We never had plans for a testing site, especially a drive-through style site where people can come and drive up to a tent in a garage, and get tested for a disease, and drive away. There's a lot that goes into that as far as the clinical side. So the speed that we can get things done and the overall size of some of these projects that we took on is very impressive.

Albert Roque: And everybody did it. And it ran so smooth that we were just in disbelief how we were able to get this off and running within a matter of days.

Michelle Lampton: As Albert so perfectly put it - everything changed. But these two leaders, Dan with formal leadership responsibilities and Albert taking on a leadership role to meet the moment, truly rose up and helped their teams overcome what has been a challenging time for all of us. Even so, they needed support from their own leadership.

Albert Roque: Well, the best part of our leadership is that they trust us. There is trust from the upper management, from the leaders to say, "Hey, we haven't dealt with patients before, we haven't dealt with patients in a long time. We need people that have dealt with patients that really know what's going on and know people the best. How are our patients going to respond best to this?" And it's by getting those nurses that deal with the patients. Nurses are so valuable because we're so connected to the patients. We spend so much more time with our patients than any other healthcare provider. We're that line between that health and you being a person and empathy and connecting with your patients.

Michelle Lampton: So what did it take to meet this moment? What are the skills one needs to demonstrate extraordinary leadership and, as cliché as it has become, extraordinary times?

Dan Thompson: Communication is number one. I have a big group of people at main campus that work 24 hours a day. Pretty quickly, I realized that emails are not going to get it done. Initially, probably that first month, I was working at least at least 12 hours a day, I think, for 13 or 14 straight days at one point. And making sure that I was at every single roll call with the officers, and getting them the newest information that we had in guidance of what our new roles and responsibilities are and what we're doing to keep our officers safe. It wasn't just me. There was all the other leaders at main campus, and other regional hospitals were doing the same thing. But the communication, it was difficult to hit and actually, I think, have that quality interaction with every employee that they feel like we really care for them, and want to make sure that they feel safe when they're coming to work, and that we're doing everything that we can to provide that to them.

Albert Roque: My leadership skills are, I never like to tell someone to do that I would never do myself. I like to lead by example, be willing to be right there on the front lines with my team. So, I don't like to sit by and oversee everything. I like to be right there with my team, working right next to my team, and just being able to answer any type of questions that they might have and show them by example. I don't like micromanaging people and just floating on top of people. I have to have trust with my team. As a leader, as a nursing team, you've got to trust each other.

Being a leader, you have to be flexible. You have to understand you're dealing with different personalities. Everybody's different. Everybody's coming from different backgrounds and different situations. So, people are going to have their different input and just being open to that. You have to be open to what everybody has to say and what everybody has to offer.

Michelle Lampton: As we bring this episode to a close, we asked each of our extraordinary leaders what one thing they would want to leave you, our listener, with - one lesson they learned or one piece of advice they could share.

Albert Roque: The one thing. It's hard to put one thing. I would say is teamwork. You've got to trust the team. You've got to have a solid team in place because by yourself, you're never going to be able to do it all by yourself. Having a team in place to come together, more minds focusing on one goal, different aspects, different viewpoints. The most essential thing to this was our teamwork that we had from the beginning. Our leaders trusted in the team and we created new leaders from this. People were able to step up.

When you have a team, it just breeds brainstorming. And you see where other people excel at and where their strengths are at and then you can focus on those strengths. I think the most important thing of being an extraordinary leader is to develop good teamwork with your nurses and your staff and trusting each other.

Dan Thompson: The one thing I would want leaders to know, or at least in my mind, that it is just to care about your employees. I think there's a lot of different characteristics that you should have as a leader, but people can tell if you don't care about them, and if you're not generally interested in them succeeding, and having a good experience while they're here. You're always going to be working through problems with employees and different things, but that would be my one thing. You really have to care about what you do, and the people that you work with, and your team.

Albert Roque: Everybody has a role to play. Everybody has a part to play in this pandemic, especially in healthcare, and you just got to be willing to step up and be flexible.

Michelle Lampton: That's our episode. A big shout out and thank you to Albert Roque and Dan Thompson for being a part of this podcast, and we hope you've enjoyed hearing from them as much as we did. If you have an extraordinary leader you'd like us to interview for this series, drop us an email. We want to hear your stories.

That's it for us at GLLI. Stay curious and keep learning!