 Welcome to Hack and Sack Meridian Health's podcast series for Women's History Month. I am your host, Jody Mayberry. This episode we're going to talk to Carol Barski. Carol is a Senior Vice President and Chief Quality Officer. With Carol, we're going to explore the topic of learning and development. This podcast is part of a series of dynamic short interviews sponsored by the Hack and Sack Meridian Health's Women in Leadership Team Member Resource Group. The group selected the topics of this series because they knew they were important to your career. Let's get started with Carol Barski. Carol, can you talk to me about your organizational approach to learning and development? For organizations like ours, where we have adult learners, particularly in my area, where we're looking to improve and transform health care. We want to combine experiential learning with small groups, lectures, so imparting knowledge is part of it, but helping people with real life challenges is also really important. Adult learners, especially in this kind of space, need a safe environment to ask each other how to handle their challenges. They need to be really comfortable with candor around their mistakes and obstacles, and so I look to have a learning environment that incorporates new knowledge with real life work and a safe environment in which to discuss actual challenges. What are some of the most important skills that leaders can learn? I actually have thought about this a lot. There are some things you can learn, and there are some things you have to be committed to. Under the category of commitments, I would say one is in health care, to be a leader, the best leader, effective leader, you have to be completely patient-centered. All of us have a continuum of how we think of our own interests versus the interests of others. All interests is important, you know, you have to be healthy and well compensated, but within that context, a great leader is completely mission-driven and focused on the patients, the outcome, and how the organization is doing. The other skill that leaders have to learn is how to speak with candor about their work, about making it effective in a way that is well heard by others. So you want to have courage to be truthfully so that problems can be resolved, the mission of the organization, and the interests of the patients can be served, but you want to learn how to do that with really thoughtful consideration of your audience. So in other words, being right is insufficient. It's not only important to be correct, it's really important to learn to be effective. Also while it's difficult to teach courage, we can teach people how to be effective and how to think differently depending on what their original profession is. The other skills I think people need are really to understand the context in which they work. That's the human beings and their relationships, but it's also the financial, the political organizational structure within which they're working. First, I think leaders need to make sure that that context, that organization is a good fit for who they are because that's a precondition for being successful. And then within that, learn to find mentors and people that will give you honest feedback about how you're perceived, how you show up, and how you can do a better job at getting your mission and your work across. When it comes to leading other people, if you're leading a team, is there even more skills that come in that are important? I know there's two ways you can look at leadership is one, you don't have to have a leadership title and be in that role to be a leader, but there also is the leaders that do lead a team. Are there some skills beyond what you've talked about that now come into play once you're leading a team? Leadership in industries where lives are at stake I think requires particular skills and leadership in every context requires that a leader find a way so that the personal growth and development of the people on their team is aligned with that of the organization. So my job as a leader of a team is not only to get our work done, but also to develop each and every team member so that they feel like they're growing and developing, maybe getting a degree, taking new courses, getting coaching, public speaking advice, so they grow as they serve the organization. I also think that leadership of a team requires first of all that people trust that you have their back. They know that you lead with integrity. You're honest with them. They know an actual evaluation of their strengths and weaknesses that you have and that you are helping them address those weaknesses. They want to know that you're there for them when they have family emergencies or issues that you see them as human beings. And when you treat them that way, people respect that and they work harder. So it's really more a matter of leaders serving the people that we work for, helping them grow and then setting high expectations is really a natural consequence. So I think people on my team work extremely hard. I try to reward them well financially as well as personally and then also help them to grow. Let's talk a little bit about the mindset around learning and development. When it comes to learning and development, is it the responsibility of the organization to train me or is this something I should take charge of myself? Both. If the organization doesn't enable you to do that, it's much harder and you have to be able to recognize that. But ideally, we're tailoring that growth and development to our current team and also for succession planning. So for example, we look at all our chief medical officers across the network. Many of us are mid or late career. How do we train the next generation? What does it mean to be a great CMO? What are the skills that are needed? And how do we get out there and train people for that? And that's part of what I see my responsibility as, even though I'm not in the section of education of our organization. And for women in particular, there are different things that we need to learn. We have to learn how to communicate, how to grow in a very different environment. I think the individual needs to learn how to find mentors and advocates and people that can assist them and that sometimes takes place separately from the official learning structure of the organization. If we work for an organization that does encourage learning and development, but we also want to take charge of it ourselves and begin to develop our career and learn more of the skills that we need, where can we start? Where would you suggest we begin to do this? I think individuals are most successful when we discover our own burning platform. What really is interesting to me? Where do I feel I can make a contribution? What really excites me to do? And then to find learning opportunities that will enable you to grow that way, thinking for your own future. So in my case, for example, I was a chair of emergency department, ran emergency departments for many years. And then as my hospital that I was working in went bankrupt, I had a burning platform that I wanted to be able to get out of my individual specialty and provide overall leadership to a hospital. And that led me to go and get an executive MBA at Yale, because I wanted to change my skill set to be able to change my career. Whenever you make a big commitment to learning, it takes a lot of time. It takes you away from other things you might be doing in your life. So I think it works best with something that you're really passionate about. The other thing you often have to do for yourself that no organization will do for you is find leaders that you admire and find the courage to go up to them and say, can I talk to you? Will you mentor me? Can we have lunch? How did you get where you are? And you want those leaders to be outside the people that you directly report to. Finding those mentors, finding a social network, linking up with other women that are working in the same space. That does become a personal responsibility. I don't believe that any organization will do that for us. HMH has many senior leaders that are women, that are brilliant and successful, collegial and available. And you don't find that everywhere. It's only possible to develop a learning or development path for oneself when one has a sense of agency that by learning, by developing myself, I can change my future. I can make a difference in my own life and in what I have to contribute to society or to my organization. If we wait for others to do it for us, or we feel victimized by our lives or circumstances, we won't be able to make those kinds of decisions. And inevitably the kinds of sacrifices we have to make in order to grow. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this conversation, check out the other topics in this series of podcasts.