Healthcare CEO’s: Do You Fear Your Team?

Aashi Arora 11 Nov 2024

1. Are you a leader wondering why it sometimes feels like you are managing high school
   students rather than grown professionals?
2. Do you dread going to work to find the line of people waiting to meet with you outside
   your door to hear their rant of complaints?
3. Do you fear your team?

I was once coaching a Healthcare CEO who had grown a healthcare organization from 10 to 75 employees in a matter of a few short years and then was looking to expand it even further. The company had outstanding services and products with a large market share and hope for a great future. But when I first met the CEO the company was stagnant. He was stuck. As I probed further into his challenges, we uncovered the biggest one of all. He feared his leadership team!

Do you fear your leadership team?

Almost comical right? And yet a challenge that afflicts so many. And remember when we begin coaching sessions today, it is a safe place for you to exhale your fears and deal with them. So could it be that some of my examples below fit your feelings and emotions at this time?

Office Setting	Emotion and Fear
Stepping into the office each morning	Suffocating! There is a line of staff members outside the door wanting answers. This is now going to set your agenda back for the day addressing multiple issues that derail time and performance.
One to One meeting(s) with staff	The to-do list is getting very overwhelming. There is a stack of complaints about personnel and everyone is counting on you to resolve matters promptly and effectively. There are multiple different personality types and getting your head around each one person and creating a winning culture just seems impossible or rather you feel like a failure.
Team meetings	Team meetings are becoming costly with disrespectful tones, rude interruptions, and condescending remarks. The time involved in having meetings costs thousands of dollars per hour and to now be having conflict and dysfunction, your role as a CEO is to bring order to the table, but you fear your leadership team. You cannot understand where and why you have this fear despite previous success.

Leadership Dilemma or Confusion

In the case of my client the Healthcare CEO, what really didn’t make sense to him was how strong technically each of his leaders were. They had strong backgrounds in each of their fields – finance, operations, marketing, sales, clinical management, human resources. Yet what felt like high school type behaviors ensued – gossip, arguments, backstabbing. And they all came to him about every gripe and disagreement.

How Coaching Peeled Back The Blindspots

During coaching, we started with first understanding his personality and his natural leadership
style through a series of assessments. As I probed with questions, he gained more and more
clarity. He concluded that he had created a band of monsters swarming his office constantly
as well as exhibiting unacceptable behaviors!

So what were the elements of his leadership style leading to the blindspots?

Style Element	Blindspot
Open-door policy	Over-dependence on CEO
Likable leader	Allowance of bad behaviors
Master problem solver	Lack of empowerment in team

Initiating Change

To summarize the steps of what to do when you fear your team:

1. Identify the symptoms of the fear
2. Reflect on getting clarity on what could be causing your difficulties
3. Confront the need to change

Change starts with you the leader, the CEO first. If done correctly, you can avoid aversion to it.

The table below shows the cycles of change and what you can do to ensure a smoother transition and acceptance to change.

Identify the Stage:	Actions:
Clarity stage	Brainstorming/focus groups
Planning stage	Dedicated committee
Implementation stage	Ambassadors
Re-assessment stage	Feedback from stakeholders

For my CEO client, his solution to the challenges in his workplace culture was to make a
dramatic shift in the leadership structure – introduce higher level C-suite positions to report to
him and thus taking the existing horizontal reporting structure and creating a more vertical one.

The company’s growth had stagnated and through coaching he created clarity around his
inability of leaning into being a more visionary and strategic leader. He had been often
inundated with meeting after meeting and direct work that he was not delegating appropriately.
He had 18 direct reports and trying to meet and regularly engage with all of them was ultimately
making him ineffective with prioritizing the growth of the company

Through leadership coaching with iRise Executive Coaching, we devised a plan for restructuring the direct reports into units headed by new executives. As we created this plan, we added 2 components to the planning process -feedback and buy-in in between each stage as listed above.

Coaching uncovered the deeper-rooted issues that this CEO was having. And through it he was
able to overcome the dread of his team and you can too!

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