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Today In Health IT, we are discussing what CIOs should consider before pursuing CEO ambitions. My name is Sarah Richardson.

I'm a former CIO for several healthcare systems. Most notably within HCA and Optum, and now president of the This Week Health 229 Executive Development Community, where we host a set of channels and events dedicated to transforming healthcare one connection at a time. In 2024, we have raised the bar on philanthropy.

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Transitioning from CIO to CEO

I am joined today by Drex DeFord, who is wearing his yellow hat. And Drex, when we think about this article, here's what I thought was so interesting about it. And that's that When a CIO considers becoming a CEO, they need to understand technology clearly, but they also have to expand their expertise into areas such as business strategy, financial acumen, and leadership, obviously beyond IT.

And this shift from focusing on technical execution to broader business goals requires a mindset change and sometimes new skill acquisition. What are your summary, your thoughts on this? I, you know, so I just think about, um, The folks that I've seen sort of successfully make this transition from CIO to Chief Digital Officer to sometimes Chief Operating Officer, and then to CEO, uh, the thing about CIOs, Is that a lot of their work creates the opportunity for them to put their fingers in so many different pies across an organization that they can actually get great experience in clinical operations because they're doing technology projects that have a people in process component to it.

And they get to know the operators in that area. They get to know the leaders in that area. They understand how everything works, how those departments cross and crossover and work with other departments. They get a lot of great insight into how health systems work broadly. I mean, from the, from the foundation and the fundraising processes, all the way through the financial operations, through claims, all the way through supply chain.

I mean, they, they have opportunities to see everything. And I think it makes them better healthcare technology people. It makes them better healthcare operators in general. And it creates a situation often where You do a really good job and the good folks we see get opportunities to do other things. So they get supply chain or they get biomedical, you know, uh, clinical engineering or they get sometimes radiology or pharmacy or lab as part of their operations responsibility and all of that's a great path.

CEO

job. Absolutely is.

Key Traits for Successful Leadership

In fact, last week wrote an article, uh, really a book review from the CEO next door that really talked about three main things, which is fast and decisive decision making. What I loved about that, it's not about being right a hundred percent of the time. It's about making a decision that you can do quickly and confidentially or confidently.

Also, reliability being

a huge

key to success. Are you making decisions that have good outcomes? And more importantly, can people depend on you to not only do what you say you're going to do, but have a disciplined approach to your work? And then resilience and adaptability. And I feel like today that resilience and adaptability are probably two of the most important factors of being a successful executive in any role.

Because things are going to happen that you can't plan for, but if you have a plan that you can execute upon, then in theory, you're going to have a better outcome. Does it matter if it's always in a healthcare system or like what you have done successfully in your career is, hey, I'm going to go work for one of the partners instead and take that perspective.

How does that potentially play into the career trajectory? Of moving to CEO. Uh, you know, so I think the more, the, the, all the experiences that you can gather, one of the things I love about the 229 project summits and the city tour dinners that we do is when you sit down and have conversations with hundreds of executives, like we do over the course of a year, The one consistent thing that I think I hear over and over again is that all of these people are collectors of new experiences.

They all want to learn. They're all excited about the new responsibilities or their new exposures they get to other vendors, to other health systems, to their own health system and the folks that are in it. And so I think all of that, that willingness to collect new experiences and gain perspective gives them this Real opportunity to have perspective on how to be a good leader, a good leader that can serve at the CEO level.

So, you know, back to your point about fast and decisive decision making this. The ability to kind of say, I can make a decision. It doesn't have to be perfect. I have enough information to be able to make a decision. And then I'm going to adjust my path on this decision to the resilience point. Turns out to be really important.

And it's hard for most people to do that because they feel like they make a decision. They have to fall in love with it. That's the only way to do this. Or they struggle really mightily with the idea that it takes forever to make a perfect decision. And so they want more information, more information.

They won't actually go. Reliability is the key to success. I think the other thing that they get to see a lot of over time is that they deal with a lot of other leaders who are very mercurial, um, the question becomes often, uh, you know, is the old man having a good day or not? before they will go to the CEO or the chief operating officer or the department leader to ask them a question.

They're having a bad day, something bad happened last night, uh, you know, their, their football team lost, whatever it might be, then they're not gonna, they're not gonna go to them that day. But if you can be the leader that is the same person, there's always gonna be a little bit of range in all of this for any of us.

But if you can be the same person that shows up every day, And I know that you're going to listen, uh, understand what I'm saying, make good decisions, uh, you know, not take things personally, not throw things when we have conversations. Those are the kinds of, uh, those are the kinds of experiences. A lot of the CIOs have with other leaders that they have met with, and sometimes the best way to learn is to figure out, From bad leaders, how not to be bad leaders.

That makes you a better, a better leader. So I can see how they wind up, um, on this path to CEO. Well, of course. And so based on what you're sharing with me, I'm thinking, okay, so I want to be the CEO, and that means a couple of things. I can't be so married to the decisions we're making in the organization that it becomes part of my identity.

Because then you get into that whole analysis paralysis that you're talking about, like use enough information to make great decisions. And if you choose not to flip over to the partner side and working with those partners, and we start to have really big, very strategically significant relationships with our partners in terms of how we're delivering the right care in our organizations.

They can help you with the things you're going to need. The market trends, the customer research, the product development, all of those are going to be essential for being the CEO. So I love that we've had the chance to not only be doing this live from our summit in DC, where we've got CMIOs and an AI.

Perspective going on this week. It's really that perfect timing because every single conversation I've heard are things that CEOs need to know and we'll actually position everybody in these rooms to take that next step should they want to. Drex, thank you for being on the show. Absolutely. And please share this podcast with a friend or colleague and use it as a foundation for daily or weekly discussions.

That's a wrap for today. Thanks for listening.