Edward Marx is an intense guy and awesome storyteller. His Twitter profile includes a mountain range and he and his health IT team at Texas Health Resources have climbed several mountains since he took on the health system’s CIO role seven years ago. But in a presentation at the Pennsylavnia eHealth Partnership Authority annual health IT conference, he explained how that happened and the leadership insights that he has drawn from those experiences.
Texas Health Resources used mountain climbing as the theme for its 10 year plan. But at some point he and his team realized that not one of them had actually climbed a mountain. But what started as a team building activity became a lot more than that and, led by guides, his team have climbed mountains in several places such as Kilimanjaro and Mount Elbrus in Russia. They’re currently preparing for a climb at Aconcagua in Argentina.
Marx talked about some of the lessons he and his team learned through mountain climbing as well as some personal lessons he’s picked up through experience. But just in case audience members were thinking they’d heard some of the management lessons on someone’s top 10 list, he observed that if some of the audience members were annoyed by what they were hearing, maybe it’s because they weren’t actually doing it. Here were some of the highlights:
When Investment Rhymes with Canada
Canada has a proud history of achievement in the areas of science and technology, and the field of biomanufacturing and life sciences is no exception.
You rise to the level of training not the expectation.
As a leader you have to be vulnerable. That’s tough for most leaders, but the more you show your team who you are as a person, the more approachable you will be and the easier it will be for them to work with you.
Attitude not aptitude determines altitude. “I am so average it’s not even funny, but I have a good attitude and that’s what has helped me [surpass] my peers.”
I am very aggressive about accomplishing different things but you need to work in a way so that you don’t leave people behind.
He also stressed the importance of making staff feel capable to do the job they were hired to do, because they probably wrestle with those concerns more than their manager does. And to convey that in a meaningful way, it means you need to tell each person face to face.
Pee in public, vomit in private. This one requires some explanation. On the mountain, Marx stressed, it can be risky to be vain about basic necessities, like peeing in front of others, for instance. The management lesson for that is be transparent whenever possible, except when it will cause more damage than not. There was no explicit lesson in there for the health system’s recent Ebola crisis but it was certainly on everyone’s mind. Instead, Marx pointed out that it publishes quality outcomes data online, and he also posts his job evaluations on the Internet.
Not all the learning experiences were drawn around mountain climbing. Marx talked about how he learned to appreciate the value of hospitals sharing patient data with each other when his daughter had complications at birth. Rather than take the risk of transporting his newborn daughter to a Denver hospital, the medical team transmitted his daughters medical record and they received guidance from the more specialized hospital on how to treat her.
In a separate talk on technology, he also pointed out that his health system is working to roll out a predictive analytics tool to more accurately predict which patients coming into emergency departments are at risk for a heart attack. A member of the health IT team at Texas Health Resources developed the tool, which uses six vital signs to make the calculation. It is planning to roll out that tool to other emergency departments across its health system.
