Understanding the importance of diversity

DR. JOANNE CONROY, president and CEO, Dartmouth-Hitchcock and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health: When you get a sack of a hundred resumes, it’s pretty difficult to go through those quickly without letting some unconscious gut feeling decide who gets into the video interview pile versus who doesn’t actually move any further. So now we blind all of our resumes for senior leadership positions. The last time we did that— hiring two of our really important positions— we got a female candidate and a diversity candidate and were incredibly pleased by the outcome.

DR. THOMAS SEQUIST, chief patient experience and equity officer, Mass General Brigham: A couple of things are really important. One is making sure you create a culture of accountability. I think the other is really communicating to everyone the purpose of why we are pursuing such diversity. I think that message often gets lost.

NICOLE THOMAS, president, Baptist Medical Center South: Having a measurement be a part of how our leaders are evaluated is really important to be able to focus the attention that’s needed on what you’re going to be judged by and when it’s important to the C- suite. It becomes important as we cascade it through the rest of the organization.

SURESH GUNASEKARAN, CEO,

University of Iowa Hospitals & Clinics: It’s a fundamental type of problem- solving, just like we’re in search of new technologies and new therapies, we’re also in search of new perspectives. I think it’s really about embracing this notion that new types of healthcare problem- solving are needed because yesterday’s configuration hasn’t gotten us the results that we wanted.

MARK CLEMENT, president and CEO, TriHealth: At TriHealth, for the first time in our history we’ve established a leadership diversity goal. Our senior leaders are now accountable for that, and it’s directly tied to our incentive plan. We launched just this year an emerging leader program targeting and developing up- and- comer minority candidates within our system to really be able to promote from within, which is for us probably one of the best sources for leadership talent.