Q&A Sonja LaBarbera Keeping a patient-centric approach through a pandemic
Sonja LaBarbera, with a background in speech pathology, is the first clinician to hold the position of president and chief executive officer of Gaylord Specialty Healthcare in nearly 40 years. LaBarbera, 47, has been in the job since January 2019 and has worked in health care for a quarter-century.
In October 2020, under LaBarbera’s leadership, Gaylord opened the Milne Institute for Healthcare Innovation.
LaBarbera, also the first woman to head Gaylord, serves on the board of directors of Gaylord Hospital/ Gaylord Farm Association Inc., which oversees all the organization’s services. Recently, LaBarbera was named to the Hartford Business Journal 2020 list of Power 25 in Healthcare. She was also awarded the 2020 New Haven Biz Women Who Mean Business award and named the 2019 Quinnipiac Chamber Woman of the Year.
With 629 employees, Gaylord is small for a hospital, as LaBarbera says, but it’s still a large employer — and based on the comments of the staff, LaBarbera is winner of the Top Leader award in the large employers category of the 2021 Hearst Connecticut Media Top Workplaces contest. She spoke with Hearst about her background and patient-centric approach to running a medical rehabilitation facility. The conversation was edited for clarity and length.
What initially drew you to speech pathology?
I was struggling sort of
with what I wanted to do. I considered everything from accounting to education. I took those aptitude tests, and every single one of those aptitude tests said that I should be an air traffic controller, but that was not something I was particularly interested in. So I met with my gym teacher one day and he said, ‘Listen, my daughter’s a speech pathologist. Check into it. I think you’d like it.’ I think partially because all I did was talk as a child, and he thought that that might be a good fit. But, you know I was empathetic, and I like to help people and he said, ‘Why don’t you look into it?’ So that is literally how I chose my major, was advice from my high school gym teacher.
How has your transition from working directly with patients to a leadership role been?
What I can tell you is the time that I was probably happiest in my career was when I was doing half treatment and half leadership, because then you have sort of the best of both worlds. But I’m also the type of person that even though I’m not directly providing patient care anymore, I go out and talk to patients all the time.
Because for me, this job is about people. It’s about the patients and their stories. If you’re having a bad day, go down and talk to a patient and you remember why we’re in the business that we’re in. And that’s where I get my motivation, my excitement, my enthusiasm to continue to grow and develop, is from the actual people that we’re here to help.
I read a little bit about your patient-centric focus at Gaylord. Was that culture already in place when you started?
It was, but I think we’ve continued to grow that culture. From a management standpoint, you have to remember why you do the work that you do every day. And for me, it’s about our patients and also our employees.
You know you want to make sure that the employees get good communication, that they’re valued, that they know why they’re doing what they’re doing, not just that they have to do it. Keeping the employees engaged is really important to getting the results that we get.
What have been the biggest challenges for you since you became CEO, and how have you overcome those challenges?
I would say definitely COVID has been the greatest challenge. And the challenge with COVID really was that we weren’t sure what was coming. We were prepared for one thing, and then something else would change. You had to be very nimble, so we essentially changed our business model
overnight. We opened additional beds, to be able to really help our acute-care partners, so that we could take more patients. We shifted resources from our outpatient services, which were not as busy during COVID, into our inpatient business. The challenge was really trying to forecast what was coming and stay nimble and make the changes that we needed to make, and being a small, independent organization really allowed us to do that.
Women make up a small percentage of hospital CEOs. Has being in that minority posed any particular challenges for you?
I know I’m the first female CEO here at Gaylord, and although when my