While women make up 78% of the healthcare workforce, only 19% of hospital and health system CEOs are female. But the CEO of a hospital with an all-female executive team says her responsibility is simply finding good leaders.
Women play an oversize role in healthcare decision-making for families, but an undersized role in healthcare leadership positions.
Rachelle Schultz |
According to a 2013 report by the independent nonprofit organization Rock Health, while women make 85% of the decisions about their children's doctors and make up an astounding 78% of the healthcare labor force, they make up only 19% of hospital and health system CEOs, and only 14% of the positions on boards of directors for healthcare companies.
An independent hospital in Minnesota is bucks that trend hard, though not intentionally, its CEO says. Winona Health, a 99-bed organization, is not only led by a woman, President and CEO Rachelle Schultz, but the entire leadership team of nine is made up of women.
Schultz, who has led the hospital for the past 13 years after spending the first part of her career with the predecessor to Phoenix-based Banner Health, says the distinctiveness of her all-female leadership team only dates to mid-2013, when the CFO, who was male, departed for another organization. The all-female leadership team will likely be short-lived, she says.
"It certainly wasn't deliberate," she told me. "I'm always looking for the best fit—the person who can work with the team we have."
To be clear, neither Schultz nor Winona Health sought publicity for their leadership team's gender makeup. While an all-male leadership team is increasingly rare, male-dominated ones are the rule. But an all-female team crosses firmly into "man bites dog" territory.
Schultz's reaction to talking about having an all-female leadership team is similar to her response to being asked to give a speech about what it's like to be a female CEO: bemusement. That's not to say she hasn't given such speeches. She has, multiple times.
"That's hard to describe because I don't know what it's like to be a male CEO," she says. "I just don't find it to be a problem. Some places I go I might be the only female in the room, but someone has to point it out for me to notice that. With my own team, it's all women, but it's definitely not the usual thing I run into at other organizations."
The leadership team's gender is accidental, she says.
"Hiring is my decision, but we always do a full gamut of the interview process with the rest of leadership team, physicians, and nurses," she says about Winona Health's hiring process. "There's a whole gauntlet a candidate needs to go through, especially at the senior leadership level. The collective also has to see what I see in a candidate."
Schultz says she likes to think of herself as a thoughtful executive who seeks to find good leadership for her health system. She's not necessarily a crusader for women in healthcare leadership.
"It is unusual, and I get that when we do our annual report, it is a noticeable thing, especially in my own community where there aren't that many women leaders," Schultz says.
Some members of the Winona Health executive team are long-term employees. "Some have been here 20-30 years, and they are people I found when I first got here," she says. "We put them in roles where they flourished so they have evolved into the senior leadership team."
Other people have been recruited. When the prior CFO left voluntarily in 2013 to work for another health system, Schultz hired Jan Brosnahan to replace him, but not because of her gender. One chief reason she was hired is that she didn't come from a healthcare background.
"That said, there were not a lot of female CFO candidates from outside healthcare, either," Schultz says. "Jan worked as controller for a corporation in St. Louis. She had a learning curve but she rolled up her sleeves and figured it out. We needed someone who could look at new models of care, and she's really done an awesome job at that and brought some great ideas."
Brosnahan brought a focus on financial forecasting, as opposed to budgeting, which the organization had not had in the past, and it's a big improvement, says Schultz.
"I'm an advocate for great leadership and personal and professional growth for people who are willing to do the heavy lifting and who are not on the sidelines observing, because there's some really hard work to do," she says. That's true for leaders everywhere in healthcare today, male or female.
One day, an all-female leadership team at a hospital like Winona Health will be unremarkable. The fact that it isn't means there's still work to do.
Philip Betbeze is the senior leadership editor at HealthLeaders.