Leading Through the Next Crisis: Lessons from COVID That Apply Right Now

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Hello to the Healthcare Success Podcast. Welcome today. And today I’m going to be interviewing and my special guest is Amy Comeau. And she is a consultant, very experienced healthcare leader, and author of Every Storm Runs Out of Rain. Welcome, Amy.

Amy Comeau (Consultant & Author): Thank you so much for having me, Stewart. I’m glad happy to be here.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So me too, I’m glad to have you. So we’re gonna talk about your book in depth in a little bit and a lot of the insights you have. But you know, we’ve titled this for ourselves, Leading to the Next Crisis Lessons from COVID that apply right now. And I was teasing a little bit offline, like COVID. No, I don’t wanna hear about COVID anymore. I’m so sick of COVID. my God, what could possibly be relevant today? So tell me about why is this relevant today? Like why, you know, we’re gonna get into more detail, obviously. Give us a sense of the landscape today.

Amy Comeau (Consultant & Author): Yeah, I mean, what you’re saying is not uncommon as a you know, my book is as you as we’ve talked about and we’ll get to, is about leading my my team through the pandemic. But we learned so much during the pandemic about leading ourselves and our teams and our organizations and our customers through crisis and challenge and change that I think it’s it’s an important topic, especially now when I mean. Uncertainty is almost like a certainty, right? In the worlds that we we live in today, particularly in healthcare.

And so, you know, I think when we think back about COVID, what was unique around that is that it was a global shared experience, right? We all had to stop and focus, and we were focused on defeating a common foe, right? It’s like the great sort of, you know, movie script, right? We’re all fighting against something to get us back to normal.

And I think the reality is, well, because of that, we learned things that are important, like focus, like how to focus and how effective we can be when we’re focusing and we have a single priority, which I think is important for us to think about as we start to encounter different crises or different challenges or changes that we may not have a shared purpose around. And so, therefore, how do we take the lessons that we learned from leading ourselves and our teams through COVID and apply them to today in today’s world. And how do we manage that change?

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): That makes a lot of sense. So I have a couple comments. One is it’s funny, when we were talking briefly in our pre-call about the idea of a common foe, and even during COVID, if lest we forget, not everybody was on the same page. So a lot of us thought we had a common foe, and a lot of us didn’t think we had a foe at all. So I mean it’s just factual, right? If you look back at what happened there. So I think any crisis is ainsome regards a Rorschach test, like in terms of how you’re looking at it. but you know, at least there was broadly a common foe. It is also interesting to me, I’ve thought about this socially since then. I remember sitting down on a wine tasting trip with a bunch of different people and we talked about I started a conversation starter about like what was COVID like and that was an interesting thing because everybody’s just viewpoint was so different based upon what they were doing for a living and what they did. So we had you know, somebody said like, “it wasn’t that bad. I would just sort of stayed at home and you know, work from home.” And the other people are like, “Wait, I was a frontline worker, it was horrible.” So, you know, it’s it’s and nobody still to this day has that shared experience. So that’s a question I hadn’t planned to ask you, but like, how do you as a leader deal with people that have such different shared experiences, such different attitudes, such different viewpoints. Like is yeah, there’s a common foe. Not every everybody even acknowledged there was one.

Amy Comeau (Consultant & Author): Yeah, and so I agree I agree with you one hundred percent. And since I’ve been outside of being on the inside of a health system for as long as I have, I’ve had the exact the exact same experience you’ve had. As I’m doing working with people in different industries, I’m certainly reconnecting with a lot of my marketing colleagues. It’s interesting to hear what people’s lives were like depending on their industry or this their situation.

So I’ll I guess I’ll re reclassify the common foe to when we were on the inside of a health system, right? In health systems, particularly, you know, academic medical centers, we were seen as sort of the source of truth for many places. But for us, we knew that we had to focus on a singular thing, right? We had no choice as caring for patients.

The world, you know, at large did not. But it’s interesting now, I think, and it, you know, COVID wasn’t the bearer or the didn’t bear misinformation and disinformation. I think those things existed far, you know, far before that, but it began to amplify that, right? In a way that we had to learn how to deal with it.

And particularly I think in dealing with how we how we as health systems or healthcare providers need to think about how we’re speaking to our audiences and recognizing that we’re here to care for everyone, regardless of their beliefs. And so, therefore, how do we make sure that we’re not alienating a part of the community and a part of our, you know, a part of our population that needs our help, but that we’re not alienating them by acting like we’re the expert and that their beliefs are wrong.

And so I think that has been a challenge. I don’t know a challenge, but I think it’s something that living through COVID exposed, and now we’re just we’re dealing with it more and more, especially as our ways of getting information are becoming more and more fragmented, and it’s harder to know where source if there are sources of truth behind things, and yet we still need to work on communicating authentically with our with our audiences.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): That makes sense for sure. So when you look at healthcare, ’cause you know, our audience is largely healthcare leaders, executives, and people that are just interested in, you know, innovation, healthcare, health and those kinds of things. But as you’re thinking about healthcare navigators today, consolidation, staffing shortages, misinformation, which we just described, political pressure, what feels most familiar to the storm that you wrote about?

Amy Comeau (Consultant & Author): I think for sure, I mean, honestly, everything that you’ve mentioned feels very familiar to me. When we’re talking about that moment in time particular and the lessons learned, I think it’s the constant state of change, the workforce shortages, the you know, changing business models, and certainly this undercurrent of mis- and disinformation, although I think that’s more I think that’s I mean, I think it’s there, but I think it’s a specific challenge that healthcare marketers, communicators, and those sort of interacting with the general public feel. But you know, at the end of the day, I guess clinicians are too when they’re they’re seeing their patients either virtually or in person. And so I think that’s something that probably could be addressed, but from a what’s most familiar to me, it’s this constant need to change. Like you’re learning something new, you’re gonna constantly have to pivot to address whatever the challenge of the day is.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): That totally makes sense. So talk about leading yourself first versus leading others. I’d love to hear you speak more about that.

Amy Comeau (Consultant & Author): Yeah, I mean, I think the important thing for you, for us all as leaders, to remember is that we’re experiencing the crisis at the exact same time as our teams. But yet our teams are looking to us for certainty, for guidance, for assurity, right? And so for me, I and when things are when you’re in crisis or when things are uncertain. For me as a leader, I had to figure out very quickly and figure out how to how to sort through a lot of information very quickly to figure out the truth. Like what was the truth at that moment in time? Again in healthcare, we were fortunate to, you know, be at at with that situation, have epidemiologists and infectious disease experts who were telling us exactly what was happening as it was happening.

But for me I had to find that I had to find that truth and I had to be able to sift through all the uncertainty really quickly. And then I needed to be able to deliver that to my team at, you know, on I did it on a daily basis, but say, okay, team, here’s what I know, here’s what we don’t know, here’s what we need to focus on today. And if it changes in, you know, a day or it changes in hours, then you share that with them as well. But for me, it is as a leader, it’s the I think a key piece is being able to sift through all the noise to find out, to focus on what’s important.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So, now your role as I recall you were a VP of Marketing at Emory, so you were at an academic medical center. Academic medical centers are complex places. And so some very smart people, lots of voices with lots of opinions. How did you sort through that? ‘Cause that’s tough. Like at any at any place, but especially like aa leading academic medical center.

Amy Comeau (Consultant & Author): What middle? Yeah, I mean for us, it’s you in this I learned this actual lesson earlier on in I guess it was 2014-ish when Emery had the first Ebola patients come and and were treated at Emory. And we had to we identified it’s when we really activated our sort of our crisis incident command center. And those, you know, those happen all the time, even with other, you know, whether it’s weather or other situations, but we identified who our core experts were gonna be on that topic. And in in Ebola bothly in Ebola and in COVID, we knew who our core experts were. And that was identified, you know, as an there was an executive team that identified that and pulled them in. So we those were the ones that we relied on for the sources of truth clinically, right? On what was happening, what was going on with the virus, how it was changing, how we needed to treat it, what we were learning. and then we would have we we used process, right?

So we would meet at that point in time, we would meet, I think it was twice daily in the morning and the evening around and everybody report out here’s what I know, here’s what I don’t know, here’s what I’m working on, here’s what such and such is working on. So we used that as our way of centering the organization and then disseminating that back out to our teams to activate them and keep them focused on what we needed to approach. But I think it is key to identify who your subject matter experts are and very quickly. Otherwise you to your point, Stewart, you will end up in a sea of people debating what’s right versus wrong. And and in crises, and particularly for academic medical centers, we don’t have the time for analysis paralysis. We gotta make some quick decisions and move forward.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): For sure. And that’s the challenging ’cause of the stress in the moment. And you mentioned people looking to you as a leader. And, you know, like every organization, every business, every healthcare organization, health system, hospital, you know, device company, or marketing agency for that matter, has, you know, better times and good times and worse times. And they really are watching you carefully as a leader. And like you have to keep your cool too, right? If you’re panicking, that’s not gonna be good.

Amy Comeau (Consultant & Author): That’s correct. That is very correct. But that doesn’t mean you have to know all the answers either though. Right. I mean you need you need to be as I mean, and that’s something that my leadership style is is very akin to is being that steady calm in in the middle of a storm. And so being able to deliver that. But you also you need to be truthful with your team, right? Like if you don’t know the answer to something, you gotta say, “I don’t know. We we’re gonna figure this out together.” ‘Cause I think you you if if you be I think if you’re too rigid and know this is exactly what we need to do, you it may seem as like how come this person is not being challenged by the why is this why does this person seem unfazed by what’s happening? So I think there’s like a bit of humanity that you need to portray as well in those types of situations.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So that led me right to my next question. So, you know, about authenticity and vulnerability. How do you demonstrate that on a day to day basis?

Amy Comeau (Consultant & Author): For me, it came fairly easy at this point in time because I had already established relationships with my team. and we had already begun doing what I would call we call daily huddles. And they were some they were very disjointed pre pandemic because we didn’t have the technology, right, to do exactly what we’re doing now. We didn’t have were or we whether we had it or not, the systems didn’t necessarily embrace virtual meeting as something to do. So we continued that. And like I said, I would share those things. but I I found and this may lead into another question. I found that writing to my team was another form of communication. And through that, I started writing a Friday email to my team just to kind of like, “hey guys, here’s how we’re gonna get through shelter in place. Here’s how we’re gonna you know, manage this fully remote work.” And so I would share with them some of the things I’d been hearing other people struggling with or myself. I think one of the very first things that I shared with them was an article, it was a Harvard Business Review article on that feeling you’re feeling is grief.

And that really spoke to me because I knew I was feeling some kind of way about shelter in place and the pandemic. And I couldn’t quite figure out what it was. And when I read that, I was like, okay, right. I’m grieving change and what once was is no longer. It’s not the same as grieving the death of a loved one, but it is grieving something. And so I shared that article with the team. I was like, “you may be feeling this. I know that I am, and here’s how. I’m missing the missing watching live sports.” For me, watching live sports on television is one of my ways of unwinding at the end of the day. That was gone. So here I’m in, here we are in a 24-7 crisis and I can’t even watch, you know, the what yeah, the Braves would have been playing. I think it was March. The Braves or basketball, I couldn’t watch anything to unwind. So that was gone. We were stripped of being able to see our son go to his eighth grade dance and watch him play soccer on the soccer field. So I shared with them grieving can come in like these random ways, right? It’s not trivial, it’s real.

And so by sharing with that sharing those with them I think just shows how you are human too and that while yes we’re gonna lead through this through this we’re gonna we’re gonna work together through this crisis, we are all going through this together and we’re all gonna react to it differently. But I think by my sharing some of those personal stories, I think it made it I don’t know that it made me more relatable, but I think they were able to then react in a way, say, okay, it’s okay the way that I’m feeling and and it gave them a way to start to process, if that makes any sense.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So I thought it was interesting the origin story of the book, growing out of weekly emails you sent to your team. Like, what did you learn about the cadence, tone, and consistency of communication that’s applicable to others?

Amy Comeau (Consultant & Author): Mm-hmm. Yeah, so I did not intend on that being a weekly habit. It just started out as a weekly habit during those eight weeks, right? That we thought we’re gonna be shelter in place. and so in the early days, it was really “great work this week. We had to pivot. Congratulations on everybody who got, you know, changed what they were doing to get this ad out, or you know, pivoting quickly to update the website.”

So it was really a lot of gratitude to the team. around thanks so much or hey if you’re struggling you know trying to wrap your mind around this this pandemic here are some resources that I’ve been using. So that was like I would say the early days were definitely sort of pandemic response-ish and I wouldn’t say rah-rah but very much encouragement and tools to manage through.

What I didn’t realize is that the until looking back on it is that the emails started to become writing therapy for me. It was a way for me to process the week that had just passed and put a period on the end of the end of the week. So I I would always write them on Fridays and I would always write them. It was the last thing that I would do on a Friday, and I never had an editorial calendar for them.

There were some weeks where I said to myself, What have I gotten myself into? I don’t know what I’m gonna write about today. And some of those were lighter. Some of them didn’t make it into the book because they were just like a stupid meme or something like that. But I found that every time I thought I should just stop writing these emails, someone would respond to one and comment around. you know, “thank you for your for your words. You’ve been able to put into words what I’ve been but I what I’ve been thinking and I haven’t been able to articulate myself” or “thanks for sharing that story about your grandfather.”

And I realized, okay, people are reading and these would be coming from people different people on my team. So I you know I had I think five direct reports. We had a team of 27. And so there are people, you know, when you’re a leader of team, you don’t get to have deep relationships with every single person on your team. But by this being asynchronous and letting people read on their own. And then me to process the week, it provided almost like a safe space for us to have a conversation that wasn’t, you know, face to face like this or focused only on business. and so anyway, they evolved. I kept on doing them until my very last Friday. My last Friday, my last email at Emory was a Friday, and it was my Friday email to my team, just basically thanking them for an amazing, you know, 20 years that I had been there.

So they they kind of evolved as we got back into, you know, needing to work back onto, you know, we got past the pandemic and there’s like, okay, now we’ve got to refocus our strategy. What does our strategy look like right now? We’ve got new people on the team, we’ve suffered through our own great resignation, and so they would evolve to respond to whatever was happening that week. And I would pull analogies, I’d pull lessons. and so I found actually the longer I went, the the the more I re wrote, the deeper they got as I went.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Great. So going back to the you know, you mentioned about showing vulnerability, is there too much? Like does it go from like healthy transparency to overshare?

Amy Comeau (Consultant & Author): Yeah, for sure. and so that, you know, there were for me, I’ll I’ll put it this way, and I know I’m prepping for the call day, I was thinking about that. So, as a leader, I knew what to keep confidential. that was professional confidentiality, right? If there’s something that I couldn’t share with the team, and then for me, I shared a lot, but there was stuff that I knew I personally wouldn’t want to share with the team. I share some of it in the book. And I think that’s what’s interesting because there were some times when I was actually experiencing my own like own personal panic attacks during some of the the very heightened times of the crisis. My team never knew about it and I never wrote about it, but I wrote about some of the things that I was using, like meditation and some other things to help me manage through those days. And so I shared those pieces, but I would also do it with a little bit of humor. And I’d say something like “at risk of of making myself sound like a, you know a hippie, I’ve I’ve started trying this out,” right? So as a way to let them say, y”ou know, you don’t have to try this, you don’t need to do this, but here’s just kind of what I I took from it.”

But and then I think to start to counterbalance that so it wasn’t all just me and my stories, because after a while it’s like, well, who wants to read the leader’s stories? That’s kind of boring. I might bring out like an example and say, “Hey, this is you know, one of the things that I really enjoy doing to unwind on the weekend, would please share yours with me or share yours with the group.” And so I would invite people to respond either to reply all or respond directly to me and share back. And so that also helped me understand kind of what understand more about my team.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So, you know, we talked about in fact this is such a big topic. I’m doing a webinar in two weeks and talking about hallucinations and AI. And yeah, there’s a lot of that. And so the AI is just basically feeding us back what we’re serving it, right? And so misinformation and lack of trust in healthcare is I don’t know, I don’t know how far back the stats go, but from my lifetime at least, it’s at the lowest point it’s been for a long, long time. And you know, I let’s do it from the I guess the patient perspective, the providers, kinda go backwards from a hospital point of view, right? External end. So I couldn’t br add, you know, during times of crisis to help build, you know, the patient and community trust.

Amy Comeau (Consultant & Author): Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I would say this goes back to what we were talking about at the very beginning around there not everybody was agreed that COVID was something we needed to be worried about, right? And so when we think about the communities we serve, we gotta think about what’s our role in serving that community. And to your point, I think there was an Edelman study that came out that shows that trust in healthcare is at some of the lowest it’s been. And so we’ve gotta pivot from being I mean being telling people “this is what’s right and you need to believe us because we’re the experts” to trying to to really meet people where they are, understand what’s you know, understand what the drivers of of the different parts of our community, what they respond to. I mean it’s not any different than the personas that we’ll develop when we’re talking about doing marketing campaigns. Understand what’s driving everyone so that we can start to communicate them and meet them where they are and some for some people it may need you may we they may need and thrive off of that authority, right? That stense of authority and expertise. But others it may be understanding why they’re resistant to something and you know, hearing them and not just hearing to respond, but hearing to really listen and understand what the drivers are in those communities.

And it may be that, you know, whatever the healthcare challenge of the day is actually the not the greatest thing that they’re they’re challenged with. It might be food insecurity or something else. And we need to address some other needs first before we can address certain healthcare needs.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So let’s talk about internally with the providers and the staff. How did you build trust there? And what does that even look like?

Amy Comeau (Consultant & Author): Yeah, I mean so building trust with the providers and the staff, I mean, that certainly comes from the C suite, I think at the at the beginning, and that then it’s also, you know, it’s crossways, right? It’s it’s it’s peer leadership. but I think you’ve gotta be to me, and this is my personal opinion, is that being transparent, keeping people informed, and doing what you say you’re going to do are important. There’s nothing worse than saying you’re gonna do something and then you don’t do it. Or even worse, you ask somebody, “I’ll do this when you do XYZ,” and then you do and that person does XYZ and then you don’t hold up your end of the bargain.

And so I think it really is establishing trust. and it is listening, right? So just as I was talking about listening to our customers, I think it’s important for leaders to be rounding and whatever your form of rounding is like often it looks rounding is comes in the form of rounding in hospitals and clinics, right? And seeing what’s happening on the obvious front lines.

But what doesn’t always happen is rounding behind the scenes. Like when’s the last time as a healthcare leader did they go around with their marketing teams or their strategic planning or their finance teams. And so or you know, sit in on a virtual, you know, staff meeting for a fully remote team. And so I think that’s where it truly where you can really truly build trust. Because if if you’re saying you’re gonna do something and you’re gonna listen, but you’re only listening to part of the organization and you’re ignoring another part of the organization, then you might be building trust with half, but you may be built you may be unintentionally or accidentally building distrust with another part of the organization.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Yeah, which certainly can happen. And that actually leads me to our next question, which is, you know, being hospitals and health systems, you know, to me I always argue if you know one, you know one. They’re very different in terms of like their own culture. in some health systems, and I’ve had guests on this podcast where the clinical leaders say, “Hey, the marketing department is every part of bit a part of the clinical marketing. The marketing team is part of the clinical team. Like we are all in this together. You have a different role than I do as a clinician, but you’re, you know, you’re your help, you’re part of fighting cancer care in my community.” And they respect that. Others, like, not so much.

Amy Comeau (Consultant & Author): Yeah, yeah. And I I mean I’ve seen I’ve seen the gamut, right? I know exactly what you’re talking about. There is. There’s I think those organizations where everybody’s seen as a valued part of delivering care. And those members of the team, even if they’re not delivering the physical, you know, tangible care intervention, they are seen as members of the team.

I mean, you’ve heard these stories when you walk can’t remember which facility it was, but you’d walk in and you’d ask the facilities maintenance person, you know, what’s what what are you doing today? And they’d say “I’m curing cancer.” Right? They believe it, right? They believe it down to their very core because they know they know the their how their role contributes. But then there are other organizations where it’s like we’re focusing on the clinical teams and the clinical teams and the rest of us are here to serve at to make sure that they can do their jobs well and excellent and may or may not be it may be at at the expense of those non clinical teams.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Yeah, I always just think if you’re gonna be in the a non-clinical team, choose wisely the institution you’re choosing. Just make sure it’s because it’s gonna be a very different experience. But what does that mean in terms of the pressures day to day? What does it create when, you know, you’re if you’re a marketing communications person and the healthcare executives may not even understand the whole point of this? And you know, so how does that work? How do you navigate through that?

Amy Comeau (Consultant & Author): Yeah, I mean for for me a lot of what I I I I started working on first is and I share well I’ll share this this one anecdote and then I’ll talk a little bit about how I began to continue to champion non-clinicians as healthcare workers because I truly believe that we are and I truly truly believe that we are patient facing.

But I shared an example of there was, you know, during the pandemic they were offering people were offering discounts to frontline workers. Or essential care workers. And I thought, well, I don’t, I’m not really a clinician, but I can’t remember what I was buying. Some maybe it was a pair of shoes, who knows what it was, doesn’t matter. But I I went and applied for the discount and I took a picture of my badge that you know showed my company and showed that I worked in marketing and I got the discount.

But yet I got the discount there, but I I had not yet qualified to get the vaccine. myself because I wasn’t a, you know, a frontline healthcare worker. And so just even things like how you have categories of vaccine or categories of who is or isn’t eligible for things can create sort of a disconnect in somebody’s mind and maybe even an unfortunate disconnect within an organization.

And so it was later on I think when we were having to prioritize roles as only being patient-facing. And I said, you know what? My team really is patient-facing. our website, and I did the math, I analyzed them, and analyzed our web traffic and our web, our web data against all of the inpatient telehealth and outpatient visits. And the number of visits to our website was like five X all of the others combined. And so that’s when I was like, you know what, we are patient-facing. In fact, often it’s marketing and communications work is the very first thing that a patient is gonna see. We were responsible for sending out the emails to people, letting them know when they were eligible for vaccines. And my team, my social media team in particular, were also either on the thankful or the regretful end of social media comments, depending on what side of the fence people were on.

And that’s also when I realized that our the non-clinical teams also experienced a form of workplace violence that although it may not be as physical as unfortunately some of what our clinicians have to deal with on a daily basis, it starts in those verbal places. And so I started actually kind of creating my own pitch talk, pitch, you know, my what are the words I’m looking for? My bullet points that I would share whenever somebody might might doubt that we’re patient facing. I said, well, no, actually we are, and here are the ways that we’re we interface with patients on a daily basis. And we we couldn’t do our jobs and you couldn’t do your jobs without you know having the website or these things that are in place.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Right, so we’re gonna talk about as we begin to wrap up here, a couple things about next steps and you know things that you should do. But the I guess my first comment before we talk about what to do and your final comments, it’s not a crisis until it is. It’s like it’s as humans, it’s really, really hard to think about the next crisis, right? Like today I was talking to my team about you know, we’re just a you know, forty-person marketing agency that’s pretty specialized and pretty complex. But it’s hard for me to think about this other crisis over here when I have to worry about this over there. And even though we know and so it’s like, “well that may not be a crisis at all.” So how do you have any special insights on how to like focus before it becomes a crisis or how to at least have an infrastructure in place when the unforeseen happens, because it’s not a crisis until it is.

Amy Comeau (Consultant & Author): Right. I I think well, and I’d add on to that too is that often if teams are experiencing burnout or stress, it’s happening far before the crisis happens, right? And so how can you, you know, how do you help your team to focus and you know manage and and act pro proactively hopefully manage against burnout happening.

And one of the tools and the techniques that I like to use with my team, especially sometimes when there’s because there’s not a crisis going on, we’ve got, you know, more priorities than there need to be a priority. And we all know when you have too many priorities, nothing’s a priority. And so we we followed this construct where it’s like an overlapping Venn diagram. So if you think about on one side there’s things that matter, there’s a bubble that’s things that matter, on the other side there’s a bubble that things you can control. And where those overlap are where you should be focusing your efforts. Because often we can focus so much on the things that matter, but we can’t influence them whatsoever. Like our role, our you know, it might be macroeconomic things, or it may be even things within the organization that, “yeah, we can’t we can’t control that. So let’s focus on what is important to our organization, what’s important to our work, and what are the things that only we can control.” And then we focus on those. And I think by providing your team with that focus, it helps diffuse like you start to do things that don’t really that make you feel better, right? You it helps reduce the busyness. So there’s sometimes there’s things that that we control, but they don’t matter and maybe we shouldn’t be doing that. And so that’s where you take this overlap and say, all right, what are the things that matter? What are the things that we can control and let’s focus there first.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Good, very good. So well we know there are we know there are crises that are still happening. The hantavirus, the Ebola cases are back on the rise, it’s like deja vu. So as we the last comments I’d love you to just give us, you know, three concrete things you can start right away to help get through the next crisis. What would those be?

Amy Comeau (Consultant & Author): Yeah. Yeah. first make friends with the leaders on other teams that you’re gonna need to interact with. That was something that was obvious became obvious to me after the fact when we were dealing with Ebola. So at the time, marketing, internal communications and external communications were all separate departments. But fortunately the three of us that led each of those departments had really strong relationships to begin with, and so we walked into dealing with that virus with with established trust, or that not virus, that crisis with established trust.

In the middle of a crisis is not when you want to be developing relationships with the people you’re gonna need most. Now, in some cases you’re gonna, you, you might be introduced to somebody new, you know, like I didn’t get to know a head of pharmacy for a long time because we didn’t have a need to interact until we started interacting on the vaccine work. But I had already had established relationships with other people who had interacted with that person. And so therefore there was that established trust.

So I would say make friends and establish good relationships across the board. ‘Cause it’s not only gonna help you during crisis because it’s gonna help you do your daily work anyway. The other thing that I would do if you’re not doing it is it took us we didn’t always do daily huddles, or some people call them stand-ups. they don’t need to be long, they don’t need to be fast, but having a touch point every day with your team to basically say,”here’s what’s good, here’s what we’re focusing on, here’s something that needs to be addressed today.” It allows you to stay in constant communication with them. and if there’s nothing to report on it, you’re you’re there for like, you know, 30 seconds. But if there’s more, like when we were in a crisis, we would use those meetings and sometimes actually blow them out because we needed to, because there was so much going on with With COVID, but it allowed us that opportunity to share instead of trying to bring everybody together.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Very good. Very good. So, I appreciate your time today. This has been fun. Any last comments we have, Amy, like the or words of advice or the I think it’s like I said, it’s a the challenge is doing this homework up front. Because it’s like but be but I’d love any other c insights.

Amy Comeau (Consultant & Author): Yeah, it’s Yeah, I but I think it’s also having grace, right? It’s like we we realizing especially in a crisis or in in times of change, we’re all experiencing it together. and it’s okay to not have all the answers. I think the key is to provide enough steadiness and calm for your team that you can move forward with clear heads. But give yourself grace and it’s okay to poke fun at yourself every once in a while. Like humor at you know, you don’t want it doesn’t need to be there every single day, but humor can go a long way in building trust and vulnerability amongst your team.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): I agree. And I just would say the final comment on my side is you mentioned something that is such a common theme when I’m working with people at the health system level. We work with people at all kinds of different healthcare businesses. But at the health system, this theme of relationships comes up again and again and again and again. To get things done internally, you just have to have relationships. And so that time invested, and if you happen to be very task forword, that could be hard, right? There’s always something to do. But it the it’s there’s something unique about the microcosm of a health system. Experiences that those relationships are really crucial. So, anyway, Amy, thank you so much for your time today. I’ve enjoyed having you. Thank you for sharing your insights.

Amy Comeau (Consultant & Author): It has been my pleasure. Thanks so much.