How Do You Create And Maintain A Strong, Effective Team?
When I think about creating and maintaining a strong and effective team, the most important thing that I do is look for people who are different from me – who show up with different capabilities, skill sets, personality.
Diversity of thoughts and experiences is really important. If I have a whole bunch of people who have the same skills and personality as I do, we're not actually going to have a lot of productivity inside that organization. So when I build a team, it's really important that I go out there and find the people who round me out and then I round them out equally back and forth when things get hard.
If you have that strong foundation, you know you can get through the hard because you trust each other. You want to show up for each other and you want to win together. That's really what makes an effective team, and it's how I've kept my teams in place over the years.
Can You Share A Valuable Lesson You’ve Learned About Building Strong Industry Partnerships?
Building strong industry partnerships has been something I've had to do out of necessity. My career has been a, a series of acquisitions and divestitures, and growing up in my career through those changes has really required that I build relationships with both the people that I'm leaving as well as the teams that I'm joining.
The industry is quite small, and joining groups like HIDA, going to network events, traveling, learning from your competitors, learning from your peers is as important as competing against them on a day-to-day basis.
Because we all have the common goal of trying to put the best products and distribution into the marketplace for the patients and the customers we serve. And the best way to do that is to understand all the different ways to go about being successful in this industry.
If You Could Give Your Younger Self One Piece Of Advice At The Start Of Your Career, What Would It Be?
The advice I would give myself is actually some advice that I think I did an okay job executing on throughout my career: Ask for the really hard, annoying assignments, the jobs that when they get handed out at the end of a meeting no one wants to do. Raise your hand, ask for that job, take on that side hustle, that task — because that is going to differentiate you, give you experiences that you wouldn't normally get; and also make you invaluable to the person that you took it from. It is an incredibly valuable way of learning; of becoming a trusted partner and somebody who people know can take on more.