Mike Young had 35-plus years of CEO and senior leadership experience when he joined Temple University Hospital in 2018 as COO to lead a turnaround. He was so effective that two years later he became president and CEO of Philadelphia-based Temple Health.
In September, Mr. Young announced his plans to retire and appoint a new CEO next year. He recently spent time with Becker’s to share his words of wisdom for healthcare leadership.
Teach people how to think 10 years ahead
The health system has grown significantly during his tenure because of his unique leadership approach – one he learned from his father, a teacher. His father taught math to inner city kids for 30 years, and the students in his class always performed well above state targets.
“They weren’t doing as well in reading, but in math my father figured out how to teach them,” said Mr. Young. “I’ve been teaching for those 38 years of CEO-dom, teaching people how to think 10 years ahead. How do their actions today affect us 10 years from now? And then you do things in a model, process and sequence that is important for that 10 year process. Occasionally, you have to move things up, there might be an IT project we need to accelerate. But because you’ve trained your people how to think, they’re ready.”
Early in his career, Mr. Young was president and CEO of Lancaster General Health. He spent 18 years with the health system and used the 10-year focus to strengthen its nursing pipeline. At that time, many other academic institutions were closing their nursing schools but Lancaster General realized the nursing shortage would hit as more nurses reached retirement age and fewer young people were choosing the nursing profession. Instead of closing the nursing school, Lancaster General turned their program into a university.
“We could see 10 years out that the shortage was coming,” said Mr. Young. “We worked for 5 years to change the rules so that we could have our own university. After 10 years of teaching and people learning at Lancaster General, they understood how to work together and develop people under them.”
Identify and grow talent, and then let it go
Mr. Young also believes in identifying talented people and training them to excel at their jobs. He likes to see his proteges spread their wings after building successful programs at Temple. Throughout his time as CEO, Mr. Young has appointed several leaders and taught them to build programs that led to larger institutions recruiting them away.
But he doesn’t mind.
“The culture of teaching and building resilience and confidence ultimately leads to long term success,” said Mr. Young. “We brought in a young guy six years ago for managed care contracting. He had experience with CMS – Medicare and Medicaid – but had never read a commercial contract. I worked with him every week for an hour to make sure we interlocked operations and did what we said we would in the contract. We had a managed care contracting committee with the CEO, CFO, lawyers who wrote the agreement and this fellow. We talked about what was working, what wasn’t and what we needed to communicate. Two-and-a-half-years later, Mayo Clinic hired him, which is a good thing.”
Temple’s practice plan is another example of this philosophy at work. When Mr. Young arrived in his role, the practice plan was losing $100 million a year and nobody was in charge of it. He brought in a leader from outside the organization with an office next to his, so he could teach that person how to run it.
“He was here for three years and now the practice plan is successful, and we lost him to Emory,” said Mr. Young. “Emory’s practice plan is up 16%. I always asked ‘what are you doing? What help do you need? What’s working?’ Then they figure out if it works here, maybe it will work there.”
Be willing to get fired
CEOs can’t get too comfortable in their roles and must take smart risks. Mr. Young has done so throughout his career, and stuck to his gut when challenged. Early in his tenure as CEO, the longtime CFO of Temple retired.
“He was a legend,” said Mr. Young. “I brought a young man in from UPMC. One of the very powerful board members said at the first board meeting after we hired him, ‘CEOs live and die by their decisions and this is clearly your decision.’ A year later, that board member said to me that he was wrong, and our new CFO was great.”
That CFO spent four years at Temple and is now with Morgantown, W.Va.-based WVU Health.
“The CEO has to be willing to be fired,” he said. “There are some CEOs who are afraid to take risks because they are chasing perfection. But we chase reaching our mission target. We take action. I tell people they will make 10 decisions today, seven are going to be great and the other three are going to be crappy. Figure out why those three aren’t working, adapt and fix it. Implement and refine it. If you keep making those 10 decisions every day, then maybe eight are good, and pretty soon the organization has everyone making good decisions and everyone learns from them and you talk about the learnings.”
Mr. Young is adamant about not taking credit for the system’s successes. He appoints strong leaders and lets them shine. The best complement he’s received from his board members is when they say, “What do you do? It seems like you aren’t doing anything and everyone else is.”
“That’s the way it should be,” said Mr. Young. “But the smart board members know what’s happening. And when there is a faux pas, I take credit and people immediately jump in to refine, and reshape. Nobody wants to fail.”
Treat the CEO role like a marriage
Being a CEO is like being in a marriage, Mr. Young said, but instead of being equals the institution always comes first. He teaches his team to see their commitments to the organization similarly.
“When you’re treating it like a marriage, it creates a disciplined and mission-focused workforce,” said Mr. Young, who took the reins at Temple Health in February 2020 and immediately brought those principles to the forefront.
Because his team had made a commitment to the organization, the mission, they were able to convert a medical office building into a COVID hospital over a weekend so the transplant patients and others who couldn’t leave the main hospital wouldn’t contract COVID.
“They did it because they understood how important it was to the community,” said Mr. Young. “We moved the COVID hospital across the street. Everyone understood, they were disciplined, and we knew who to call.”
Temple reorganized their teams as well; residents were sent home so they didn’t have to learn in the high risk environment and other faculty members stepped up. There were 500 COVID patients in the hospital and the faculty split into 30 teams, with the chair of pulmonology leading the charge. Every day, the teams of hospitalists, surgeons, and clinicians met to review protocol and decide how to move forward with patient care.
“Everybody was rowing in the same direction to make it happen,” said Mr. Young. “Our outcomes are really spectacular. If you do that on a normal basis and people are thinking about 10 years out, you use the same model and focus on growing revenue, managing your expenses and developing your people, you’ll be successful.”
Simplify transition plan
When Mr. Young decided it was time to retire, he didn’t create a 40-page transition plan. Instead, he worked with the management team on a deliberate process to select the next CEO, Abhi Rastogi, and spend time working alongside him. He advises CEOs, especially those with tenure, to give the board a brief outline of their transition plan and then update them monthly with progress for transitioning to the new leader.
“I don’t like a big formal process,” said Mr. Young. “I’m not a believer in just walking away after spending 7 years of setting up a direction for the system. I suggested I would stay on as a consultant for a year and our board chair was adamant that he wanted me to stay and work with the next person. We have been talking about this for two years and I’m now going to stay on as a consultant for two more years. I’ll sit on the parent company board and cancer center board as a resource for the CEOs.”
Next year will certainly be a challenge; Mr. Young and Mr. Rastogi have been working on a plan to grow revenue by more than $40 million to cover the impact of HR-1’s potential funding cuts. The pair also brought in an AI expert to support projects and make sure revenue growth is underway. Even though the funding cuts will phase in for the next few years, Mr. Young is taking a forward-looking approach to system strategy.
“We are doing this now and we’re not waiting until 2027,” he said. “We believed we belonged to a good purchasing group, but we just went to a better one. We asked our physician group to commit to 95% utilization, and the physician leadership and medical school leadership were sure we could do that. We’ll bend over in the street to pick up a penny and a nickel; a lot of others don’t bend over for $20. With these cuts coming, they’re going to have to learn to bend over for a dollar.”
Temple has also bucked the trend of closing OB and women’s services by opening a women’s hospital in September. The hospital provides inpatient services, maternity labor and delivery and a neonatal ICU.
During his tenure, Mr. Young also led the turnaround of a hospital that was losing $38 million and grew it to the point of breaking even last year. His success isn’t an accident; he executed the turnaround the Temple way: with operational discipline, strategic growth and unwavering commitment to the system’s people and communities.
“It’s really important that if you’re a young or mid-career CEO that you build your network,” said Mr. Young. “You have to have somebody to talk to. You have to have people you can bounce ideas off of and people you can trust. I’ve met people from other major academic centers that say they have 100 AI projects and I’ve shared our AI governance. It’s a lot easier to build off of other good ideas than always come up with the right plan from a blank piece of paper. I never found a health system CEO that wasn’t willing to take my call. I think that’s really important.”
