Steve Narang, MD, MHCM serves as Chief Executive Officer for Banner University Medical Center Phoenix.
On April 11th, Dr. Narang will speak on a panel at Becker's Hospital Review 9th Annual Meeting. As part of an ongoing series, Becker's is talking to healthcare leaders who plan to speak at the conference, which will take place April 11-14, 2018 in Chicago.
To learn more about the conference and Dr. Narang's session, click here.
Question: Describe one of your best colleagues. What does this person do to make him or her indispensable to your organization?
Dr. Steve Narang: Very simply, she epitomizes the concept of a "Multiplier," as defined by the author Liz Wiseman. She multiplies the talent of everybody around her every day. She is a talent magnet, always looking for talent that may not exist in traditional "boxes," avoiding organizational charts, and focusing on an individual's innate strengths and potential. She is a liberator of teams, creating a safe environment for individuals to have the permission to be heroic versus defensive in their thinking. She liberates the best of her teams by being an intense listener, allowing softer voices to be amplified, while restraining her own voice to stay facilitative versus dominating. At the same time — as a liberator — I watch her demand everyone's best work at the same time, creating space for mistakes and vulnerability. She is a challenger, inspiring greatness in others versus giving directives that highlight her own talents. She never gives answers, and instead she spends time in the front line to understand the issues, creating a focus on being present, and then challenging assumptions so that her teams find the spark of possibility and discovery. She is a debate-maker versus merely a decision-maker. She always spends time to find out what others know and invites them to the table regardless of position or title. By doing that, she creates space for rigorous debate based on data and fact-finding, focused on learning from each other versus who wins the "debate." Finally, she is an investor, and not a micromanager. She creates ownership and empowerment at the level of those closest to operations. She is a teacher and a coach and stretches people's roles. As a talent magnet, liberator, challenger, debate-maker and investor she inspires this organization every day. We now have a Multiplier award we give to anyone in our medical center that brings out the best in all of us.
Q: How is the barrier between competitors and collaborators changing?
SN: The recent billion-dollar deals between CVS Health and Aetna, and UnitedHealth and dialysis giant DaVita's physician group, are a stark reminder for all traditional provider organizations of the disruptive healthcare environment we live in, further blurring the lines between collaborator and competitor.
With rivalries between competitors increasing and new entrants to the healthcare market, I often apply Michael Porter's "Five Forces" model to understand the dynamics in my local market. Porter's model reminds me that as an evolving academic medical center in a large health system, our ability to earn more customers is not only determined by our own performance, but also by our market structure, which includes the degree of rivalry between existing competitors, the bargaining power of customers and suppliers, the availability of substitutes for existing products and services, and the extent to which new entrants are poised to enter the market. Each of the Five Forces holds the potential to drive down prices and drive up the cost of competing. Some critical forces impacting our own market include substitute products for traditional hospital-based services, such as free-standing emergency departments, free-standing physician-owned cath labs, free-standing ambulatory surgery centers, free-standing imaging centers and retail clinics in pharmacies. New entrants to the market have also created shifting competitive forces, especially with new digital and mobile platforms improving access to the consumer. Startups and companies from other industries are eroding the edges of the traditional healthcare architecture.
Of course, the disruption in the influence of buyers has also impacted the roles of competitors and collaborators in the market. With the continuing shift to value-based payment by all payers and the increasing burden of payment shifting to the individual consumer, traditional hospital systems must create often unlikely partnerships with traditional competitors to meet the new definition of value from the new consumer. New entrants in the healthcare market are poised to attract billions of dollars of revenue from traditional healthcare companies if the traditional companies do not look at traditional competitors in the context of the Five Forces model. Ultimately, successful new multidimensional "bedfellows" in healthcare will have their own consumer-oriented, technology-enabled, "Amazon-like" brand that will quickly overshadow the one-dimensional, monolithic, expensive and often "Blockbuster-like" brand of the traditional hospital system of today.
Q: As a leader, what is the best investment you made in your own professional development in the past five years?
SN: Other than the decision I made to enroll in Harvard's Health Care Management program [in Boston] — which is designed specifically to develop leadership in developing physician executives and a program that catalyzed my personal journey to instill purpose into my leadership philosophy — the best investment I've made since then has been my commitment to ensure I always have "space" to pause for self-reflection and awareness. To accomplish this commitment, I have an ongoing relationship with an executive coach and ensure I receive authentic, transparent feedback on a regular basis. Creating and sustaining a culture of vulnerability around me is critical to ensure I have a "mirror" I can trust. Though, like many others, I enjoy reading "leadership pearls" from a variety of sources, I often go back to one particularly impactful book — Lee G. Bolman and Terrence E. Deal's Reframing Organizations — on a regular basis to use as my guide on how I can stay present and connected to the four frames of the organization I have the privilege to lead. Investment in continuing coaching and supporting a culture of personal feedback has been invaluable to my ability to learn to reframe my leadership to unleash possibilities within me and the teams I lead.