Most healthcare conference sessions focus on success stories. John Couris, president and CEO of the Florida Health Sciences Center at Tampa General Hospital, believes healthcare leaders should spend more time talking about failure.
“We don’t talk enough about failure in our industry,” Mr. Couris told Becker’s. “As great as we think we are, quality is stagnant in this country. Costs continue to escalate. We’re on an unsustainable trajectory.”
He argues that healthcare leaders spend too much time celebrating what works and too little time examining what doesn’t.
“As a system, in the eyes of our customers, our patients, our payers and our employers, we have an incredible amount of room for improvement,” Mr. Couris said. “Until we address that head-on, real change can’t happen.”
‘We didn’t know what we were doing’
Before joining Tampa General nearly nine years ago, Mr. Couris spent more than seven years leading Jupiter (Fla.) Medical Center. There, he learned two of his most expensive leadership lessons.
The first involved a partnership with an athletic training company that operates performance studios attached to orthopedic practices. Jupiter Medical launched a performance studio with former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow as a celebrity partner but eventually shut it down after the business failed to meet financial expectations.
“The model of the performance studio wasn’t the failure,” Mr. Couris said. “How we approached managing it was the failure.”
The hospital lacked the expertise needed to operate what was essentially a retail fitness business, he said.
“We thought we knew what we were doing, but who are we as healthcare leaders to get involved in what was essentially a retail business, a high-end performance gym?” Mr. Couris said. “We just didn’t have the knowledge or expertise to run it correctly.”
The studio was eventually converted into a surgery center, and the financial loss was notable for Jupiter Medical.
“I think health systems need to stick to their knitting,” he said. “There is a tendency that the larger you get, you think you can do everything and you think you can do everything well. That’s untrue.”
Right people, right roles
Mr. Couris said he repeated a similar mistake when Jupiter Medical opened a behavioral health detox facility.
This time, the issue wasn’t the business model. It was leadership.
“I appointed an ambulatory person who I thought was pretty innovative to lead it, but it was the wrong choice,” he said.
The experience reinforced one of his core leadership principles: putting the right people in the right roles.
“You own everything,” Mr. Couris said. “It is difficult to work with leaders who tend to push the blame to somebody else or try to make up excuses. Own it, learn from it and try not to make the same mistake again.”
In hindsight, he said he should have hired a domain expert and given that person the authority and incentives needed to succeed.
Fewer partners, deeper relationships
Those experiences helped shape Mr. Couris’ approach at Tampa General: fewer partnerships, but deeper ones.
That philosophy was tested when Tampa General decided to move from an existing technology partner to Palantir, which Mr. Couris said became the company’s first healthcare partner.
The decision required a difficult conversation with the incumbent partner’s CEO.
“I lean heavily into the importance and significance of relationships,” he said. “And sometimes that clouds my judgment.”
A board member from his Jupiter Medical days once described Mr. Couris as a “rescuer” — feedback he said was difficult to hear but accurate. Still, he said the strength of the relationship ultimately allowed both organizations to work through the transition and come out stronger on the other side
“The beauty of a deep relationship is that there are going to be ups and downs,” Mr. Couris said. “You work through the problem.”
‘Fail fast, learn fast, move on’
Mr. Couris said his willingness to embrace failure has become a competitive advantage for Tampa General.
“We don’t have to be bigger, we don’t have to be smarter, we don’t have to have more money than the health systems we’re competing with,” he said. “We just have to be faster. Our ability to move fast and execute on our strategies will continue to be our differentiator.”
That speed, he argued, comes from being willing to test ideas, learn from mistakes and move on.
“That’s one of our superpowers because we’re willing to deploy something in the market, fail one, two, or three times, learn from the failures, deploy a new process, keep pushing forward before our competitors are even in a boardroom talking about the opportunity,” he said.
“Unless you can embrace your mistakes and your failures and learn from them, you truly can’t innovate. You truly can’t challenge the status quo. You truly can’t dream up new models of care and how to create real value.”
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