A leadership lesson from Dolly Parton about human worth, flourishing and the value healthcare creates
A while ago, I wrote that healthcare needs more Swifties. That remains true. Taylor Swift has created something healthcare desperately needs: belonging, community and the feeling that each person in the crowd is somehow part of something larger than themselves. But another remarkable woman offers healthcare an equally important lesson. Healthcare needs more Dollys.
Here is a confession: I did not know much about Dolly Parton but judged her anyway. The big hair, the jokes and the colorful language seemed to tell the story. Then came Peggy Noonan’s reflections on Dolly, followed by a deeper look at her life, her music and the way she has lived. The judgment was profoundly wrong. What emerged was someone breathtakingly beautiful, not because of how she looked, but because of how she looked at other people.
When Dolly saw people, she saw souls. She looked beyond the clothes, the money, the education, the mistakes, the dirt and the circumstances of someone’s life. No matter how poor, how forgotten or how imperfect, she seemed to see something deeper: a human being, innately good, inherently worthy and capable of extraordinary things. She saw what the world so often fails to see. She saw the person beneath the circumstance.
Dolly grew up in Appalachia, one of 12 children in a family with very little money. She knew what it was like to have the world see what you lacked before it saw who you were. Yet somewhere along the way, she learned something profound: our circumstances may be unequal, but our worth is not. She became one of the most famous people in the world, yet she never seemed to believe that fame made her more worthy than the people she grew up with. And she never believed poverty made them less worthy than her.
She saw them. She loved them. She never separated herself from them. Perhaps that is one of the deepest lessons she offers those of us who lead organizations: love begins with how we see another human being. Before love becomes an action, it is a way of seeing.
You can hear that lesson in Coat of Many Colors. Dolly tells the story of a little girl whose mother sews her a coat from scraps of fabric because scraps are all the family has. The little girl wears it proudly to school, only to have the other children laugh at her. There is poverty in that story, but the deeper wound is not poverty. It is the terrible sting of being told by other human beings: you are less than us.
That part of Dolly’s story feels familiar. As a child, some of my clothes were made by my mother, and classmates sometimes laughed at them. Yet most of us know some version of that experience — the moment when we weren’t chosen, when we didn’t quite belong, when someone saw what we lacked rather than who we were. Those wounds can remain with us for decades. We remember the moments when someone made us feel small.
But Dolly’s mother saw something different. She saw her daughter through the eyes of love, and love changed the meaning of the coat. Like Edna St. Vincent Millay’s The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver, the story captures love’s almost miraculous ability to transform what the world sees. Love can take what the world calls poor and make it precious. It can take shame and restore dignity; it can take scraps and somehow create abundance.
Imagine bringing that way of seeing into healthcare. Before the diagnosis, the insurance card, the education, the income, the addiction, the anger or the mistakes, we would see the human being. We would see the patient who repeatedly comes to the emergency department because they are hungry and need a meal, not as a problem to be managed or a cost to be avoided, but as a person whose circumstances have not diminished their worth. We would stop sorting people so quickly into categories of deserving and undeserving, difficult and easy, important and unimportant. We would see the soul before we saw the label.
And imagine seeing our colleagues that way. The nurse who made a mistake, the physician who lost her temper, the environmental services worker cleaning a room, the medical assistant answering the phone and the executive sitting in the boardroom are different in role, authority and circumstance. But they are not different in human worth. Each deserves to be seen, heard, respected and given the opportunity to contribute at their highest capability. Leadership begins when we stop asking, “What is wrong with this person?” and become curious about the person standing before us.
This does not mean abandoning standards or accountability. Love without accountability becomes sentiment; accountability without love creates fear. Living and Leading with Love asks something harder of us: to hold one another to high standards precisely because we believe in one another’s capacity to meet them. It means correcting without diminishing, disagreeing without demeaning and holding people accountable without stripping them of their dignity. We can demand excellence without ever questioning someone’s worth.
Healthcare has extraordinary technology, brilliant clinicians, remarkable medicines and increasingly powerful artificial intelligence. Yet none of these innovations can answer one of the oldest questions in human life: How will we see one another? Will we see a diagnosis, a job title, a mistake, a socioeconomic class, an adversary — or will we see a human being? Because how we see people determines how we treat them. How we treat people shapes the organizations we create.
And the organizations we create determine how they perform and the value they produce. In healthcare, that value is profoundly human: more access and less suffering, better health and less harm, greater affordability and less waste. These outcomes are not separate from how we lead and how we treat one another; they are the fruits of it. When people are seen, respected and invited to contribute at their highest capability, people flourish, and flourishing people build organizations capable of extraordinary performance.
That is Dolly Parton’s lesson. Every person is worthy of respect and capable of excellence. See the soul rather than the surface. Love rather than separate. Love is not soft; it is among the most powerful forces available to a leader.
Perhaps that is love’s greatest superpower: to look at another human being, see beyond everything the world uses to divide and rank us, and recognize the soul before us.
When we do that, people flourish. When people flourish, organizations flourish. And when healthcare organizations flourish, more people receive care, fewer people suffer, more people become healthy, fewer are harmed, and precious resources go toward healing rather than waste. And when people are healthier, society flourishes.
Healthcare needs better technology. It needs better science. It needs better management. But perhaps healthcare also needs something much simpler. Healthcare needs more Dollys.
Peter Pronovost, MD, PhD, FCCM, Chief Quality and Clinical Transformation Officer, and President of the Healthcare Transformation Institute, University Hospitals Cleveland
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