Success Starts With Trust

Podcast Transcript

Brian Bolwell, MD:欢迎来到除了领导之外,在十字路口of leadership and everything else. I am Dr. Brian Bolwell, your host, and together we will co-mingle with extraordinary thinkers and explore the impact of their ideas and experiences on leadership. Today, I'm delighted to be joined by Paul Matson, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at the Cleveland Clinic. Paul, welcome.

Paul Matsen:Thank you. It's great to be with you.

Brian Bolwell, MD:So, Paul, tell us a little bit about your career. If I remember, you started in the advertising industry in New York. Is that right?

Paul Matsen:Yes, that's correct. Interesting career, probably three distinct phases. Out of school, I went to work in the advertising business in Manhattan. I actually can claim that I worked right on Madison Avenue. I spent most of my advertising career at Young and Rubicam, which at that time was the largest communications agency, advertising agency in the world. It was a great place to work in those days. This was pre-digital, and the world was all about big television campaigns and big magazine campaigns but worked with a broad range of clients. My first client was the US Army Be All You Can Be campaign, but I worked with General Foods marketing Kool-Aid, on soft drinks, AT&T telecommunications, credit cards, and created future Cleveland Clinic patients by pushing Kentucky Fried Chicken out in the world. [Paul laughs] So that was my first phase and did that for 12 years and then made a big change.

Moved from New York to Atlanta, Georgia. Went to work for Delta Airlines as the head of consumer marketing, where I oversaw the advertising sponsorships, the frequent flyer program, product development. We had the Olympics in 1996 in Atlanta, so that was something I really enjoyed having an opportunity to do. I was there for 12, almost 13 years. I started in marketing, was then tapped to be the head of corporate strategy, which was quite an experience. Then from there, I went on to lead our international alliances and partnerships. We built the SkyTeam Global Alliance, which was anchored by Air France in Europe, and then back to marketing as the chief marketing officer, and then here to Cleveland Clinic.

Brian Bolwell, MD:So, Paul, the one initial question is in an advertising company, there's a certain work environment that I assume is somewhat different than that of the airline industry. It sounds like at Delta, you had a variety of leadership roles. What was the difference culturally and just in terms of how each industry was organized and how they ran? And secondly, what were your early learnings about how to lead?

Paul Matsen:Yeah, I've been able to draw a lot of learning from each experience. The advertising environment was unique in that I was an account executive and account manager. So, I was the person responsible for working closely with the client on a daily basis, listening to them, helping to develop their marketing strategies. In those days, agencies particularly had much stronger relationships with companies right up to C-suite, but then you had to organize the agency resources to find and execute ideas and programs for the clients. So that was a leadership challenge right from the start because working with creative writers, art directors, producers, media planners, researchers, who were all experts in their own fields, but none of whom actually reported to me, it was an absolute matrix management structure. So, you need to learn early on, very quickly, how to influence and organize to get work done and how to negotiate a bit when creative people might bring you an idea that you might not think is quite on strategy, because you have an obligation to the client to try to deliver something that's within the realm of what was agreed to.

So, that was a great experience. I also learned because I did work on a variety of different assignments, how to immerse yourself into a new assignment and a new culture, to be effective quickly in a new role, because clients expect you to come in and make an immediate impact. Every industry has its own language, has its own rhythm and culture. So had to learn how to do that. That was great experience. Delta was a great organization in that it had a wonderful culture. It, for many years, was referred to as the Delta family, almost everyone was started in an entry level job, except pilots. Everybody started in entry level jobs and worked their way up. People spent their whole lives with the company. It was very paternalistic. That had its pros and cons because there was a company right at the time that I joined hit a rough patch, as airlines were going through deregulation, tough time in the economy.

And 90 days after I joined, we announced a $2 billion cost restructuring program. That's a long story unto itself, but I learned a lot of things about what not to do as we were working through that program because it did a great deal of harm to the culture and the way in which it was managed. Eventually we came out of that and got back to growth and back to success. But I learned how to work with boards and executive management and when I was in the strategy role and then in international working with partners—multicultural partners. So, that was extremely enlightening. You know, each one of them could be a long story. So, I've taken a lot from each experience, all of which helped me when I came into the role that I have now in Cleveland Clinic.

Brian Bolwell, MD:Before we get to the Cleveland Clinic stuff, so you just gave a couple examples of leading without having direct authority. You mentioned that in terms of the advertising industry with different creative folks, and I imagine when you were dealing with forming relationships internationally at Delta, you had to do something similar. So how did you do that? How did you influence people when you really didn't have any direct authority over them, but it was important to do so for the greater good of the project or the overall plan?

Paul Matsen:Yeah. In the advertising business in Young and Rubicam, Y and R for short, as we called it, had a great process for management of creative ideas and prided itself on being a place that could manage creative processes and creative people to produce really good outcomes. And one of the ways in which it brought people along was we went through a strategy process on every project. My favorite part of it was called the SSO, the strategy selection outline. As a team, it required us to sit down and think about what were the strategic alternatives, not just go to one idea, but to actually lay out and document the strategic alternatives, the pros and cons. Before we would ever get to the client with a recommendation, we went through that process of challenging ourselves. And then of course you could take it farther with research and analytics, but a lot of people think marketing, somebody's off in a room and they get hit on the head and have a brilliant idea.

And that does happen. I mean, when you see a great creative idea, it's an incredible moment. But a lot of it comes out of a great process as well and including a lot of different ideas and perspectives and not everybody's comfortable with that. But keeping that process moving was important. Similarly, when I worked with building the Global Alliance with Air France, we realized we had significant cultural differences. Air France, themselves would have said their culture was very formal, very hierarchical, took a lot of time to build trust. Delta, being an American company, wanted to move fast. We were willing to make some assumptions, to try to figure out 70, 80% of it and let's go. So, we actually spent months working together to create a joint business plan that became the vision for the partnership. It held up to the test of time. It was a great joint exercise that required people to sit down and work together, not just to negotiate and criticize with each other. Then each partner area, the people who were designing the network, sales, marketing, branding, all had to come back and present together to both CEOs as partners, and that set us on a great path for success. So, those kinds of experiences really shape you as you move forward.

Brian Bolwell, MD:I think those are two really cool stories. I mean…it's so important to number one, listen to diverse ideas and certainly thematic in leadership these days is the importance of psychological safety to hear diverse ideas, and that sounds central to both of the examples you just told. Additionally, I really like the idea of a strategic plan or roadmap to look at alternatives, things that you don't think will work as well as things that might, as well as looking at how you might achieve your objectives. One of the things that I've recently read is that many leaders, all leaders actually, talk about what they want to do, but not everybody talks about how to do it and addressing the how becomes quite important.

Paul Matsen:是的。Yeah, that was key in the partnership business plan was each respective area had to take the vision and then put together a specific plan with timelines in their own areas. Another example down this path that I worked on, a project launching a credit card and it was AT&T, which they had never done anything like it. It eventually became the AT&T universal card, which became a tremendous success. But the person who was brought in to run the project organized a retreat where he organized people into teams, and everybody had to take on the role of a different competitor. The idea was, okay, we are forming our plan, but if you were the competitor, what would you do to respond and blunt that plan? I think it was called red team green team exercise, but it was great because it forced you to step back and think differently and not just put your head down at the desk and write a plan and not pressure test it against some other ideas. So, a lot of ways to go about it.

Brian Bolwell, MD:That's another really cool story. So, thank you for that. While you were a Delta, Paul, 9/11 happened, and that obviously drastically affected the airline industry. So, a lot of leadership lessons there. Number one, I'd love to hear about how Delta managed and how you helped manage the immediate week, days, of the event. Then obviously, there is a downturn for the airline industry subsequently. How did you approach that?

Paul Matsen:是的。I mean, it's particularly meaningful given that we're on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and it changed so many lives. Delta was fortunate in that it didn't have an airplane or personnel directly involved in the terrorist situation, but literally in the immediate aftermath, we were all sitting in our offices. We had seen that something flew into the building. We didn't know what. The airline has a command center. So, the leadership team assembled in the command center. First things first was every airplane in the world had to be brought down to the ground, wherever it was, if you remember that. We had to account for all of our people, and of course we were greatly relieved when that was over. Then commercial aviation in the United States was shut down for four days. Nobody could go anywhere. We immediately started to form... Once we knew all of our people were safe, several things happened.

一个是我们立即开始计划我们什么uld come next. Security had to change. We knew there would be a lot of government response, but we had to start thinking about security. We had to plan for contingencies. In the end, I think about half of our business went away overnight. So, we had to make some difficult choices about staffing, and routes, and things like that. I think I've shared this story, but my first task as the head of international at that time was, I had to fly to Tokyo. It was my first flight after 9/11. As you can imagine, the flight was sparsely populated and I had to lay off 75% of our Tokyo staff, almost all of whom were Japanese national, so extremely difficult. But looking back, I'm proud, much in the way our organization has responded to COVID.

I look at how Delta responded and how calm and rational people were. Unfortunately, decisions had to be made to eliminate jobs, cut costs. I remember one of our CEOs saying at one time we have to make these difficult decisions and treat people with as much respect and dignity as we can, but we're doing it to preserve the future of the organization and preserve our ability to help the community and the future. And that always stuck with me, because if you work long enough, you work through up and down cycles, and it teaches you to stay calm and work for the best solutions. Working through COVID and watching how this organization and the healthcare community responded, immensely proud of how humanistic our leaders were and preserving employment but making all the tough calls that needed to be made throughout the process, so a lot of parallels.

Brian Bolwell, MD:Why did you decide to come into healthcare and to the Cleveland Clinic specifically, Paul?

Paul Matsen:So unfortunately, Delta and all the major US airlines went into chapter 11 bankruptcy after 9/11. Southwest was the only one that didn't. That is a horrific experience to go through. The company is under the control of the creditors. Ironically, when I joined Delta Airlines, I was the youngest officer in the company and one of the first ever hired outside. When I left, I was the longest serving officer of the company. I left during one of the rounds of reorganization and would like to have seen it through, but that wasn't meant to be. So, I took a little time off at the insistence of my wife, who is much wiser than I am, and thought about what areas I might work on next, travel industry, maybe financial services, because I had some experience there.

我这个模糊的概念的健康care was a huge industry, and I could be qualified for some work there. I got a call from a recruiter and came to Cleveland Clinic. I had told this story many times, but when I first got the call, I hadn't heard of Cleveland Clinic. I don't know what rock I had been hiding under, but I had never heard of Cleveland Clinic. I shared that with Toby Cosgrove, our CEO, Dr. Cosgrove, during the interview. I think it may have actually, in an odd way, helped me that he found that kind of fascinating because given the challenge of coming in to build a global brand. But afterwards when I came and met people in the organization like Dr. Cosgrove, Dr. Hahn, some of the great board members like Pat Carton, I made the decision to come to Cleveland and I recognized immediately how little I knew about healthcare. I mean, I knew less than I thought I knew, and it was compounded by the fact that Cleveland Clinic has a wonderful culture, but a very complex organization model. I spent the first year walking into a lot of walls, but eventually found my way.

Brian Bolwell, MD:So, you became the Chief Marketing Officer here. How did you approach it? I mean, healthcare is different. Cleveland Clinic is very complicated. We've got regional hospitals. We have an international footprint. We have institutes. We're a very high-level academic organization. We have a culture that adheres to our motto of patients first. All of this must have been somewhat daunting to try to figure all this stuff out.

Paul Matsen:It was daunting, and fortunately Dr. Cosgrove said to me, don't do anything for the first 90 days other than go out and meet all the institute chairs. Actually, we didn't have institutes yet. That was one of my first projects within the next 24 months. But he said, go meet with all the clinical leadership. Go meet with the hospital presidents. Meet with your team. Come back in 90 days and tell me what you've learned. Toby always, when he hired new people in the early stages, he always wanted to know what people coming in from the outside thought, which I thought was a great quality. As great as this organization is, he always wanted to make it better. And so, that was a blessing because it took the pressure off to try to have the quintessential a hundred-day plan. The organization wasn't in a crisis. Things like trying to understand the difference between a community hospital with private practice physicians and how you market that, versus an institute that's truly world class, trying to bring patients in from around the world and around the country.

Actually, we were just breaking ground at Abu Dhabi at that point, so that was a brand-new project the organization was trying to figure out. The organization 15 years ago was, I would say, a bit more decentralized than it is today. Today we're much more focused on enterprise standards and being one Cleveland Clinic. So ultimately building those one-on-one relationships with physician leaders, many of whom were skeptical, rightly so about a new guy coming in from outside healthcare and had strong opinions on how to market and communicate, but ultimately building and managing those relationships was the foundation of the work that I've done going forward with my team. I make it a point every year to meet with all of the clinical leadership of all the institutes. I make it a point, outside of COVID, to go to them.

One thing I would share, I was in the C-suite at Delta reporting to the CEO when Toby hired me. I was in the C-suite reporting to the CEO, but it struck me really early on here, the nature of the work we do, not being a for profit company, that the chair of heart and vascular institute, the chair of the urological institute, or the cancer institute are all far more important to the organization than I am. So, I'm here to serve them, not the other way around. The people who failed here haven't figured that out. But that was something all of my other experiences in matrix management and partnerships gave me the ability to find that insight.

Brian Bolwell, MD:So, given that I ran the cancer center for about 11 years, I can tell our listeners that everything Paul just said is accurate. He did come to see our leadership in the cancer center once a year. He came over to our offices and it was always lovely. One of the nice things was your ability to listen. I think listening is a cultivated trait. Have you ever thought much about that?

Paul Matsen:是的。你知道,营销人员常常挣扎。You know, there's a culture in marketing. People feel a tremendous amount of pressure to come up with that big idea, the game changing idea. And often, where I've talked here about how collaboration can lead to creativity, often people fail because they go off in isolation and come back and they want to say, hey, here's the great idea. Buy it. Right? And then when it doesn't go their way, a lot of frustration happens. So, I think I've learned listening is critical and then we have to come back and... For example, as we were making the transition as an organization from traditional printed paper to digital, this academic medicine was a very paper intensive, writing intensive world. It still is a writing intensive world.

But there was a lot of dialogue, and we had to earn people's trust to show them that the things we wanted to do in social media and the website, we had to earn people's trust. And that's not easily given. In this industry, reputations build up over years and years. They don't just want to hand it off to an administrative group, a shared services group without a partnership. I'm particularly proud of that. I mean, you know many of our team members. The fact that we have marketers and communicators who partner with the institutes is a key element of how we work and how we're successful. We have great specialist teams who do cool creative stuff, but you have to then bridge those. We bring those people in to support the institutes. I think in our industry that's essential. You know, it's a complicated world here.

Brian Bolwell, MD:它是复杂的,你的一件事just brought up is a change to digital marketing. You know, I'm not sure that all of our listeners understand even what that is. Certainly, when we think about marketing, traditionally, we think about TV commercials and we think about billboards, but boy, there's this whole space in digital, as well as you mentioned, social media. How did you, number one, change management, right? So that's a big part of leadership. And number two, how is this new world applicable to marketing for healthcare?

Paul Matsen:是的,所以这是一个不断变化的过程。冷杉t within our own marketing communications organization, we had to change ourselves first. I had a mantra with my team that every project we need to be thinking, can this be digital, mobile, and measurable? That was hard for a lot of people who'd grown up in traditional media, myself included. We spent a lot of time talking to industry leaders. I went out, my team, we went out and met with companies like Google, and Facebook, and LinkedIn, and Twitter. And that's incredible. That's something this organization always encouraged. All the great ideas don't lie within our four walls or within Cleveland, Ohio. So, we were empowered to go out and find those things. Then step by step, we built our digital programs. The website, when I joined Cleveland Clinic, had 15 million visits a year. This year it'll have 400 million. We're aiming for 2 billion in the next two to three years by creating great digital content that's useful and trusted. Most interesting thing for us as we build a global brand, 40% of the traffic to our website is international. A relatively small percentage is in Ohio. But if you look at our research, the number one way people find out about Cleveland Clinic's brand for the first time is digital, either our website, social media, search, or digital ad placement. So, the evidence is right there in front of us.

Brian Bolwell, MD:How do you figure out a strategy to utilize this new era? You do what you did back in your ad days and get a bunch of people together? Is it similar to that?

Paul Matsen:I think it's very evolutionary. The beauty of the digital world, it's very hard to predict three years forward or five years forward. That's so hard to do, but I think we've done a lot of what we call test and learn, and we'll make small investments, and if they succeed, we'll rapidly scale them up to bigger investments using paid search as one. We found this research partnering with Google and our analytics team that at one point while we thought we were doing good work; we were significantly under invested. It was a great way to reach patients in markets outside of Northeast, Ohio. But we had to challenge ourselves first. We moved money out of traditional media into paid search, and then once we proved it worked, went to the leadership, and asked for further investment, which we got. We didn't try to build it all ourselves.

We used the tremendous business intelligence systems the clinic built and used them to create our marketing data structure and with our own data science team. So, I can go to the CFO and our CFO knows all the data that we're using to prove the effectiveness comes from our own systems of business intelligence. So, I'd say testing and learning is what a digital era allows. You know, it used to be if we wanted to do this back when I started my career in marketing, you'd go run a test market like an Evansville, Indiana, and you have to wait six to twelve months and then you'd get the results, and then maybe you'd scale it up and do a launch. We can do things much more rapidly than that. You know, we optimize our campaigns now on a daily basis.

Brian Bolwell, MD:And how about Facebook and Twitter? I mean, these are incredibly powerful parts of today's society.

Paul Matsen: Yes.

Brian Bolwell, MD:I mean, how did we start even venturing into that space and how do you see it going forward?

Paul Matsen:So, I remember vividly writing our first social media strategy with our team, because our CEO came back from a conference, the World Economic Forum. He had been very impressed with what he heard there from some of the leaders of Facebook and Twitter and people who had run political campaigns with social media and said, what's our social media strategy? And I said, well, give us 90 days or give us six months. Whatever I said, he said half. So, we quickly benchmarked great companies like Starbucks, and Coca-Cola, and Nike, and what they were doing. We came back with a recommendation of how to get started.

It's not hard to start social media sites. The key is content strategy, and we didn't even call it that then. But we had to discover what was it that we had to say, to share, that was valuable to other people, not just talking about ourselves and patting ourselves on the back. What we eventually learned for patients and consumers was information about helping them lead healthy lives was extremely valuable, and we do everything based on scientific evidence and with physician and scientist review, and then with physician social media, which I think we've been a pioneer in, your own institute being one, where your physicians tweet from conferences, but they contribute to our consult QD physician blog, to do podcasts. We tailored to that audience what they found useful, which was the latest on research and innovation. I think we uniquely talk about leadership, for example. I think that's how our organization has found its content strategy and its voice, and there's room for lots of voices. That's one of the great things about healthcare is we have so many content contributors. Tapping into that creating platforms for them has made us successful.

Brian Bolwell, MD:Yeah. You said a lot of pearls in the last couple minutes and I just want to touch base on a couple of them. One is I agree entirely that docs want to hear about the latest and greatest. And so, when we're at one of our national meetings and all this new data's being presented, Twitter's an incredibly effective way to instantaneously communicate not only data that's being presented, but our interpretation of it. I think that to some degree that's what docs are looking for is, what do the Cleveland Clinic people think about this particular subject that just got discussed? And boy, we've had a wonderful partnership with marketing to be able to do that. You know, actually at our conferences, we'll tweet out little 35 second videos of us commenting on some important topic, which has been really cool. The second thing is really how easy it is, but I think that we have uniquely taken advantage of it. I'd like to think that from the leadership space, we are in fact content leaders, but boy, it changed quickly. What's going to happen with this space in two years, do you think?

Paul Matsen:Couple of things, one is video. Video and visuals continue to be the dominant media choice, short videos. You know, how many people are singing the latest TikTok song? But we're in a partnership right now with YouTube creating videos on health topics, where they're sharing with us the topics that people are searching for, but they have partnered with us and that's the power of our brand and our content creators, because people trust our creators. We create valuable content and we're a trusted source. So, I think video will continue to be powerful. We're trying to really find creative ways to bring together things like photography, illustration, animation, into different formats because you're attached to your digital device basically all the waking hours and people are looking for that short, engaging information. Then they can go deeper if they want to. So, we're trying to build it that way so people can engage with a bit of content, or they can come in for a deeper journey through the content.

Brian Bolwell, MD:Paul, one word that you've used repeatedly in this chat has been the word trust. Our listeners know that one of my favorite leadership books is theSpeed of Trustby Stephen Covey. How do you generate trust? Why is it so important to you? Do you think it's essential to leadership? What are your thoughts?

Paul Matsen:Absolutely. I think we have both come from an organization where we've talked a lot about servant leadership, I believe in that deeply in my role. The most important things that I do are communication through to all the other leaders in the organization, making sure information flows that I'm hearing back to my team so we can be effective. I do very little, if any, of the hands-on work. I have to trust my team, my leaders at every level that they understand our mission, vision, our values, and then that they know that they can trust in telling me if there's something that needs to be changed or something that's not right. My team doesn't hesitate to give me feedback, which I'm very proud of. In turn, when we're thinking about our healthcare brand, we're not selling anything. We're not Coca-Cola. We're not Nike. People come to us when they're facing the most difficult situations in their lives. They need to know that they can trust the information that they're receiving from us to make the best decision for themselves and their families. I know that's what you've done your whole career, but that has to manifest itself in our culture in marketing for sure. But it has to manifest itself in our brand and how we present ourselves to the world.

Brian Bolwell, MD:Well, we have one of the most trusted brands there is, I think. You have data around that. Do you not?

Paul Matsen:是的,当然。你知道,我认为这是一个脆弱的thing. Every time we enter a new market, we're working closely with our London team, with our Abu Dhabi team. Again, we have to trust in them to execute in their local markets, but we're there side by side with them sharing all that we know, providing them support as they need it. We just launched a brand-new website in London that's tailored for the market there. So, I think in this era of digital information moving so fast, it's easy for people and organizations to make a mistake and breach patients' trust or breach consumer trust. So, you have to make sure that your reputation is strong, so if you do make a misstep, you can correct it, but that your people know what's expected of them and that they're doing the right things, because with 77,000 people, we're not micromanaging the work people are doing. It's deeply embedded in our culture and who we are.

Brian Bolwell, MD:Another key point that you talk about a lot is your team and how important your team is and how you let them make decisions, and you effectively delegate. How do you generate good teams? How do you form good teams? How do you sustain good teams? What are your thoughts?

Paul Matsen:I mean, of course, as you hire people or identify talent, really choosing people that have the qualities that you want on your team, the people that you want to work with. It's interesting, when I was looking for the job here at Cleveland Clinic, the former CEO of Delta said to me, don't focus so much on the position, focus on joining the right company with the right culture, people you want to work with. I think we've created a team of people that you want to work with. We hire people who've got the right values, but they also have to have the right skills. You have to perform in our organization. We've had our share of difficult conversations over the years where we have to coach someone out of the organization, and those are hard conversations to have.

But at some point, that's, that's a critical part of leadership and trust. I think I've sometimes reflected on some of my own decisions and said, oh, I should have moved on that one faster. It was a disservice to that person. It was a disservice to the organization. But you know, hiring the right people, setting as clear expectations as we can. I mean, there always just going to be ambiguity to be dealt with. That's a key quality for a leader that you have to deal with ambiguity. Giving them the right resources to do their job. You know, if we don't give them enough resources to execute, they're going to fail, and then communicating with them, supporting them. You know, we're not afraid to set clear goals and OKRs as we call them and hold people accountable to them. But it's a positive reinforcing experience generally.

Brian Bolwell, MD:Yeah. I think that one key thing is great teams are a magnet for great talent. Once you have great teams in place, it's the sort of thing that other people want to join. Hopefully it becomes somewhat sustaining. As we wrap things up, Paul, what are you most proud of during your tenure at the clinic?

Paul Matsen:I am, of course, immensely proud of the team, without a doubt. You know, we see it in our engagement scores year in, year out. We see it in their engagement in the community, supporting things like Velosano, supporting things like United Way. We talk to the team about those things all the time and their participation is a sign of their engagement. But you know, I'm also incredibly proud of how we've built a brand that lives up to the organization that Cleveland Clinic is. That's no small accomplishment and there's lots of room for more growth.

Brian Bolwell, MD:Very eloquently stated. This has been delightful, Paul. Thank you so much.

Paul Matsen:Thank you.

Brian Bolwell, MD:This concludes this episode of Beyond Leadership. You can find additional podcast episodes on our website,clevelandclinic.org/beyondleadershipor subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And to our listeners, we welcome any topic ideas you may have for future episodes, comments, and questions about this or any past episode you can let us know by emailing us atexecutiveeducation@ccf.org. Thank you very much and have a great day.