OP-ED: Growth comes from creativity, not cutting costs
One of the ideas I carried with me into hospital administration came from a place that had little to do with healthcare. It came from my years as a band director.
In that world, growth is easy to observe. More students join the band. The sound improves. The performances get better. The audience gets bigger. Everyone sees the progress.
The same thing happens in sports. Every season, millions of us become instant experts on leadership and success. If our favorite team wins, everyone is happy. If it loses, we want the coach fired. What people really love, however, is progress. They love seeing forward movement.
I discovered early in my healthcare career that employees, board members, and the public are no different.
People want to feel they are part of something growing. They want to believe tomorrow can be better than today. They want to know that the organization they support is moving in a worthwhile direction.
Understanding that concept led me to one of my favorite management principles:
You can’t shrink to greatness.
Before becoming a CEO, I spent about 10 years sitting around senior leadership conference tables. During those years I noticed a pattern. Whenever financial challenges appeared, the discussion always seemed to go in the same direction.
How much money do we have?
How much do we need?
Where can we cut?
The quickest path to balancing a budget was reducing expenses. Since salaries and benefits represented one of the largest categories, employees often became the first target. Hiring freezes. Benefit reductions. Layoffs.
I hated it.
A few years into my CEO role, I decided I was done leading budget meetings focused primarily on cuts. Instead, I challenged my leadership team to bring growth ideas to the table.
If someone proposed a new initiative, the unacceptable response was, “That won’t work.”
The acceptable response was, “How do we make it work?”
Progress happens when intelligent people figure out how to overcome obstacles rather than explain why something can’t be done.
I remember announcing that we were purchasing a new PET/CT scanner. Not maybe. Not someday. We were doing it. The machine would arrive in six months, and it was up to the leadership team to turn that investment into growth.
Almost immediately, the regional oncology physicians embraced the idea. New services emerged. New patients arrived. What initially looked like an expense became an opportunity.
The same thing happened in our laboratory. We had an incredibly well-equipped facility, but it was underutilized. I challenged the department head to make growth her mission.
Before long, the lab was serving senior centers, physician practices, local businesses, and even veterinarians throughout the region. Capacity that had been sitting idle suddenly became productive.
Growth came not from cutting. It came from creativity.
Organizations that spend all their energy figuring out what to eliminate eventually run out of things to cut. Organizations that focus on growth create possibilities.
Not every idea succeeds. Some fail spectacularly. But the pursuit of growth generates energy, optimism, and innovation. It gives us something to rally around. It creates hope.
Looking back, I learned more about leadership working with a high school band than I did in those executive seminars. A band grows one student at a time, one rehearsal at a time, one performance at a time. Nobody ever built a great band by cutting good players. You built it by giving people a reason to improve and a chance to be part of something bigger than themselves.
Hospitals are not that different.
Whether you are running a hospital, a business, a school, a community organization, or maybe even a country, people respond to a vision of progress. They want to believe things are going to be better and that the best days are still ahead.
That is why my most important lesson of leadership is also one of the simplest:
You can’t shrink your way to greatness.
Nick Jacobs lives in Windber.