LEADERSHIP
Knowledge@Wharton: There is a chapter titled “Make Your Enemies Disappear, Assume Positive Intent.” That approach shouldn’t be only with other executives, but it also should be with other companies to help break down some of those walls that may be there. Do you agree?
Williams: That’s extremely important. This whole notion of assuming positive intent assumes that each person is pursuing a course that makes sense from their point of view. If you have the conversation, and you try to understand their perspective and point of view, hopefully you can come to a win/win. Now, it’s clear also in life that there are people who behave badly, and the object is not to be a pushover. But there are other books written on how to deal with jerks, which is not what my book’s about.
My book’s about when you’re in a
business negotiation or a discussion, or someone says something that might be initially somewhat offensive, if you assume positive intent, you’re able to determine over time whether this was just a casual comment or something that they hadn’t thought about, or whether the person really is a jerk and you have to go to a different place.
Knowledge@Wharton: Drawing on your time at Aetna, you wrote about some of the issues in the health care sector. I think that is as challenging as anything we have out there right now.
Williams: It certainly is. As you know, it’s a huge part of the economy. It’s almost 20% of our GDP. It’s growing at a rate that’s a multiple of the CPI growth that we experience. So, there’s a huge opportunity to create more value in health care. As we tackle the problems of access and making certain that everyone ultimately has access to health care,
52
DOMmagazine.com | oct 2019
the Affordable Care Act extended access to individuals who really were what I’ll call the working poor. They made too much for certain government programs of assistance, but often, they didn’t work in companies or have access to health insurance. That was a very important population. But we still have a lot of work to do to make certain that people have access to coverage that everyone can afford. The answer is really continuing to digitize, continuing to use analytics, eliminating waste in the health care system and helping those individuals who have chronic conditions do a better job of managing their conditions, improving their quality of their life and decreasing the costs of care for them.
“One of the fundamental points I always stress is that your consideration for the individuals involved has to be higher than your focus on the task to be done.”
No one would build a system that
works the way our health care does in the U.S. because of the way it’s evolved. But changes to the system have to take into account the cultural context of the U.S. What works in the U.K., what works in France, what works in other countries, can’t be imported into the U.S. We’re a different country. We have a different culture. We have different traditions. We need market-based solutions that do, in fact, improve the affordability of the system.
Knowledge@Wharton: Will the concept of leadership evolve as we go forward or will the core principles remain?
Williams: Leadership will continue to evolve. In my book, I talk about leading yourself, leading others and leading organizations. What’s evolved is that, as the leader of the organization, one of the single most important things is really leading yourself. Because you have more degrees of opportunity to make mistakes, more degrees of freedom to make bad judgments. So, this sense of self-awareness and effectively leading yourself as a leader is important, and also changing. We’re experiencing things like the #MeToo movement, which has been extremely important.
Knowledge@Wharton: How important is that self-awareness in leading teams?
Williams: My experience has been that teams are much better at identifying solutions and options and generating alternatives. Making decisions is a leadership issue. Like in Aetna, for example, if it was a clinical decision, our chief medical officer made the decision. If it was an information technology or digitization, that team made the decision. But you really need to have a person who listens to all the input, hears the pros, hears the cons, gathers the relevant facts — not all the facts, or you can chase them down a rabbit hole and waste a lot of time — and then makes a decision. Think about the team as advisory and the leader as the decision-maker.
Republished with permission from Knowledge@Wharton (
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu), the online research and business analysis journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92
