UPMC Health Plan CEO Diane Holder has grown the insurer to 4-million plus members and built a strong team capable of a "seamless transition."
And there's good reason: Ms. Holder plans to retire at the end of 2024 after 21 years leading the insurer.
Before leading the Pittsburgh-based system's health plan, Ms. Holder was president of UPMC Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic and was the founding CEO of UPMC's behavioral managed care plan, Community Care Behavioral Health.
In February, Ms. Holder announced her plan to retire at the end of 2024. She sat down with Becker's to discuss her advice for future leaders, her approach to succession planning and her legacy at UPMC.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Question: What advice would you give someone starting out in a leadership role?
Diane Holder: The advice I would give younger people coming into leadership roles is how important it is to listen. It's very important to hear what your team cares about, what they believe will make the biggest differences, how you will get things done in a better and more rapid way, typically. I think that it goes part and parcel with: strong leaders are usually strong listeners. They're able to help mold and bring people's disparate points of view together, so potentially you can move forward and maximize whatever that opportunity is you're trying to create.
Q: The average healthcare CEO tenure is around six years. What are the benefits of being a long-serving CEO?
DH: There's always pros and cons to how long a CEO should stay in a role. I started some of our health plan companies, so they were nascent when I got here. I've had the ability to grow them and expand them, and now we're serving 4 million members across all of our companies and our products and services.
For me, it's felt like this ability to keep adding companies and building companies has been very positive for UPMC, and for myself, that I could keep that continuity. Because we had lots of people who run the companies under me, we've had that ability for me to have that alignment across companies. I think that's been helpful to us in many ways. We certainly had a lot of obvious success factors attached to that.
I do, however, believe that everything has a season and it's very important to mentor and advocate and find people who are that next generation, and help support them so that they're taking on more and more. By the time you step away, there should be people who it would be seamless for them to take over. In my mind, we have been working very hard to make that the case here and have worked hard to make sure our infrastructure is strong, our teams are strong, our leaders are strong. Any one of us can get hit by a bus tomorrow, and it shouldn't impact the organization.
Q: You're planning to retire at the end of 2024. Where will your focus be over the next nine months?
DH: I've already been transitioning my role in many ways, increasingly over the last two or three years, realigning reporting structures and having others in our organization take on different pieces. So, they're getting a lot of practice in developing the bids, and establishing the right responses in the market and figuring out the many many components that have to be executed on. I feel like that's been well under way for a period of time, so I will just continue to facilitate that over the year.
Q: What are the essential skills healthcare leaders need now?
DH: A good healthcare leader is similar in my mind to a good leader of almost anything. I think it's very important to have skills that allow people to bring their best foot forward. I think that means you have to have a level of respect for the diversity of people that you need on your team. You have to find ways to include people who are different than you, and have different ideas, and are able to help you, and them, think out of the box. I think any industry requires that in their leadership.
I think a good leader also thinks broadly outside of their own regime. They think broadly about what they can learn from other industries. How does retail impact healthcare? How does big computing play a role? I think a good leader stays ahead of the game in terms of what's out there in the markets, and what's happening broadly economically. How do they play in the broader space?
Q: What legacy do you hope you leave at UPMC?
DH: I hope I can help change the paradigm in how we think about the way care is delivered and financed. I think I've had the opportunity at UPMC to be able to help do that.
I hope to have left a legacy that behavioral and physical health are both very important to pay attention to, and that we have to serve people holistically. I hope I've also left the message that women can do lots of great things in their careers. Even though there are many very successful women in the healthcare industry, we still tend to have our upper echelons more male-dominated. Although that is changing, I'm glad that I could be an example of somebody who was able to do that. I think that's good for younger women and younger people who are interested in forging ahead in their careers.