Jaime Lewis (Host): Welcome to the Healthcare Executive Podcast, providing you with insightful commentary and developments in the world of healthcare leadership. To learn more, visit ACHE.org. I'm your host, Jaime Lewis. And in this episode of the podcast, we're joined by Carla Harris, Senior Client Advisor for Morgan Stanley.

For over 30 years, Ms. Harris has served as a leader in multiple sectors and was appointed to chair the National Women's Business Council by President Barack Obama in 2013. You may also know her as a talented vocalist, having released four gospel albums and sold out both Carnegie Hall and the Apollo Theater.

Carla Harris will be presenting the Bachmeier Memorial Address and Luncheon, Intentional Leadership, Tools for Maximizing Your Success at the 2024 Congress on Healthcare Leadership, March 25th through 28th in Chicago. Welcome, Ms. Harris. Thank you for being here.

Carla Harris: Oh, thank you for having me, Jamie.

Host: I want to start with your background. Tell us about your career journey and the path to how you became a leader.

Carla Harris: Sure. I have been 37 years on Wall Street as of this coming summer, and I've been at Morgan Stanley for that entire time. And I learned after my sophomore year at Harvard, that investment banking was pretty exciting and that it would challenge me in ways that I hadn't thought about when I was thinking about careers coming out of Harvard undergrad and even business school.

So that's what I've done. And I've spent a lot of time actually working on healthcare transactions. I executed in the capital markets, every healthcare transaction that Morgan Stanley did from 1994 through about 2001, 2002. And then I've worked on various and sundry since that point. And I became a leader as I moved up in investment banking.

As you probably know, Jaime, you go from associate to VP, to executive director, to managing director. And then I had an opportunity, I'd say probably extensively into my career, about 25 years in, to actually create something from nothing, to create the Multicultural Innovation Lab, to try to help position the firm as the firm that engaged constructively and productively with multicultural decision makers across all industries.

And from that, we created an award winning accelerator inside of Morgan Stanley, where we would invite tech enabled companies that were founded by women and people of color. And we'd give them three things, cash in exchange for a single digit percentage of the company, a carefully curated six month curriculum to help them to develop from being a founder to a CEO, because as you know, there's a difference.

And we would also help to expose them to some of our larger investment banking clients in the hopes that that would advance the scaling of their business. We also created a podcast so that we could elevate the conversation about the inequity in the distribution of capital to those same constituents and also amplify the message about the lack of equity around access and opportunity, not only to capital, but to other opportunities in the market for women and people of color.

And the leadership portion came from running transactions, if you will, while I was in capital markets, also leading an opportunity to potentially create an emerging manager platform in Morgan Stanley, and then ultimately creating this in house accelerator and this lab.

Host: I would imagine you've had lots of mentors along the way. What are some of the more important lessons you've learned from those people that you use in your work today? And how did those mentors model authenticity for you?

Carla Harris: Yes, you're right that I've had several mentors along the way, but there's only been one mentor, frankly, Jaime, that I have had from the time that I started as a first year associate all the way through now, even as a senior client advisor. And this is someone who's outside of the business, but I always say that the mentor is the person that you tell the good, the bad, and the ugly to.

And this is the person that has one agenda item when they're speaking to you, and that is you and that they will give it to you straight, no chaser, no matter what the issue might happen to be. And this mentor, I feel a hundred percent confident that she's always had my best interest at heart. And despite the fact that she hasn't worked in this business, she is a service provider to this business. So she understands the context very well. And your mentor needs to understand the context that you're working in, in order to be able to do their job as a mentor. And the mentor's job is to give you tailored advice. And I would say that where she's been most useful, and even the other mentors, is not only helping me to think through a problem, but more importantly, helping me to think about the ways to solve the problem as it existed around my career.

And even to this day, despite the fact that I'm pretty good at constructing a narrative; if I'm going to have a very important conversation and I'll call her and say, here's what I'm prepared to say, even today, as good as I am, she can find a way to improve upon that narrative and even improve upon the way I'm thinking about delivering it.

The authenticity piece actually came from my own revelations, across my career. I realized pretty early on, that I was my own competitive advantage, that the temptation that one has when you come into these large industries, especially into large organizations, if it's not going well in the early days, your temptation is to present like Jaime and to speak like Caitlyn and maybe to dress like Mary.

But at the end of the day, I can never out Caitlyn, Caitlyn. And while it is certainly fine to see something else in someone that you find attractive, when you put it in your tool chest, you need to put it in your tool chest in a way that works for you, not trying to be them. And I learned probably five to six years into my career that my real advantage was just being Carla. And once I realized that, there was no looking back, Jaime.

Host: You mentioned that you have worked in healthcare before. Healthcare organizations, of course, have multiple generations in their workforce and at various levels. So in your experience, how can leaders support their teams through potential generational conflict and create an inclusive culture?

Carla Harris: I gotta tell you, Jamie, I think that is squarely the leader's responsibility, which is why I wrote Lead to Win, because I had the aha moment in the fourth quarter of 18 that we were in a very different environment, and then the one that I had built my career in. And the one I built my career in, obviously, Boomers and Xers were the dominant population in the workforce then, and you had traditionalists that were sitting predominantly in the leadership seats.

But today, we're in an environment where you have Boomers and Xers are the ones that are in positions of power, and the dominant population are millennials and Zers, and they demand very different things. They demand, as table stakes, transparency, inclusivity, and feedback. So I believe that it's the leader's job to think about how do you engage most productively with your workforce.

Obviously, if you have people that are reporting to you that are Boomers, you have a pretty good idea of how to engage with them. But you need to make sure that you are understanding how millennials and Zers absorb information, where they get information from. What's the stimulus for them to create outsized productivity?

And they respond very, very positively to feedback. And if you're a Boomer or an Xer, you didn't get a lot of feedback as you were building your career. And so your temptation would be not to give it. But you're the one that has to adapt if you want to make sure that you get the absolute best out of that workforce.

Host: Well, speaking of all that, what are some ways that healthcare leaders can show that agility as they adapt to changes in the world of work?

Carla Harris: Yes. So here are a couple of things they can do. I will give you three. Number one, in most cases, you might know what to do, and you have an extensive amount of experience. But if you really want to train your people that are reporting into you, and you also want to motivate them to, you know, maybe follow the way that you're thinking about doing things, is that when you're having a meeting, invite them, solicit their voice, say, listen, here's the problem that we have. How might we think about doing this? I've done it this way for the last 10 or 15 years, but knowing what you know now about technology, knowing what you know now about our patients, how might we approach this differently? You'd be surprised, Jaime, how much intellect, creativity, and innovation is left on the table because we as leaders never asked for it.

You know, we're thinking of the most efficient way is to just tell them to do it this way, which is how we were taught. But if you take the time to solicit their voices, you might find a more innovative way, a different way to leverage technology, a different way to serve the patient that might be better, especially in the environment that we're in now.

The second thing you can do is to make sure that your people, and be active about thinking about whether or not your people have the training and the development that they need. And so often we assume that people will get some of that on their own, but again, soliciting their voices, asking the question, making sure that you're accessing the right technology, the right collaborations, the right partnerships for them.

And then the third thing that you might do, especially in the environment that we're in now, where they do value and are thinking about mental wellness; is to be more proactive about thinking about that. Obviously as a Boomer, our bosses were never thinking about how we were feeling, what kind of mood we were in, what else we were dealing with personally, and how it might affect us in the workplace.

You were sort of trained that you don't bring anything personal into the workplace, but that is not how today's workforce operates. So again, I think you have to be ahead of the curve in thinking about that, talking about that, provoking that conversation with the people that you're working with.

Host: On the side, I shouldn't say on the side, but on the side, you are also an accomplished singer and you've released gospel albums. What have you learned through the music industry that you've applied to your own leadership style?

Carla Harris: I got to tell you, I think that being a performer has given me a really sharp awareness of my audience. So when I'm standing on that stage, I can literally feel the audience, Jaime. I'll give you an example. In my very first Carnegie Hall concert, and we've now done six that have been sold out.

In my first concert, I could feel from the audience that after the 12th song, I was at the top of the hill, that it couldn't get any better than that. So despite the fact that we had rehearsed and rehearsed and we had 14 songs that we were prepared to deliver, I could feel that it couldn't get any better than that moment.

So I said, Good night, everybody. And you can imagine the band, the backup singers, everybody was looking like, what, what, what, we got two songs to go, but I could feel that we could not serve the audience any better than at that moment. And so I think that that has made me very in tune to the environment and the atmosphere when I walk into a client meeting and while I might have thought that I was going to present this particular presentation that we had worked hard on, I might pivot, and I do pivot when I walk in that room and say, maybe we ought to approach this differently. Maybe we ought to start talking about the article that came out about the company yesterday, or maybe we ought to ask three questions before we dive into this book.

But it gave me an ability to connect even better than you might find the average banker might be able to do. The other thing that I've learned from a leadership perspective, as a performer is to leave that room for people to give you input. Because again, we rehearse one way. We're going to deliver a set of songs this way, but the guitar player might say, what about this riff, or somebody might say, why don't we end the song this way? That could have been different than the way I was thinking, but it's better. And if you don't give people that opportunity to exercise their voices as a part of the ensemble, then you miss it. You miss the opportunity to make it even better.

Host: Well, we're lucky enough to have you presenting the Bachmeier Memorial Address, Intentional Leadership Tools for Maximizing Your Success at Congress. Can you give a sneak preview of your session? What can attendees expect?

Carla Harris: Absolutely. I'm going to give the pearls of intentional leadership. And the macro message, Jaime, is that you're not a leader because your 37 years into a space or because somebody gives you a title or promotion of leadership, management, or authority. You're a leader because you show up intentionally every day for your people to lead them, which is different than managing them.

And I'll run through the eight pearls of intentional leadership. And also I'll be pretty prescriptive about how you might deploy these pearls and there'll be authenticity, building trust, creating clarity, creating other leaders, diversity, innovation, inclusivity, and voice. So that's the sneak peek.

Host: Thank you for that. You've definitely provided a lot of food for thought, so thank you so much for joining us.

Carla Harris: It's been my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Host: You can hear more from Carla Harris at the upcoming 2024 Congress on Healthcare Leadership, March 25th through 28th in Chicago. To register, please visit ache.org/congress. And if you like this podcast, please consider sharing it on your social channels and rating or reviewing the show. Thank you for listening.