Intro: The following SHSMD Podcast is a production of Dr. Podcasting.com.

Bill Klaproth (Host): On this edition of the SHSMD podcast, we meet Christine Gallery from Emerson Hospital. Christine is the 2023 SHSMD Leadership Excellence Award recipient.

 So, what does it take to achieve excellence? What can we learn from Christine? Well, keep listening and you're going to find out, because we all strive to be excellent, at least that's what we try to do on this podcast.

Not sure if we do it all the time, but that's what we strive for. So let's get to Christine. This is such a great honor to talk with her. Let's get to it. Right now.

This is the SHSMD Podcast, rapid insights for healthcare strategy professionals in planning, business development, marketing, communications, and public relations. I'm your host, Bill Klaproth. In this episode, we are honored to talk with Christine Gallery, Senior Vice President of Planning and Chief Strategy Officer at Emerson Hospital in Concord, Massachusetts. She is the 2023 SHSMD Leadership Excellence Award recipient. She will receive this award at a special ceremony on Monday, September 11th at the SHSMD 2023 Connections Conference. Have you signed up yet? What? No, what am I going to do with you? What am I going to do with you? All you have to do to sign up is go to shsmd.org. S-H-S-M-D.org/education/annualconference to get signed up. For those of you that have signed up, thank you very much. Alright, let's get to Christine. This is going to be a fun episode. Christine, welcome to the SHSMD Podcast.

Christine Gallery:  So much, bill.

Host: It's a pleasure to have you here, and congratulations on being the 2023 Leadership Excellence Award recipient.

Christine Gallery: Well, I appreciate that. Thank you so much.

Host: It is quite an honor. What does this mean to you?

Christine Gallery: Well, it really means everything to me. SHSMD is an organization that is near and dear to my heart, and there are so many really smart, wonderful, experienced, knowledgeable people in the organization. So, to be selected to receive this honor among them is really beyond anything that I could have imagined.

And it does really mean so, so much to me to be acknowledged by my colleagues.

Host: Again, congratulations, and I know you have given back to this industry as well, so we thank you for that. So you are known for your collaborative, accountable, respectful, and innovative leadership style. So I don't know you very well, but I would imagine that's who you are as a person at the core, or did you have to really develop these skills?

Christine Gallery: Well, I'd like to think that I'm a respectful and collaborative person at the core. I am a middle child, so I'm used to, uh, navigating and getting people to collaborate for sure. I. But I think in your professional life, these are definitely skill sets that need care and feeding that constantly need to be looked at.

Holding yourself to account, having others hold you to account; these are things you have to continually look at and challenge yourself by saying, am I doing enough here to build a consensus? Am I doing enough to bring the right people to the table? Have I been accountable enough to really achieve what we've set out to do?

So I think, yes, you start out with kernels of this as a person, but these are really, you know, you have to consciously and continually develop these skills as a professional.

Host: I like how you said that you ask yourself, am I doing enough? That's really interesting how you put that. I could see how that drives you to be even better and better. But overall then, what drives you to do what you do? What drives you to achieve excellence?

Christine Gallery: Yeah. I would say the biggest driver for me is the belief I have in the mission of the organization that I work for. At the end of the day, we're all in healthcare. And we're all here to help people, sometimes when they're going through really the most difficult points of their lives and having the most difficult conversations and making some really tough decisions.

And, to be able to be part of that conversation or to be able to be a factor, hopefully a positive factor for somebody as they're going through their healthcare journey, is really important. So at Emerson, we're a mission-driven organization. I firmly believe in our mission. We are here to improve the health status of the communities that we serve.

We want to be accessible, we want to provide excellence locally. And those are really the basic tenets. Compassion and equity and accessibility; these are values that I hold dear, that the organization holds dear. I've been at Emerson for 25 years, and I can tell you that, that's a really unwavering mission and vision for us as an organization, and that really drives me to, to want to live up to that, to want to live up to that brand promise and live up to that for the communities that we serve. So I think what drives me to be excellent is to know that I never am excellent, that it's always a journey and a path forward and a constant striving.

Host: So it's a journey. It's a constant striving to excellence. I like how you said that and you were answering that, in my mind I was thinking compassion. And then you said having compassion. How important is having compassion when it comes to leadership?

Christine Gallery: Well, I think having compassion and empathy is hugely important. So not only for the patients that you're serving and really understanding where they're at in their healthcare journey and how stressful it could be for themselves or for a loved one, but also having that for the people who work for you in your organization.

We've heard a lot about burnout on the front lines. Certainly, post pandemic, that is true. You have to have a lot of empathy for what people have gone through throughout their careers and in particular the last few years. So understanding the challenges that the workforce is facing and the demands that are being put on them.

And, gosh, they really rose to the challenge during the pandemic, but now it's just continuing forward and it's always, it's not just providing the care, but doing it in such a way, where you're showing that empathy, where you're really connecting and understanding. It can get to be a very sort of heavily IT world out there.

Right? You know, that providers are typing into their computers, while they're trying to talk to you. So trying to really balance out looking somebody in the eye and saying, I hear you and I know where you're coming from, and let's get through this together. I think that's just really critically important.

So having empathy both for the people you work with and the people that you're working for is really important.

Host: Yeah, I think you get the most out of people when you lead with compassion and empathy. Who doesn't want to work for somebody that leads with that? So we've all had mentors who have encouraged us and pushed us and helped us to learn and grow. Can you tell us of a mentor who has done that for you and maybe what you learned from them?

Christine Gallery: Yeah, for sure. So I think my most important mentor in my professional life is my current boss, Chris Schuster, the CEO, and President of Emerson. I have learned so much from her. Not only her brilliance and her strategic thinking but her ability to grasp the big picture and the minute details.

And she also has a way of putting herself in other people's shoes. So speaking of empathy and taking lots of different perspectives. So, I've admired that about her for many years. She's also pushed me to be better. You know, let's not just have this answer, Christine. Let's explore another answer or another way that we might be able to solve it, and that challenge that she puts forth has made me grow. It's helped me to learn. I've taken so many lessons from her and I think, both of us as working moms, busy, working moms, there is a lot of similarities there. You know, the ability to connect on that level as well. But she certainly has been an extremely important mentor to me throughout my career.

I will also say that in life, there are like the big blessings and the small blessings. So, there's lots of other people that in smaller ways have mentored me. Maybe it's around a particular project I was doing or a particularly difficult situation that I found myself in professionally.

And I have to say that a lot of those mentors and those advisors came from the ranks of SHSMD, the people that I served on the board with. People I have met through SHSMD, they have been really valuable to me and have served as sort of mini mentors in a lot of ways. So, you have to sort of take advantage of the brilliance and the excellence and the knowledge that's around you at the time.

So, they've been very important to me as well.

Host: So let's stay on SHSMD for a minute. I think it's a wonderful organization. All the learning opportunities, the conferences, the networking, the great podcast, uh, sorry. Shameless plug. So tell us why do you feel it's important for people to get involved with SHSMD?

Christine Gallery: So I think if you're in this area of healthcare, if you're in marketing or planning or physician relations or communications; I think it's critically important that you get involved in this organization. It's really the premier organization that brings all those disciplines together and it does it in such a way that you have an opportunity to fit in or figure out what you need from it.

So maybe all you need, and what would be super helpful for you is to be on some kind of listserv where you're bouncing ideas off of others. Maybe it's that you want to read a couple white papers. Maybe it's that you want to attend a webinar or take a certificate series.

That's all great. There's knowledge transfer there, there's great information. There's cutting edge knowledge that you're getting. But I think one greatest attributes of SHSMD and something everybody should be taking advantage of is the networking, is the people that you're going to meet when you attend conference, when you attend other events and just really leaning into that and making those connections. It is amazing. Even though we all come from very different backgrounds and different geographies, healthcare is amazingly similar and the challenges that we face are usually very, very exact from place to place. So, just turning to somebody at conference, somebody you've never met before, introducing yourself and starting up a conversation, you just can't even imagine how valuable that is and how that's been so valuable for me; all of the people that I have met throughout the years, being on the board, participating in committees, going to conferences, going to the networking events.

There are just so many valuable nuggets that you could pick up here and there. So I just think it's the organization to be part of, if you're in this area you will get a lot out of it and you can kind of pick and choose where you want to dial in.

Host: Very well said. And it's the people that make the difference and the networking, as you say. And those people often can become mentors or, lifelong friends as well.

Christine Gallery: And many of them have. Thank you. Yes. Many of them have, and I, I would be remiss if I were to end this podcast without mentioning Ruth Colby, who nominated me for this, and she is the CEO of Silver Cross Hospital outside of Chicago. And she has been one of the people I mentioned as a mentor to me. I've admired her throughout her whole career. She really is a role model and a great example of somebody that I connected with early on when I joined SHSMD years and years ago. And we remain professional colleagues and friends and to this day, still share thoughts and ideas, innovations and insights.

So, I really have to give a big shout out to Ruth and thank her for the nomination.

Host: Absolutely. That's, great. So as we wrap up, just a couple more questions. For someone listening to this that says, I aspire to that someday, I want to be the Leadership Excellence Award recipient, can you share some advice with us on what it takes to achieve excellence?

Christine Gallery: I think to achieve excellence, you have to really believe in what you're doing and you have to really embrace the value of it and the value proposition of what you're doing. And you have to say this isn't just a job; this has a purpose. This gives me purpose. And I think if you wake up every day with that sense of purpose, the excellence and the striving for excellence comes very easily after that because, you're committed to that goal, you're committed to that mission, you're committed to that organization, whatever it might be. I think it can come quite easily.

Host: Yeah. I, love I love that. Believe in what you're doing. And it's not just a job. It's something that gives you purpose. I think that's very well said. Well, as we wrap up, last question, Christine, and thank you for your time. Any final thoughts on being the 2023 Leadership Excellence Award recipient?

Christine Gallery: Again, I'm going to say that I am incredibly honored to receive this award. There are so many deserving people within the ranks of SHSMD that could easily have gotten this as well. I join a roster of folks who have received it before, many of whom I know and respect so much. So I am just thrilled and grateful to be receiving this honor.

Host: Absolutely. Well, we thank you for your leadership and your membership in SHSMD and all you do for the healthcare community. Christine, congratulations again and thank you.

Christine Gallery: Thanks so much, Bill.

Host: And once again, that's Christine Gallery, the SHSMD 2023 Leadership Excellence Award recipient.

If you haven't yet, please get registered to join us at the 2023 Annual Conference in Chicago, September 10th through the 12th. All you have to do is go to shsmd.org, that's S-H-S-M-D.org/education/annualconference. Do that and you can join us for this wonderful conference. And if you found this podcast helpful, and of course, how could you not people please, make sure you share it on all of your social channels, and please hit the subscribe or follow button so you get every episode. Every episode is chockfull of great information to help you not only in your career, but I like to think potentially, maybe possibly your personal life as well.

So do that for me, would you? This has been a production of Dr. Podcasting.com. I'm Bill Klaproth. See ya.