Why Memorial Sloan Kettering Is Working Hard to Put Itself Out of Business

Why Memorial Sloan Kettering Is Working Hard to Put Itself Out of Business Why Memorial Sloan Kettering Is Working Hard to Put Itself Out of Business If it was up to Dr. Craig Thompson, he’d be unemployed by this time next year. He’s working towards it, in fact. As the President and CEO of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Thompson leads 19,000 individuals who are all hoping to eradicate cancer, thus putting MSK out of business. As they research, treat and manage patients with hundreds of variations of cancer, Memorial Sloan Kettering clings to their mission  and pushes themselves to  deliver for both patients and employees. Leading the charge is Dr. Thompson. With a 99% CEO approval rating, Dr. Thompson is the highest ranked healthcare leader  on the 2017 Highest Rated CEOs list. While he humbly says that his work is in service to others, Dr. Thompson’s employees highly regard  the culture of care that he has built. “Powerful mission and ambitious leaders, advanced clinical care, pride in research,” says one clinical research supervisor. A phlebotomist adds: “Great company culture, management is awesome, benefits and perks are great, work is rewarding, coworkers are hard working, knowledgeable and are all there for one purpose [- ] saving lives!” Glassdoor’s Amy Elisa Jackson spoke with Dr. Thompson about his role as President/CEO, how he fosters employee engagement in the face of The Big C, and what types of candidates he looks for to join MSK. Glassdoor: Congrats on earning a spot on the Highest Rated CEOs list. You must feel so appreciative to your staff and employees for recognizing your leadership in this way. Craig Thompson: I have had the privilege for the last seven years of leading an extraordinary organization and so I guess what it means to me [is] that I’m really pleased that my fellow employees believe I’m pulling my weight. Glassdoor: How would you define leadership as it pertains to heading MSK? Craig Thompson: Everybody comes here to [take part in] our mission which is to really help patients and their families face a diagnosis of cancer. Everybody comes here with a very ripe motivation. They know what we’re doing. They know why we’re doing it. My real role in leadership is to try to get the best out of everyone by aligning their talents with the organization’s mission and culture. Everybody can find a unique role for their talents within this very large organization that we have. Glassdoor: However, you aren’t just a CEO. You’re also a researcher and a physician. How does that shape and inform your leadership? Craig Thompson: When we started in 1884, 133 years ago, most people didn’t believe cancer was a separable disease. We had been focused as an organization [on] finding out what was at the root, the cause of cancer. Now we know cancer is multiple diseases. We are engaged in very fundamental research in the laboratories here to try and understand 400 different types of cancer and to develop the optimum treatment to develop strategies to both prevent and treat patients. That is our research mission. Our clinical care mission, since 1884, is to really give cancer patients and their families hope. Today two-thirds of cancer patients are doing well. They’re back with their families five years after a diagnosis. Finally, we have an educational mission which is that every year we train about 1,500 doctors and nurses in the best practices of cancer care. They leave us to go throughout the country, throughout the world actually, to engage in taking care of people in the locations where they start their practices. It’s an organization where we have to have the expertise of a physician. We have to have an expertise [in] research and we have to understand 16,000 people come work here to fulfill those three missions, and it has to have the organizational abilities to support all the structures of a large company. We’ve got to have HR. We have got to have retirement benefits. We have got to understand that people come to work. They will work very hard on our mission, but ultimately they hope to earn a salary and to get personal satisfaction in a way that they can be proud of what they have done and still put a roof over their family’s heads and be able to put food on the table. Glassdoor: Aside from the mission, how do you inspire your teams and ensure employee engagement? Cancer isn’t easy to research, treat or cope with. How do you motivate in spite of it all? Craig Thompson: I try to make sure that everyone that comes to work here has what they need to complete their job successfully every day. We have 16,000 employees and they all come to work believing that they run Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Every day they can go home knowing that they delivered on the promise that they started the day with - to help patients and their families, to engage in bringing a new therapy…. to teach interns and residents and nursing students what it is to care optimally for cancer patients. What is really great is the ownership that everyone has for the individual part of our mission that they oversee. My job is to help solve the problems when people don’t have what they need to provide optimal care. It’s really making sure that we distribute the resources so that everybody can do [optimally] at their job. Glassdoor: Tell me about a time when you felt truly rewarded by being CEO. Craig Thompson: We just had the retirement of a senior physician last night who has [been here for] 40 years of his career. When he started,  young men with testicular cancer always died of their disease. We saw one of his patients from 40 years ago at the dinner last night. He told us about it. We expect 95% of young men with testicular cancer today to be cured. That has happened in his lifetime. It’s been an incredible boost for all of us with his leadership and that part of our organization to have participated in the innovation to do that. My job is to keep us focused on that because there are still cancers that we don’t do tremendously well with. There are still cancers that we haven’t yet gotten ahead of. Brain cancer, for an example, or pancreatic cancer, where we still don’t have the optimal therapies to help every patient. Glassdoor: What do you look for in candidates you hire? What makes someone MSK material? Craig Thompson: What we look for is people that are curious. People that want to understand and improve health through understanding cancer… two real skills that are hard to balance. People that show that high level of common sense but at the same time, they have to be ambitious for what they want to achieve. The status quo in cancer care is not good enough for anybody. If they come in saying, “I just want to be able to do what we do today,” that is not enough. We want them to be pushing the boundaries. We need to get better. Right now we do about half as well as we all hoped in helping patients and their families. One thing that we say repetitively here at the organization that I say maybe too frequently but is a constant reminder for all of us: There is no organization of our size who works every day to put ourselves out of business as faithfully and as frequently as we do. Everyone in the organization will be thrilled if we put ourselves out of business. Glassdoor: I like that! Thrilled to be out of business, indeed. Now for a fun one, what was your first job? Craig Thompson: I grew up in a military family. My dad after World War II was lucky to take an exam and get into the Coast Guard Academy. He was the first in his family to go to college and he became a career Coast Guard officer. We moved around the world and he was more often than not loaned to the Navy. We lived on Navy bases. My first job was on an island in the middle of Pearl Harbor called Ford Island. My front yard was the aircraft carrier docks for the Pacific Fleet. Me and my friends sold coconuts to the new recruits who came for their first time to a tropical island. We would go around and collect the coconuts that [had] fallen off the trees on the island, then bring them in wagons and sell them for a quarter apiece to the sailors. It was a great business. Glassdoor: Ha! What a creative business. Craig Thompson: The lesson I learned from that was interesting. After about a year of doing this, my friends and I realized that the hardest thing about coconuts, if you’ve ever seen a real one, is you’ve got to get the husks off. So we had little hatchets and spent a week before the next aircraft carrier was coming in dehusking all the coconuts. It was double the work, so we could double the price because we were providing value. We were going to charge 50 cents. But when we went to the docks, we didn’t sell a single coconut because every young sailor that came off the ships had seen a dehusked coconut in their supermarket in their hometown. They had never seen one with the husk still on. The value was actually in seeing something that they have never seen before. That is what we’ve been selling them. We just didn’t realize it. Very valuable lesson.