Renee DeSilva 0:07

Welcome back to The Academy Table. I’m Renee DeSilva, CEO of The Academy and your host. In this episode, I welcomed Maxine Carrington to the table. Maxine is the Chief People Officer of Northwell Health. And she served in a variety of employee experience and HR roles at the health system since 2008. When I think about health systems who are at the leading edge of addressing the industry’s workforce challenges Northwell often comes to mind. So it was with great pleasure that I dove into many of these topics with Maxine. A few takeaways from my conversation.

First, Maxine, like many doesn’t refer to the current era as the great resignation, but rather the great retention. It’s reflective of the opportunity that Northwell sees in building non-traditional talent pipelines. With veterans, people with varying levels of abilities, or mid career professionals returning to the workforce. They’re incredibly focused on customizing experiences to attract and then retain that talent. And Maxine shared some excellent learnings in this space.

Next, I’ve been tracking with Northwell and their brand promise for quite some time, “we are made for this.” As I learned from Maxine, it originally came from team members themselves. And it’s clear that even today, it brings to life the organizational values that they hold close, truly compassionate, truly innovative and truly inclusive, among others.

And finally, I’m sure all leaders are experiencing this, but we’re in unprecedented times in terms of what employees are expecting from their employers. And that’s especially true for leading health systems. As Maxine says so perfectly. When you’re the largest employer in your region, you are always expected to say something to hold a view and demonstrate commitments on the major and often thorny issues of our time, gun violence, equity and social justice. And more recently, abortion and reproductive health care rights.

I greatly appreciated Maxine’s candor and perspective on how Northwell approaches their role. So with that, let’s head to the table.

Maxine, thank you so much for joining us today. I’ve been looking forward to our conversation.

Maxine Carrington 2:41
Thanks so much, Renee. It’s good to connect with you.

Renee DeSilva 2:43
So I had a chance this spring to notice that many of our Academy members were abuzz with a talk that you gave around just how we as an industry think about retention and engagement more holistically. And so I’ve been really delighted to start this conversation. Before we dive into that though, tell me a little bit about your background and how you landed in your current role of Chief People Officer at Northwell.

Maxine Carrington 3:10
How much time do you have? I always say I came to Northwell as a recovering attorney, I had worked with the city of New York for about five years as a labor attorney mainly on the management side for the city, the New York City Office of Labor Relations, but also beginning to work on process improvement projects standing up a pro bono program where law firms could handle some of our caseload and starting discovering that I liked those aspects of the job I love leading people started to take on greater responsibility there. I loved seeing opportunities to transform make something better, I just didn’t know what I was going to do with that. A lot of colleagues before that had transitioned from labor, illegal practice into labor relations in various industries, healthcare, aviation, transportation, etc. So I started eyeing that. At the same time, I was having some really tough, complicated experiences in health care with loved ones, thankfully, none of our Northwell facilities where I felt where the patients needed an advocate, to really voice support for them to challenge whatever was the establishment of that particular entity. And it dawned on me that healthcare would probably be the next great space to help transform and that’s what I saw. I saw it as an opportunity. And I remember that realization, sending in an ad one day in Brooklyn, and emergency department, I said, You know what? I need to get into healthcare, I want to help fix it and make it better. And the stars just aligned. I literally start to look and I get a call from someone who had worked in the city, that office where I worked previously. By the time I get there, she’s somewhere else but we would have occasion to connect so I knew her so she reaches out, she says, we’re looking for attorneys to lead labor relations in our hospitals, we’re looking to build out that capability. And so I came over long story short, I won’t tell you about the first interview at a steak house where they discover I’m a vegetarian. That was we’ll talk about to this day. So I joined in 2008, one of our hospitals a few months in, I get called to a diner to talk about an opportunity to lead HR at RB What was that our only Behavioral Health Hospital? And back then you didn’t say no, you went along for the ride, and you didn’t challenge your esteemed elders, you trusted. I did at one point during that breakfast or lunch, whatever it was, I did say, I really don’t know HR, with all due respect. And I said, you can learn the terminology, you can pick up the skills, you can learn this world, but there are attributes, competency skills you have that we think can transfer well. And then the rest is history. I went over for three years that I went to lead HR for Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, which is really known really opened down the world. With that came another couple adjacent hospitals are part of Linux, and then went into regional roles as we began to expand and regionalize in our own way, different markets, and then into a deputy role. A year of that was spent helping to manage to COVID. And then the Chief People Officer role last year. That’s fantastic. It has been a journey and now we’re Northwell, we’ve changed so much. It hasn’t felt like the same gig.

Renee DeSilva 6:42
I’m sure, especially in the times that we’re living and leading, and it’s required different things, I’m sure challenge Yes, yes. Well, I love I before this current position, I was the chief talent to Chief People Officer for our company. And I, I loved that work, I thought I’d be doing that for the next 10 years. I love the work that I’m doing now. But I do think of that as a platform, where you have such an ability to influence the strategic direction of an organization. So let’s talk about that. We are, as a country, as an industry in healthcare solidly into year two of the great resignation, as many people talk about it. And it also reflects opportunity for maybe reimagining the compact that we as employers have with our team members. And I think you’re very forward-leaning on that. So what’s the opportunity that you’ve noticed through this pretty tumultuous last few years?

Maxine Carrington 7:34
Yeah, I’ve always been drawn to neuroscience experts, and just always thinking about that compact, as you referenced. There’s the great resignation—I refer to as the great retention; others out there are using the phrase “the great reimagining”—and I think those are more pas, you’re leaning into it a little bit more positively, you’re seeing what the opportunity is. And we have a thing at Northwell we say we never waste a good crisis. We look to quickly learn what we can from it. And then what are the opportunities now as you reposition yourself and have to pivot to optimize whatever the situation is, right? So how do we take the lessons learn, go forward, driving something even better, because you learn, you have to learn so quickly in crisis, things move fast, you’ve got to make fast decisions, you’ve got to innovate fast, right? Change fast. And so it just helps accelerate something different. So neuroscience futurist, notwithstanding the pandemic, we knew the world was going to be changing. And so we’re very much in Northwell, about studying people. And it’s healthcare, right? You’ve got psychology and your behavioral science, you’re always thinking about that. How do we influence behavior? I also love studying from behavioral economist, how do we influence behavior? So whether it was the seat belt or how to get people to stop smoking? It’s about influencing behavior, how do we influence you to become your best to produce your best right to when we have a saying at Northwell race health? How do we raise the health of our workforce as well? And you’ve got to influence behavior, right in that regard. And then you come through something like a pandemic, where healthcare quickly learns that not all providers want to get vaccinated, don’t believe in the science are concerned about the safety and efficacy and you would think this is the industry where we should just quickly adapt and adopt right. And we came to terms with nope, that’s not the case. So there were some lessons learned and I think one was relationship we saw in our sites where the leaders were even more accessible, even more relatable, walking the floors more working on relationships most strongly with the workforce there. We saw higher vaccination rates mean by and large. And so that was one observation. I said, Okay, we’ve been talking about this concept of relationship and how we form relationships, right, and how meaningful it can be. And here’s this perfect example of it highlighted through the pandemic. The other thing was teaching science and that we don’t think about it, we take it for granted, working in health care that people just know it. And know, they didn’t all know it. They may know what we put in front of them. And they may know what they need to know, for whatever degree of certification, but not science more broadly, not a love of science, as you would find, like people at our Research Institute, right. They’re just curious, curious, they’re exploring, they’re leaning into science. So this concept of teaching science more broadly, but also teaching it to the whole household?

Renee DeSilva 10:53
So that’s so interesting, right? Yeah. I mean, as you’re talking, I’m just reflecting on just the footprint that you all hold. So I think 80,000 employees, and so as you as you talk through all of that, that’s at that 80,000 people, right, and just the behaviors that you have to think about over such a vast sort of scale, and also struck by just you operate in such diverse, almost, let’s call it like micro neighborhoods in terms of just the disparate languages and just cultural influences. And so I like what you’re distilling, not easy to deal with that amount of of breadth and depth.

Maxine Carrington 11:29
Not at all. And I think this new journey for us to your point, we’ve been saying recently at 80,000, there things that the probability is increased for so violence has hit our doorstep. We’ve trained for active shooters, we’ve trained for domestic violence issues, we and we, we’ve had to deal with those intimate partner violence, we’ve dealt with it. But we unfortunately lost a team member have lost two team members to gun violence. And it was three weeks apart, one in our Florida, one of our Florida locations, and one literally down the street from me, narrow the practice where she worked. It’s just a different world to your point, and we’re learning and having to reposition ourselves, and even safety, something we’ve always been committed to amplifying it even more, given the current times we’re living in.

Renee DeSilva 12:26
Yes, and so let’s maybe spend a bit more time going a little bit deeper on that this repositioning or reimagining, I was struck with some of the ways that you think about employee experience and developing what I would call more nuanced career paths, meeting people, maybe where they are on journeys that might not be typical. So talk about how you brought that to life a bit across the system.

Maxine Carrington 12:49
Yeah, so a few years ago, we embarked on a project called Polaris, HR has to come up with cool names. So Polaris was to contemplate three things. So one was moving all of our systems into the cloud. So we went live last year on Oracle Cloud. The second was career framework, we had over 10,000 job titles in the organization. So the ability to point people toward various paths was made difficult because of that. So the first thing we had to do is kind of cut that in half-face one, we now are working on executive career framework this year. But we were able to have that and in addition to just reducing the number of titles create clear career paths, right, so that folks could conceptually visually navigate what the various professions are within healthcare and at Northwell. And how to get from point A to point B, whether that is a linear path or a more of a Securitas, all over the place? Whatever it is, you can at least see it. The third was around career movement. And then we brought those two together career framework Concur movement, and really tried to take on career experience. So we began to we evolved our talent management division into career and performance development, because in essence, we’re driving you to be a better performer, help the organization perform better, but also helped you develop your career force. And so we brought in people with that skill set who can advise on career. Next was how do we scale this because we’re not going to be able, we’re still not for profit. We’re not yet in a position to build out a whole career advisement center or something you would see in academia. But how do we scale it? So we knew well, we’ve got to enable all of our leaders to have clear conversations with team members. And so we came up with this model. We studied a lot of other organizations for profit, not for profit, came up with grow. goals reflect opportunities, and well, and it’s just a framework for how to have conversations that are transparent with team members about their career interests and aspirations and then how to connect them to resources. We created a internal careers portal where resources live, career assessment tools live. And then now our team members can also apply for opportunities internal, they don’t have to go to our external site. We’ve got career newsletters now that go out, we’ve got ongoing career workshops, as well as chats about various professions. Next up, we’re doing the next phase of it, which I’m pretty excited the team is working on this at launch, I think next week, we are kind of deputizing leaders across the organization who are experts in their fields, to be our volunteer career advisors. And they volunteer for a number of sessions with team members, team members sign up. And then we scare them toward these career advisors that have day gigs. This is their volunteer, they’re giving back to their profession and to us, and they’re giving career advice to these team members. So really excited. And then there’s a journey map of sorts of roadmap where eventually we do get to that concept of a career advisement center. But until then, we’re scaling and working toward it.

Renee DeSilva 16:04
Yeah. What’s interesting, as you’re chatting about this, it’s in some ways, taking a big robust organization, and then trying to make it feel small and personal for individual team members. Right. And you even said, at the start of our conversation, when you were talking through your own journey, you said back in the day, you didn’t say no to opportunities. And so it sort of goes back, which I which I concur, right? It was like a yes. And you sort of figured it out after and so I think what I like about what you’re saying is this need to modulate and find ways to bring people along a journey that requires a greater level of investment and sophistication than just maybe what we would have done 1015 years ago, well said, yeah, so I am also a student of some of this work around engagement and retention, and how you think about finding talent and pockets that don’t exist, I’ve been struck by some of the work from Accenture on this net better off framework, which is like really gets into the hearts and minds of why people pick companies like The Purpose Driven nature of what they do. And so maybe comment a bit on when you think about that lens, and you think about building pipelines for talent from non-traditional backgrounds. I’ve seen some really interesting work from you and your team around that trends and disability organizations or differentiated ability organizations, how have you thought about tapping into maybe pools of talent that might be otherwise overlooked?

Maxine Carrington 17:33
Yeah. I would say to you, we’ve come a long way. But we’ve got a ways to go and doing even better. One of our differentiators at Northwell is our commitment to veterans, and those who are active military as well, for sure we have at Northwell, an office that was stood up, gosh, who would say back in 2009. It’s our Office of Military liaison services, military and veterans liaison services. And it’s it’s based in the community. It is meant to partner with the military support folks from a healthcare standpoint, as well as an employment standpoint. So we’re out in the community providing services providing care. But when we look at social determinants of health, right, employment is such an important factor. So we have team members within our organization in our workforce readiness division, they partner with our Office of Military and Veterans liaison services. And they’ve come up with ways to help someone help a veteran assess what are the skills I’ve gained in the military, in service, that can translate into a role with Northwell. And they literally help take them through that assessment, and then steer them toward employment with us. And so we employ hundreds of veterans. And we definitely have folks who are active and they may get called, and we support them. So when they return back to Northwell, from service, active duty, we will pay them the difference between what they earned during service, and what they would have earned with us. So if there was any gap, we make up for it, and we really try to celebrate the return as well. We just had a huge concert in New York City today during Fleet Week in New York City. We do this pretty much every year now. It’s called side by side. And it’s our declaration to the world that we’re committed to vets. And our recruiters are there at these events as well, trying to recruit as much as possible veterans into the organization. So that’s been amazing. And we’re just continuing to evolve it and go bigger. I met a couple new vets today that have been hired into Northwell.

Renee DeSilva 19:48
Fantastic. Yeah, that’s interesting about that, too, is as you sort of think through the just math around, not necessarily having the competence of having an half the supply-demand equation on talent needs is sort of moving in the wrong direction. So I think as an industry and as a country, we have to think more creatively about how we get people ready for positions that maybe they might not maybe have to think differently about that. So, a question for me, which is a little bit of a practical one is, what are the implications of things like that? Being creative in how you think about talent sources. How do you think about that in terms of having your hiring managers on board for that, maybe removing friction for prospective employees that might just come at it from a different background and lens of experience?

Maxine Carrington 20:32
Absolutely. Even our people with disabilities hiring, we have a disability etiquette, education series that we asked leaders to participate in, right, so that if we hire someone with a disability or known disability, they are welcomed, the environment is inclusive, and the leader knows the language, right, and how to support that person. And so we try to think holistically about it. It’s not just get the numbers in, it’s right. What’s the environment they need to come into? And then yeah, to the veteran example, how do we read to you before you even start to know what to expect, right? What are the perhaps gaps that you may have, that we can support? And so it’s using things like our website, it’s using social media, it’s using that conversation between that individual and the recruiter. Just contemplating that. And then you’re absolutely right on the pipeline, right. Today. We by the way, right now, we’re bringing in record numbers of people. Every week, we’re bringing 250 to 300 people in a week. So we’ve been amplifying our brand more and more and absolutely tapping into partner organizations, community organizations, when we see a layoff notice, we’ll probably be the first one. We will reach out to that business and say, Hey, we noticed you’re laying folks off, can we connect. So we are trying to get ahead as much as possible. I’ve charged our recruitment team, with a quick, easy slogan, be out there more than anyone else. They are every street fair, every mall everywhere you can imagine just bringing the brand out. And I even said to the head of recruitment recently, who is an operations leader? Now, I said to her Oh, who we recruited into run recruitment for us. Talent Acquisition, I said, we should probably rebrand our recruiters, right? They call talent acquisition, people recruiters should probably call them brand ambassadors, because that’s really what they’re out there doing for us just taking the name everywhere we can, because you just got to drive toward volume. And then you can work through selection. That’s right. Volume is not there. You can’t you don’t have enough to select from.

Renee DeSilva 22:36
That’s powerful. Even I was struck by I think you’ve returnship program for non clinical roles for mid career professionals. So just this really massive levels of customization to reach people where they are, I think is impressive.

Maxine Carrington 22:49
Yeah, we just graduated our first class of women who have been out of the workforce for any number of reasons, their stories are poignant and amazing. And yeah, they come back through, it’s sort of an apprenticeship experience with some inspiring inspiration wrapped around it. And they come through that experience. And then they go into permanent roles, they get an offer, and thankfully, all of our initial participants received offers finance, HR, IT cetera. And the next group will start and we really hope to expand that. And the next step is a program similar returnship For what retirees just a path back toward whether it’s full time or part time employment. So the team is working on that right now.

Renee DeSilva 23:32
That’s fantastic. So I want to talk next about mission and values and I do spend time just canvassing missions that speak to me among our health system members. I just may be more your your your brand promise, but it’s I’ve known about it for many years that really lands with me, but at Northwell we are made for this. I love that. I love that. Because that means you’re made for a lot of things, right? Like the tough stuff and the hard decisions and the challenging calls. And so just talk more about how you think about team member promise and how values how you sort of orchestrate those to show up in day to day.

Maxine Carrington 24:12
Made for this was developed years ago adjacent to the rebranding of Northwell, from norrisville Iga to Northwell Health, and it was really a collection of comments from our team members. So the team went out all of the organization and listened the time I was head of HR at one of our sites, they listened to me as well. Ton of listening sessions. And that was all brought together in this made for this manifesto. We actually just revisited it and updated it to just reflect the times we’re living in today, two years into a pandemic, two-plus years. So it’s that and with that we just updated our values as well. So they’re still truly compassionate, truly innovative, truly together. All All those values we just added truly inclusive, we had one call truly ourselves, it has now been replaced by truly inclusive. So once that’s been updated our behavioral commitments, we’re not calling them expectations anymore commitments have been updated. Our behavioral our performance review ratings have been updated just to be more progressive reflect the times, how we evaluate you how we recognize and reward you. So all of that now getting connected, made for this, I will tell you, Rene, working with marketing, we always pause and say, Okay, what’s the continued shelf life on made for this? And just when we think it’s going to die out, all of a sudden on social media, there’ll be a resurgence of made, no will say yes, something about being made for this. And it just continues to live on all these years later. And it’s just this rallying cry that we kind of get to ground ourselves in and remind ourselves of who we are, what we’re committed to, especially when times get really hard.

Renee DeSilva 25:59
Yeah, I was in a different role when you all were working on that unveiled it when I was sort of watching from afar, but it just it has always stayed with me. The other one that stays with me is Christiana Care, which is for the love of health. Just like short, really pithy things that evoke something is really powerful.

Maxine Carrington 26:17
Their values, “love and excellence,” we’re like, ah, wish we hadn’t done our values. We could have just done with that.

Renee DeSilva 26:25
I know. It’s really good. I don’t know if this is still true. But I know up until a few years ago, maybe pre-pandemic that Michael Dowling, CEO of Northwell, was was still personally meeting with most new hires at Northwell. And so I don’t know if that’s still if you’ve been able to maintain that.

Maxine Carrington 26:40
Michael does it. He meets with the 250 to 300 a week, every single week, very rare for us to need to replace him. new hires, were actually adding another day just to accommodate the volume coming in and get us ahead in hiring, he’ll be at those. And he now does a get-to-know dinner monthly with team members. So we curate list of team members, and he meets with them that’s in addition to his rounding every week and everything else he does, to connect with our workforce.

Renee DeSilva 27:14
Yeah, it goes back to what you said, like just the leaders showing up and modeling that from the top. I’ve taken some inspiration from that. And just my own approach with our new hires don’t nearly have that much volume. So I’m always thinking, if Michael can do that at Northwell, I can totally do it here with our 130 team members. So that’s it’s inspirational for sure.

Maxine Carrington 27:34
Connection, visibility, accessibility, all of those things. Relationship, ultimately.

Renee DeSilva 27:40
It does it matters. So then maybe one final question before I get to my wrap up question, which I ask all of my podcast guests: I think when you and I first met in 2018, and it was around, it was my first couple of months in this role. And we were having a conversation around making the case for why equity and inclusion matters. Yeah. And I think we’re having a different conversation. Four years later, yeah, business case is more understood. But maybe just I’ll let you comment broadly on just how you’ve seen the conversation, if you’ve seen the conversation shift, and how that sort of playing out and the experience in your settings?

Maxine Carrington 28:21
Yeah, I still remain concerned about the channel changing because we’ve all lived through the cycles of whether it was affirmative action and equal employment opportunity, just even the naming the nomenclature we’ve used over the years to describe this body of commitment and work. It’s been interesting to follow. And then you’ll have these kind of seminal events, whether it was Rodney King back in the 90s, George Floyd and everything in between and after and before, whether seen or not this reactive cycle. And so you get concerned is the channel going to change again, but I would say, this is interesting. I’m seeing the most sustained commitment that I’ve ever seen. And we have to keep leaning into that and leveraging it. For sure. I think what I’m seeing is this commitment of companies, organizations to more fully integrating it. Right. So it’s not a set-aside, it’s not an office over there somewhere in a corner, right? It’s not a project. It’s not a food fair, right? It’s all the kind of when you look at the maturity model, like baseline one on one or negative one-on-one, right, you’re really seeing everyone trying to commit to full integration and sustained progress and seeing the business case come to life. I’m seeing that in in a different way. And I also think, just current life events. It’s going to keep that level of advocacy and activism and disruption happening. So that’s going to keep but alive to what we’re seeing coming out of Supreme Court and just the discourse and these nationalist groups and people recognizing No, that’s not okay. We can’t believe in that. We don’t want to believe in that. And the workforce now there’s a rising level of activism. Yeah, right, happening as well. So I think we have to harness that, use it to our advantage, ensure that team members can talk about these things years ago. You know, this. You didn’t talk about politics and religion in the workplace. Now you do.

Renee DeSilva 30:34
Yeah, it’s interesting to see. And the shift has been over probably the last five to 10 years. So it’s just, it’s interesting to know how quickly things can change on your equity and inclusion friend or comment. I agree, it’s one of the things that I spent a lot of time thinking about is it’s not, it can’t be a thing, it really needs to be the way in which we do all things. And so it’s interesting to see how that plays out across really not just healthcare, but just really broadly.

Maxine Carrington 31:04
Yeah, and your point about the values, we put, we intentionally put truly inclusive in, because once you do that, you’ve got to train on your values. And you’ve got to train everyone on your values. And so we’ve got to be more inclusive, so that we can really unlock the power of diversity, right, as we like to say, and so this aspect of full integration, supplier diversity, obviously increasing representation of historically underrepresented folks all aspects of the strategy, you’ve got to stay the course on it, but I am seeing the most commitment I’ve ever seen for sure.

Renee DeSilva 31:36
Yeah. You said one other thing that I just want to pause on, which is the workforce expects leaders to hold a position. It’s interesting, because for healthcare companies, which you all may be unique, and providers, you might have five different generations in the workforce, that have very different views on what that ought to look like, right, a baby boomer versus a Gen X would probably or Gen Z would probably feel very differently about that. I’m not asking you as I share specific places that you’ve held or not held a position, but how do you as a leadership team, make that decision?

Maxine Carrington 32:15
It’s partnership. It’s HR certainly representing the people of the Oregon thinking about the people nonstop. But we all try to our internal communications and marketing team, our CEOs office, it’s many eyes on something. And then we really try to leverage our business employee resource groups as well. So what we started seeing is in the past, yeah, you weren’t expected to really speak to something, I mean, look at Disney, right? Have the lessons learned of when to say something, when not to and now you really, it’s always want to say something. And if you don’t, you’re going to be called out on the carpet about it. So I will tell you something will happen. And within minutes, I’m getting texts and emails from team members, or is Northwell going to say something? And so it just became standard. And we actually have literally worked with internal comms, they’ve put kind of a matrix together. And it’s not that we live and die by it, but it guides us on is this a Michael Dowling, CEO statement or screensaver? Is this a business Employee Resource Group statement is just to, for us to start to think about it more intentionally, because we don’t need Michael making a statement about every single thing come from someone else, and then aligning that to our corporate social responsibility goals as well. So gun violence is one of our areas. Michael speaks out.

Renee DeSilva 33:40
He’s very out front on that, yes. Like gun violence is a public health issue, as I think he’s been talking about that for well before the last few tragic events that have happened, but yeah.

Maxine Carrington 33:51
Absolutely. And so yeah, you are expected to take a position and I think when you hit 80,000, when you are known nationally, when you are the largest insert provider employer in the region, you are expected to say something.

Renee DeSilva 34:07
It’s fascinating to watch that, especially in light of some of the recent Roe vs. Wade decision, how that will shape the discourse that we’re having in the healthcare community.

Maxine Carrington 34:20
Renee, it’s so interesting how the psychological safety in our organization that team members feel comfortable writing back when those communications go out and voicing. And so we put one out about Roe v. Wade, and we framed it in the healthcare context about the relationship between a provider and a patient, ensuring people have access to safe care. Right. And we got back, thank you. I feel more at ease. I was so anxious, I was crying and this helped me and we got back. How dare you? I see more from you. Right. So we saw the gamut of it, and we expected it, but I love that they feel safe enough.

Renee DeSilva 35:01
That’s right. All right. Well, final conversation, although I could talk about this for hours, but I’ll give you your day back. But maybe final wrap up question, which is, the purpose of this when I originally launched the podcast was to create space for conversations, and really to also have voices that might be less well known. And just just I wanted to make sure that we were having the right conversation and curating that for a broader group of people. And one of my favorite questions has been, if you could invite any two people to your own table, to curate or continue this conversation, on talent, on the reimagining, on what it means to lead? Who would you invite to that conversation and why?

Maxine Carrington 35:43
Oh, boy, I can’t think of names.

Renee DeSilva 35:46
Okay. It can be prototypes.

Maxine Carrington 35:48
Yes, that come to mind. So one, and this might be a little provocative is, you look at what’s happened recently at Amazon, Apple, Starbucks, you never thought they would get organized, but they have, and they’ve got to meet by and large, I mean, known in some ways for good culture, by and large. One in particular, maybe not as much right now. But what happened? And what are your lessons learned? Because I think we can all learn from them. And it’s not a criticism, we’ve all been there with organizing activity, what it’s, we want to learn. So I think anyone their CEO, their head of HR, and our, the other is said to my earlier comments behavioral economist, a futurist, trying to give us insight, some prediction into what we should be looking out for using insights. So anyone from those prototypes.

Renee DeSilva 36:41
Indeed. I would love to join probably more the second part of that conversation. The first you harkens back to your attorney and labor relations routes on that on your first pick. Which makes a ton of sense. But yeah, Adam Grant comes to mind in that second category. Listing? Yes. Yes, yes. Now that’s good. All right. Well, maybe he’ll be a guest on a future edit a future Academy event, and we can maybe try to make that happen. I will be there. All right, well, so nice chatting with you. Thank you for the time and I will hopefully see you soon.

Maxine Carrington 37:12
Thanks so much for new appreciate the opportunity.

Renee DeSilva 37:14
Thank you.

Thanks again for joining me at the table. The Table is a podcast produced by the Health Management Academy. Make sure you catch future episodes by visiting our website, TheAcademyTable.com, or by subscribing on the podcast platform of your choice, and if you have suggestions for topics or guests, I’d love to hear from you. Please drop me a note at renee@hmacademy.com. I look forward to talking with you soon.