R E F L E C T I O N S
Steve Zylius / UCI
We Are Built for This ..............................................................................................................
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By Chad Lefteris
ome would say it was a sort of cruel April Fools’ Day prank: being formally approved by the University of California Office of the President as UCI Health’s CEO on April 1, 2020, just days after the state of California had shut down due to the global pandemic. What a time to take the helm of a health system! The irony is that this
thought only came to me many months later, only after I dove right in. I knew I could help, and throughout my career, I have always been the one who remains calm, not reactive, about the crisis at hand – although that characteristic was tested time and time again over the last year. I was fortunate to have been hired from within, as it reduced the normal onboarding and flattened the learning curve; frankly, there was no time for that anyway. As leaders, we get to stand on the shoulders of those who came before us, and we immediately went to work transitioning from the interim CEO and prior leaders to ensure that nothing got dropped during a time of great uncertainty. Right after taking the role, I began to preach the need to get back to basics – focused on our teammates and
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on communication – even if there were unknowns, and there were many in the early days and weeks of this pandemic. Sometimes leading isn’t just leaping to action. Instead, we took a very measured approach, based in science and in facts, to our decision-making and then overcommunicated the “why” behind each decision as a way to connect the dots for our teammates. We worked quickly to establish formal and consistent communications from my office to keep our co-workers and clinical faculty informed, which culminated in a daily
