People Investment By Joel Gallion, President, Bellevue Healthcare
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say all of the below with a big caveat—we are by no means perfect. We’ve gone through periods where our internal model wasn’t working well, or we didn’t handle specific team situations well. But we’ve learned and grown over the years and have seen far more successes than failures in our team and people development. Bellevue Healthcare (BHC) from day one has valued both the personal and professional growth of our team. It was woven into the framework of how we started. Our founders Peter Norman and Eric Mortensen did everything from delivering and cleaning equipment to all business and customer service operations. We’ve taken that model and, over the last 20 years, have continued to tweak and develop a system and process to invest in our people and their development. These are the keys to our process:
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We are upfront with everyone from the first day that our goal is to promote and advance from within.
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Start with a mentality
We hire for character and fit (chemistry) and are upfront with everyone from the first day that our goal is to promote and advance from within. There are numerous examples of this throughout our organization, from our executive team to most of our store managers. We don’t shy away from having a college graduate start in a truck delivering equipment or working an entrylevel retail or customer service role. We believe this is vital to mutually discovering if BHC is the right fit and setting a path for future advancement. Those who have the right attitude, effort, and empathy–and can buy in to the service-first culture at BHC–can take advantage of those opportunities.
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Advancing education is a key to long-term organizational success and, more importantly, long-term success for the individual.
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Put your money where your mouth is
At BHC, we have an informal education program where we sponsor certain people who have shown great potential within our organization to get advanced schooling or education. To date, we’ve sponsored about 10 undergraduate programs, two MBA programs, and numerous education programs for RT or ATP tracks. There is obviously a cost to this, but we believe advancing education is a key to longterm organizational success and, more importantly, long-term success for the individual. Everyone that we’ve sponsored for one of these programs is still with BHC today. Prove the model
It’s one thing to talk about personal development and advancement—it’s another to have real examples to point people to. As I mentioned above, since investing in our team’s development was built into the framework of our culture, there are very few people in a leadership role within BHC that have not advanced within the organization through some development program. Our lead RRT, for example, started with BHC out of college as an equipment cleaner. Our VP of rehab started as a delivery technician. Those stories go a long way to creating a culture that gets handed down to every person within the organization regardless of their tenure.
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Good leaders attract other leaders—you MUST invest in continuing to develop the leadership experience of your team.
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Make leadership development a part of what you do
Good leaders attract other leaders—you MUST invest in continuing to develop the leadership experience and toolbox of your team. At BHC, we do bi-annual leadership meetings where we bring in everyone who has a leadership role and spend one to two days together focusing on nuts and bolts operational material and team/leadership development. Part of this curriculum is pulled from books, podcasts, or other
VGM Playbook: Protecting Your Most Important Asset: Your People
People Investment | 10
