Anita Vaughn & Donna Abney
With the end of the 2016 election cycle in sight, presidential nominee Hillary Clinton stands poised to shatter the “highest and hardest glass ceiling” in the land. Should she be elected to the Oval Office on November 7th, it will be a resounding first for our nation, the news of a woman as president reverberating with the same kind of anticipation and resolve as the election of Obama in 2008.
Yet we needn’t look to Washington, D.C., to find stories of women who have shattered the glass ceiling, for they exist right here among us in Memphis. Women, who through hard work, tenacity, and determination, have climbed to the top of their particular fields. Nowhere has the ceiling been shattered so dramatically than in the healthcare industry.
Several years ago, while editor of Memphis Parent, I did a behind-the-scenes walk-through of the pediatric emergency wing being built at Baptist Women’s Hospital and met then-CEO Anita Vaughn. Then 64, Vaughn exuded energy and expertise. During our conversation, we talked about her journey as a healthcare executive, coming up as she had at a time when administrative leaders at Baptist were almost exclusively male.
How did she rise to the top, I found myself asking. What challenges did she and women of her generation encounter, and how were these overcome? Who were their mentors? And what have they done to help other women move forward into leadership roles in their respective organizations?
In reporting on this feature heard some interesting stories. I interviewed former Baptist Memorial Hospital for Women CEO Anita Vaughn; Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital president and CEO Meri Armour; Kathy Hunt, West Cancer Center’s regional director of business development and physician services, and former Methodist Le Bonner Healthcare executive vice president Donna Abney, listening closely as each woman shared the insights gained from a lifetime of leadership.
Women who excel
Though the glass ceiling is slowly but surely being shattered, the reality is that women continue to be underrepresented in top executive roles, particularly given their numbers in the field of healthcare. Women have made strides, certainly, as surveys spanning the last several decades suggest. But today, only 18 percent of hospital CEOs nationally are female.
Memphis has had the good fortune of having several early female leaders: Lucy Shaw, who headed The MED (now Regional One Health) from 1989 to 1995; Anita Vaughn, who oversaw the planning and building of Baptist Women’s from 2001 to 2015; and Peggy Troy, former Methodist LeBonheur COO and CEO of Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital from 2003 to 2007.
Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare CEO Gary Shorb, who has announced his retirement at the end of 2016, points to Lucy Shaw’s success, in particular, as an example of how that vision of diversity, in both gender and color, must start from the top down.
“It was quite unusual for an African American to take over a hospital [at that time], but Lucy was talented and had the support of her board. You must have a board that embraces that attitude and sees the strength in diversity,” he says. “Eighty percent of the workforce [at Methodist] is female, so having women in leadership roles is critical.”
Facing the challenges
Larry Kuzniewski
Mary Armour
In the 1970s, when these executives were beginning their careers, employment opportunities for women were still fairly narrow in scope. Le Bonheur’s CEO Meri Armour, who recently has led the hospital through a major fund-raising campaign and a $340 million build-out, says, “I graduated from an academically rigorous Catholic high school in Ohio in 1968 and my guidance counselor told me, ‘You have three choices: You can become a nun, a nurse, or a secretary.’ So I picked nursing.”
While women were hugely present in hospitals, their roles had been traditionally relegated to the nursing ranks. Just a handful of women were present on the business side of the aisle, recalls Donna Abney, who retired in April 2016 as executive vice president of Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare. The few who were in the public accounting office where she worked in the mid-1970s did their best to blend in, dressing in conservative suits accented with prim bow ties at the neck.
“There weren’t a lot of women who were older than me who were successful and someone to look up to,” she recalls. “And it was tough being a mom. It wasn’t a gracious and embracing time for women those first 13 years of my career.”
Anita Vaughn echoes that sentiment. The 43-year veteran of the Baptist healthcare system started out as a newly minted registered nurse — a title she still reveres — in the mid-1970s, joining the hospital during a nursing shortage. She did bedside nursing in the intensive care unit, learning how to tend to patients and manage doctors. But she also quietly cheered when a few women would arrive as part of the new resident rotation.
“When I first started, I would get a composite of the incoming residents and out of 50 U.T. residents, maybe two or three would be women. Being a young nurse, it would thrill me to see the female residents,” she says. “I loved medicine and sometimes thought maybe I should have gone down that path.”
Kathy Hunt
But becoming a doctor wasn’t a path women were typically encouraged to consider. Nursing was the traditional route. Yet while nurses did most of the day-to-day patient care at hospitals, they lacked decision-making authority. Armour, who started out in pediatric-oncology nursing, says the guidelines they had to adhere to were clear-cut. “When you called a physician to make a request, you didn’t call between the hours of 12 and 6 a.m. And you couldn’t make independent decisions,” she says.
“We weren’t part of a team. We weren’t considered thoughtful enough or smart enough to contribute. You couldn’t be heard in those days. We took care of patients and the [doctors] told us, ‘We’ll call you if we need something.’ That’s why I wanted to go to law school. I hated that.”
The challenge, if you wanted to lead, was to find your way out of that box.
“I think I performed well clinically and was well respected by the staff and doctors. That was a big thing, especially in the intensive care unit,” says Vaughn. Head nurses, particularly once they began to manage a unit and personnel, would mix with doctors and staff more routinely, learning how the organization functioned.
“We’d have monthly ICU meetings with the medical director, physicians, and administrative staff, so that gave me the opportunity to be in front of those administrators and to show I could prepare for meetings and report how we were doing.” Having access to those decision-makers eventually led to a place at the table.
The importance of mentoring
Once they had begun to gain more expertise in their jobs, these female executives looked for opportunities to grow and prepare for the next phases of their careers. That meant finding someone who would mentor them, leaders who recognized their abilities and gave them additional growth opportunities.
“You need mentoring to build your own confidence,” Donna Abney says. She found several leaders, including Gary Shorb and Maurice Elliot, former CEO of Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, who would “put themselves in the backseat and let you take credit and run with the ball. They would challenge me by saying, ‘Take this, you can handle it.’ This was early in my career when I was still finding out what I could do.”
But such acts were confidence builders and enabled Abney to begin believing in own her abilities. “So many women were smart and capable but intimidated by the spotlight shining on you. Tell what you know. If you know it, own it,” she says.
“The first time I thought I was an effective leader was when I was heading the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center,” says Armour. “The director of the center was remarkable in his qualities: nurturing, supportive, self-effacing, humble. I learned more from him than any woman I worked with. What he taught was how to be selfless and vulnerable to those around you, and not to worry about your own success because when you give it away it comes back tenfold.”
Vaughn remembers a nurse administrator, Elizabeth Farnell, who routinely took her into her confidence. “She would often call me into her office — that was an honor right there — and she’d pull out a project from her ‘incubator drawer’ and say, ‘Think this through with me, Anita,’ and I’d get to brainstorm with her.” Having an administrator she could problem-solve with helped strengthen Vaughn’s leadership skills and, with Farrell’s advice and coaching, Vaughn eventually became the chief nursing officer at Baptist Memphis.
Similarly, West Clinic’s Kathy Hunt credits a marketing executive at East Jefferson General Hospital in New Orleans, where she worked in business development for a decade, for believing in her. “He could be a sounding board, yet, looking back, he gave me complete autonomy to grow and develop. He saw something in me and gave me the opportunity,” she says. “That was the catalyst for everything that came after.”
Says Gary Shorb: “You have to be deliberate about mentoring. Unless you are really very conscious of opening doors and mentoring, it just won’t happen. The same can be said about encouraging minority-owned businesses. You must make those strategies a priority to have a diverse environment. If the CEO and C-suite don’t have that intentionality, then it’s difficult to make significant progress.”
Paying it forward
These women will also tell you that furthering their educations and saying yes to bigger assignments ultimately enabled them to move up, making choices that helped them develop a broader knowledge base. Armour says she climbed the nursing ladder, and eventually moved to Cleveland Clinic to start their cancer center and children’s hospital.
“That was really the start of my transition from traditional nursing to hospital administration.” That position would lead to University Hospitals of Cleveland Case Medical Center in 1995, a senior-level position that required more executive thinking and decision-making, responsibilities, Armour says, that went beyond nursing to include cancer services, pediatrics, and women’s health. That would prime her to be recruited to take the helm at Le Bonheur, which would go on to receive national acclaim as a premier children’s hospital.
“I would often encourage women to take more assignments, to grab those projects, to be assertive,” explains Abney. “Those major stepping stones were when I did that and ultimately became part of my work . . . It shines a light on you and gives you the opportunity to be heard and seen in a different way.”
Finally, as more women ascend to leadership roles in healthcare, they can bring with them a softening of the corporate culture, an acknowledgment that work/life balance is an important part of business today. Employers must recognize and try to accommodate the demands their staff face beyond the workplace.
“The great thing about the women’s revolution is that men got to be whole people too,” notes Abney. “Executive women began to look at their male colleagues and ask, ‘Why aren’t you going to the kids’ soccer game?’
“I have always told every executive mom, ‘You won’t remember that much about your work life and why you missed those soccer games, but you’ll remember that you missed them. Don’t let your kids down, don’t make decisions you’ll regret; that will haunt you.’ I don’t have any regrets. I was going to work hard and give 110 percent, but I wasn’t going to forfeit something of my kids’ lives.”
Finally, sharing knowledge with others is integral to creating future leaders. Hunt does that through her involvement with professional organizations. Currently, she’s the president of the Mid-South Medical Group Management Association and writes a regular column for Memphis Medical News.
And Vaughn passes along the lessons she received from her mentors. “I’ve had many women come and say, ‘I want your job,’ and I’d say, ‘That’s a great goal; I want you to have my job. So let’s talk about your path to get there.’ ”
