Julia Hanigsberg
I was a late adopter of social media. I remember asking a young lawyer on one of my teams more than a decade ago, ‘What is Facebook anyway?’ Her response was this: ‘Everyone who works for you who is young is on it!’ I also remember asking another professional on a different team (with some derision) why would I want to get news in 140-character bites when I get a daily newspaper at my door (he didn’t have a great answer!).
Today, with a monthly blog, Instagram and Facebook accounts and tens of thousands of tweets later, I guess I’m a convert. Social media has become an important part of my identity as a healthcare CEO. So, how did I go from a sceptic to writing a chapter on being a social CEO for this book?
One part of the answer is that I’ve been lucky to have great social media mentors. When I worked in a large university, I had students as my ‘reverse mentors’ who coached me. And through Twitter, a terrific social media expert named Lina Duque reached out to me and has been a coach and mentor (and friend!) ever since.
My work
In order to tell the story of being a social CEO, it makes sense to talk a bit about the challenges I face on a day-to-day basis outside of the social realm.
I am president and CEO of Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital. Established in 1899, Holland Bloorview is located in Toronto, Canada, and serves children and youth from across Ontario and Canada from infancy to young adulthood. The hospital sees clients with over 2,000 unique diagnoses annually. Our work is to support children and youth living with disability, medical complexity, illness and injury. A holistic approach is taken to assist young people in achieving their goals. This includes physical and cognitive development as well as life skills such as employment readiness, transitioning to adult healthcare and social services and friendship. Children and youth also have access to programming in music, arts, fitness, science and technology. Holland Bloorview is also an academic health sciences centre, which means that it trains the next generation of clinical professionals: doctors, nurses, therapists of all kinds and many others. In addition, it is in the top forty Canadian research hospitals, where researchers are working on the solutions to change the future for children and youth.
My number one priority is high-quality, safe, compassionate and coordinated health care that is centred around children, youth and their families. My team is extraordinary and makes miracles every day, but I know that the healthcare experience for families is far from perfect.
For example, I hear frequently from families how fragmented the healthcare system is. Why, as one mother asked me, is she expected to be the general contractor of her child’s care, keeping track of medications, specialist appointments, transitions between hospitals and home, back to family physician and in the school as well? My challenge is to work with other leaders across healthcare, social services and government (and more) to bring order to that fragmentation. And by the way, that mother I referenced is someone I follow and interact with on Instagram and Twitter.
A high proportion of our clients are children with disabilities who need not only tremendous medical care (and research to advance that care) but also acceptance and inclusion to achieve their most meaningful futures. Instead they face stigma and barriers. As one of our young clients tells us, she frequently lunches alone in the cafeteria at high school and her peers don’t see past her wheelchair to the person she really is: a creative ambitious young woman who plans to be a successful novelist and a mother and won’t let her cerebral palsy get in the way. That same young woman and I follow each other on Instagram.
Another inevitable challenge is the cost of providing care. We are fortunate in Canada to have publicly funded healthcare, but those funds are scarce and the costs of providing care are constantly increasing. We have to be great stewards of the financial resources we have and creatively stretch every dollar.
The relentless march of technology is another inevitability and a cost-driver. And while technology is a boon and necessity, it is also a burden. Type ‘doctors and technology’ into Google and you’ll be flooded with search results that lament how much clinicians hate electronic health records (which were supposed to save time and money) and essays predicting a future where artificial intelligence will replace much of the healthcare workforce (a contention with which I disagree).
Finally, our people are our single greatest resource. Burnout among clinicians is a serious reality, so I am laser-focused on how to promote team wellness. We also need to plan and recruit for the future of healthcare while being mired in the challenges of the present. To use a uniquely Canadian metaphor, we need to, in the words of hockey great Wayne Gretsky, ‘skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been’.
Social leadership
So how does any of this relate to social media? Well, social media is an important part of healthcare leadership because of the need to stay on top of these challenges within the context of the pace of change and the challenges of complexity.
The pace of change means that it is a struggle to keep on top of what you need to know to be an effective healthcare leader. I use Twitter as a tool to be engaged in some of the most current thinking and in dialogue with some of those thought leaders. I use social media as a rapid and omnipresent content delivery system that helps me identify and consume information, including health science research and leadership/strategy advice.
The complexity means that sources of information and knowledge from different sectors and thinkers are important in helping me approach the range of problems I’m thinking about. The breadth and variety of thinkers I’m exposed to on social media gives me insights that I can share with my team.
Through social media I not only read about but get to interact with academics, researchers and thought leaders from around the corner and around the globe. Perhaps even more importantly, I’m exposed to thinking from patients, caregivers, advocates and critics who are unlikely to be published in traditional sources. The challenge of being in dialogue with non-privileged viewpoints, whether or not I agree with them, is incredibly valuable for my ongoing thinking and personal development as a leader.
My unique approach to social media
My approach has been to use social media to be an extension of transparency in my leadership and to be the digital equivalent of the world’s best cocktail party!
If you imagine the quintessential open-door leadership approach, how much more effective is it if that door is open to all of Twitter? I’ve had young professionals reach out to me over Twitter to ask for career advice. I’ve had parents of children waiting for admission to our hospital connect with me by DM (direct message – a private way of communicating on Twitter) to ask questions, giving me the ability to connect them to the right people on my team, or to easy-to-access online resources. Members of my own team share their research or experience, and I get to amplify the impact they are making by sharing with my network. I connect with scientists thousands of kilometres and multiple time zones from where I live to hear about the most interesting and provocative new thinking.
I was new to healthcare four years ago, and social media accelerated my networking with leaders in the field. Before day one at Holland Bloorview, people who I was going to be working with were following me on Twitter so I hit the ground running with those on my new team who felt like they knew me and who I could rely on to help extend in-person relationships.
My Twitter feed is a window into who I am and what I care about. That is in the context of the professional me (healthcare/public sector leader), the engaged me (advocate for women in leadership, girls in STEM and disability stigma-busting) and the personal me (mom, wife, dog owner, reader).
That combination of the personal and professional is, for me, the essence of success on social media. To be effective, your social media presence needs to reflect your whole self and needs to be authentic and interactive. One of the best things is how people I meet in real life for the first time will feel like they already know and trust me because of prior engagement over social media. This could be because of a scientific breakthrough I tweeted about, but just as often it is because I shared a photo of Golda (my dog), a recipe or a novel recommendation.
Challenges
As much as my social media presence is personal to me, at the same time, as a CEO, whatever I do or say publicly reflects upon my organization. I treat my social media as an extension of myself and have to use judgement so that I don’t inadvertently put the hospital’s reputation at risk – I think I do a pretty good job at that balance.
I remember once being told by a communications professional that something I put in my blog about what I was currently reading wasn’t ‘relatable’. But it was literally what I was currently reading! Relatable or not, it stayed in because … authenticity!
However, there have been cases where someone has reacted negatively to something I’ve posted. For example, I touched a nerve when I expressed sympathy for the family of an accused perpetrator of a deadly and devastating crime. The context was the heartbroken mother of the accused lamenting failed multiple attempts to access mental health resources for her adult child. Fortunately, I was able to reach out over social media to an individual who had been particularly hurt by my comments and diffuse the situation, but I’ve seen those emotion-laden moments explode over social. The public nature of social media always includes some risk.
Five social media tips for CEOs in the healthcare sector
If you are thinking of embracing social media as a healthcare leader (and I think you should), here are five tips to consider:
1 Give it a try and be prepared to learn as you go.
I started out by following and ‘listening’ for a while before I got up the nerve to post. Find respected people or people you personally admire who are active on whatever social channel you want to try and learn from what they do, including things like frequency, style, use of hashtags, emojis and other social tactics. On Twitter, look for the feeds of some of the people you admire most as leaders or commentators. Then develop your personal style.
2 Neither be intimidated by nor be focused on numbers of followers, likes and so on.
Social media companies rely on our obsession with these very things and the dopamine rush of the ‘like’ to fuel our obsession with (and some say addiction to) social media. Resist! Be real. Share and consume what you find meaningful (and fun). Interact with people who fascinate and challenge you. Be a thoughtful, literate and critical consumer of information. Be impact-focused rather than followers-focused.
3 Don’t think you are too busy for social.
Of course you are busy. The beauty of social is it will take exactly the amount of time you want to give it and not a minute less or a minute more. If you don’t trust yourself not to get pulled down a digital rabbit hole, set a timer on your phone. You can be a social CEO in just fifteen minutes a day.
4 Share what other people are posting.
Be an amplifier and help other voices get heard, particularly people with less power or privilege than you might have. Give marginalized voices a place at the centre.
5 Use social media to connect with your own team and prospective employees.
Even if yours is a small organization and you are a master at ‘management by wandering around’, it is unlikely as CEO that you will be able to connect with every member of your team as often as you wish (I know I can’t). Social can be how you can connect with everyone – especially people who work different hours or other places than you do as CEO. Social media will never replace personally getting to the satellite location or connecting in person with staff who work the night shift, but it is a superb way to be broadly available.
Concluding thoughts
I never thought of myself as a social CEO. Our identities are composed of many elements, and social media can be a vehicle to exploring those different parts of ourselves with multiple communities. My leadership identity – who am I as a CEO in healthcare – is one of those multiple identities. Social media has been there to help me become the leader I am today and I’m grateful for the global community it helps me to be a part of. If that is being a social CEO, then I guess I am one – and all the better for it.