I recently went one-on-one with Laura Bartus. Laura is the Head of Learning for Humana’s Center Wealth Pharmacy and is the Chief Learning Officer of the Human Health Project.
Adam: What are the keys to developing emotional intelligence and why is it important in the field of healthcare?
Laura: I think the real core of what we do in our work in health insurance and in the healthcare industry in general is taking care of people and trying to improve their well-being. When you think about what we do at Humana, it’s not just providing health insurance. It’s really trying to help people have more healthy days. And it’s really important to us that we keep the people that we’re serving at the core of everything we’re doing. So customer service is really important. If you have somebody on the phone with you who’s a member that’s having a tough time getting a hold of their doctor or getting a medication, you need to listen to them. They need to feel like you truly care, because you do. And you need to be able to serve that person and give them the right information at the right time. So it helps them fix their problems. Emotional intelligence is critical for us because we are not going to help people live healthier lives if we can’t support them. And we can’t support them if we don’t listen to them. So I absolutely think emotional intelligence is critical. Everybody on my team is wonderful at that. And that’s something we really try and focus on.
I might get into stoicism a little bit here, but it’s important that you understand what your thoughts and emotions are in a situation so that you can evaluate whether a situation is tough for you, whether a situation is, let’s say, triggering for you, or a situation is going to overwhelm your ability to think reasonably. So you’ve got to know yourself first. And then you have to practice a lot of self-management techniques. You’ve got to give yourself the time to wait before responding sometimes. Sometimes I like to sleep on it if it’s a really rough email, and I’m like, I want to respond to that right now. Sometimes I need to stop and wait. Counting to 10 is great. Sleeping on it is even better. But practice some emotional regulation techniques that will help you not let the emotions that are flooding you overwhelm your reason. I think that’s super critical. And then the next two things are: be aware of other people and what’s going on with them. Think about if you were in their shoes, how might they be feeling if it’s a member that’s calling us, let’s say, and their medication is delayed. Well, if it were you, you would probably be really frustrated, too, if you didn’t have a medicine that you needed or if you’re calling for your mom and your mom is having a hard time getting a claim paid. Think about putting yourself in that other person’s shoes. And then the last part of emotional intelligence is just trying to build that relationship, trying to build trust, letting people know that you’re there for them. Often it’s being the one to try to fix it, to try to repair things. Whether you’re on the phone with somebody, or whether you’re talking to your best friend, or you’ve got a tough conversation you’ve got to have with a co-worker, always be the one to try to repair things and build trust.
Adam: What are the keys to building successful relationships in healthcare?
Laura: I have a great friend at work, Natasha Wade, who made a great analogy on building relationships. And she said, “Building relationships is like having a bank account. And every time you go to the bank, you’re either making a withdrawal or putting in a deposit.” And when you think about trust at work or trust at home, you need to be putting more into the relationship than you’re taking out of it. So make continual deposits in that relationship. One of the best things you can do is have touch bases every couple of months with people, even if you’re not working on a project, just to see how they’re doing, see how their kids are, what’s going on in their life, what’s stressing them out. That’s making a deposit. And sometimes you’re going to need to make a withdrawal, too, which is like, hey, I need something from you, or we have a conflict and it’s not going so great, and we have to have one of those kind of crucial conversations. You’ve got to put more into it than you take out. And when you are investing in people and showing them that you’re trustworthy and you’re real with them, like you’ve got to be vulnerable. Sometimes I have to share when I’ve messed up, and that’s hard. But in the end, they’re more willing to forgive you when they know that you really care and that you’re a really honest person. One of the best things that I actually love is talking about conflict resolution and how you need to start with yourself. You need to own your part in it. People don’t want to have conflict. People don’t want to disagree with other people. They don’t want to fight. It’s really awkward, super uncomfortable. But when you start with, here’s my part in this, when you start with, I own that this issue that we’re facing is my fault. That opens the door for a better relationship and building for the future. If you don’t start with owning it, then I think sometimes you don’t have a foundation to build an agreement on. So, having that first, hey, here’s what I did. Here’s where I messed up. That gives the other person the opportunity to say, well, it’s not all your fault. I did that too. And then you can come to an agreement.
Adam: What do you believe are the most important soft skills that anyone working in healthcare needs to develop and how can they develop them?
Laura: There are a couple that are really important. The first one is, especially with the advent of new technologies that are AI enabled that make us not have to do so much manual gathering and pulling of data and finding of reports, that kind of stuff, critical thinking is probably one of the most important skills that we need to teach people in the workforce. That’s in healthcare, that’s in every industry, because you no longer have to go hunt and peck and find that information. The information is going to come to you. You don’t have to spend hours finding the right document. You can now have the document summarized and given to you. But it’s still important that you have the critical thinking skills to know what to do with that information. So you’re not just finding, knowing, and understanding. You’re analyzing and you’re synthesizing that information, and then you’re incorporating it into your work. So maybe a data scientist doesn’t have to go and take a look at 1,000 rows of an Excel spreadsheet anymore. But they have to know what does this information mean? Why is this important to us in our work and for our team? So, critical thinking, I think, is important for anyone. And then the other one that I always am trying to help people build up, and I’m encouraging people to build up, is just agility, mental agility. You have to have a growth mindset to even Hope succeed in the work world. The pace of change is faster than ever. The pace of the technologies bettering themselves is doubling basically, or for their computing power doubles every. 18 months, that’s going to get faster. And so exponential growth rate and the technologies we’re dealing with, if we don’t have the mindset of I’m constantly learning, I’m constantly growing, I’m constantly gaining new skills, we’re going to be left in the dust and we’re not going to be the people that help move our companies into the future. They’re going to hire outside talent. So if you actually want to stay relevant, you want to keep moving up in your company, you really have to be constantly building up your skill set, figuring out, all right, how do these new technologies help me? What do I still need to do? What other skills might be important for me to learn to be successful in my particular field?
Adam: How can anyone working in healthcare develop critical thinking skills?
Laura: I think you need to practice the art of analyzing a problem and looking at it from a solution-oriented mindset. So you might not have as much raw data to look at, but look at things from the perspective of what is truly the problem here that we are trying to solve, and how can we fix it? And you have to put on your strategic cap and say, well, if X is the problem and I know we need to get to Z, then what does my Y look like? You have to figure out how to be strategic in coming up with solutions. It’s kind of the process of going through needs analysis for whatever problem, and going, all right, I think this is the issue, but what does the data say? What is the issue really? It’s just thinking through what is really the cause. It’s like root cause analysis. What’s the cause of this problem? And how could I be a part in helping solve that? I like when people are just brainstorming solutions because I think that if we are just kind of looking at the problems with our own lens, we’re only going to come out with a very limited number of solutions. So I love seeing lots of different people identifying potential solutions, but we have to spend more time on the problem. I see a lot of people jumping right to solutions, and I don’t think that’s healthy either. You do want to come up with a solution, but when we truly understand a problem, then we come to better solutions. I can’t remember who said it. Fall in love with the problem. Don’t fall in love with the solution. And I think that’s really wise because if you truly, deeply understand what the problem is, you’re going to have better insights into what the solution is and not just jump there.
Adam: Are there examples where you’ve seen the kind of problem-solving that you’re referring to come to life?
Laura: A lot of it in learning and development is that you need to truly understand what the business problem is before building a learning solution. A few years ago, when I was a learning designer, that’s a person who does instructional design and builds a learning solution, I had a project where I had to train employees on a new computer system. And I didn’t understand the problem well enough to build a truly great learning solution. I just jumped to, here’s the new tool. Here are all the screens in it. Let me develop a learning solution that trains people on that tool. I didn’t spend enough time figuring out why associates were going to be using the tool, what kind of tasks they were going to be completing in it. And the learning solution kind of bombed because I hadn’t spent enough time going, what is their process going to be when they’re using this new technology? I spent more time going, OK, I want the e-learning course to do this, and then this, and then this. I was in love with e-learning, and it was like a new Camaro for me or something. It was really, really fun. But I didn’t spend enough time going, what’s the process that people are going to follow in this technology from beginning to end? That’s how I should have trained it. First, they’re going to log in, then they’re going to get to this general demographic screen, then they’re going to have to input this information. And because I hadn’t thought about what we should be doing and I just thought about what I wanted the end result to be, I had to redevelop it, which really sucked for me because it was a whole lot of additional hours. It was also embarrassing because I hadn’t done it right the first time. Nobody wants to be in that situation. So it kind of prevents problems when you do a really good needs analysis at the beginning to figure out, okay, what is truly going on here? What is truly the issue that we’re trying to fix?
Adam: What skills do you believe anyone in healthcare should develop?
Laura: Well, one of the first and most important in healthcare is business acumen. Because a lot of times our teammates were in particular roles that are sort of a microcosm of the business. Maybe it’s a quality team. Maybe it’s a claims team. Maybe it’s a call team or the learning team like I’m in. And we have a very siloed approach to work sometimes. And we’re kind of just doing our work heads down. And we don’t look up and think about how does my work impact the whole company? I try really hard to build up business acumen, understanding what are our drivers of profitability. What are the things that are big expenses? How much does poor quality cost us? Or if a customer calls in and they’re like, hey, this is wrong, what does the negative interaction cost us in terms of goodwill and dollars? So I think everybody in the health care industry needs to have a more fully baked understanding of how the whole business works, how the industry works. When I do an annual conference with a few other people who help me plan it, it’s for internal associates. And we have three sections of conference sessions that we do. One of them is career development. One of them is well-being. But another whole chunk of them is business acumen. So we have sessions on how does CenterWell make money? What is Humana’s place in the health insurance industry, and why is that important? How do you in your particular role develop better products and deliver value to the organization? So probably business acumen is the most critical factor in people’s ability to understand the business and then also have opportunities to move up. Because we can move up to a certain point with the skills that we are building in our particular functional framework. But at some point when we move up into leadership, we really need to understand the business better. And I think that’s what sets apart people who don’t move up and people who become healthcare executives.
Adam: How can anyone interested in developing that business acumen develop it?
Laura: I think it’s a combination of experience and learning. I would highly recommend, there’s a great book that I read a couple years ago. It’s called Seeing the Big Picture. And it’s all about the drivers of profitability. That’s just a $15 book that you can get on Amazon. It’s great for understanding the business. But I think another really important thing to do is ask your leader, ask your boss, if you can get some experience in learning the budget, and what are the things that impact your budget. I would also advocate for getting a mentor in your organization, somebody who helps you understand from their perspective. Maybe it’s somebody in finance, and you’re like, hey, how do we make money? Hey, what determines whether or not we’ve had a good year? How are bonuses calculated? That person, that mentor who’s at a higher level than you, has a much better, more well-rounded understanding of the whole area of the business. Just as you rise through the business, you’re going to have insight into more and more areas. So ask that person, ask that mentor for a lot of insights into the finances of an organization. The other thing I would say is go do a job shadow. So go to in whatever your HR information system is, go and look for people who have finance job titles. Maybe find the finance people for your area. Go do a job shadow with them and say, hey, tell me a little bit about your work and how you determine what’s allocated for the next three months in the budget. Tell me how the budgeting process works. Tell me how we make money. And that person can give you a behind-the-curtain sneak peek into how we make money. Those are things that anybody in an organization can do, whether they’re in shipping, whether they’re in janitorial, whether they’re in building maintenance, whether they’re in patient-facing care, or whether they’re in a more professional, like a consulting kind of role. Anybody in the business can find a mentor, read a book, or go do a job shadow. Those things are not limited to people in the upper echelons of the company. So I always try and get people involved in those. If you don’t have a formal mentoring program at your company, Go look for people who have those titles and ask to have that relationship with them. Usually, people love sharing their knowledge, and if they’re not already overwhelmed with mentees, then they’d probably be willing to help you out for a limited term. Don’t ask for a long term, but maybe six months, 30 minutes a month, an hour a month. That is usually time that people are willing to give.
Adam: I love that advice, and it’s not going to surprise you that I’m a big believer in the power of mentorship. One of the pieces of advice that I share often with audiences on the topic of mentorship is to start small. Don’t ask someone who you don’t know: Can you be my mentor? They’re going to look at you and, whether they say it or think it, respond: I don’t know you, you don’t know me, that’s a pretty big ask. Instead, ask that person: Can we go out to coffee? Do you have 20 minutes for a phone call? Do you have 20 minutes for a Zoom? Start small and grow from there. Mentorship relationships, like every other successful relationship, require both parties wanting to be there and both parties wanting to take that relationship to the next level and then to the next level. So if your 20-minute coffee or Zoom, or phone call goes well, that’s going to lead to a lunch. That’s going to lead to a more extensive relationship. That person will probably be your mentor if it’s meant to be and if you ultimately pursue it. But if you start off in a way that is just overwhelming, you might kill things before they have an opportunity to sprout.
Laura: Yeah, always. under-promise, over-deliver. I think that when you’re pursuing a mentoring relationship, just ask for that small thing, and somebody is more likely to invest that small amount of time. Even you can start with sending them a message on LinkedIn or through your company email, say, do you have 10 minutes for me to pick your brain? Or can I pick your brain on one particular question? If you get a positive response to that, then you can, like you said, grow it. But I think when people pursue mentors, the mistake that they often make is shooting for the moon. And if I get an email from somebody asking me to be a mentor for a certain amount of time, like a year, let’s say, that’s a lot tougher for me to say yes to than just, hey, I have this question about leadership. Can you answer it for me? That one question. And if they respond with great thoughts or they show me that they took that advice to heart, I’m much more willing to invest more of my time. I’d say one more thing that I would add is when you are talking to people, you want to be your mentors, or you want to job shadow them, or even if you’re trying to sell them something, offer value. Don’t just make it a one-way relationship. I talk to people all the time who are just asking, asking, asking. Find out how you can help them too, because that’s how you build a real relationship. It’s not just gimme, gimme, gimme. What people want is to build a relationship where both people give and take. That’s a true relationship. So it’s really important for mentees to try and figure out how they can help that mentor too. I actually think one of the coolest things that I’ve heard of, I did this for a while, was reverse mentoring. So I had a person who was younger than me. He knew a lot about AI technology and different things that could help me with efficient work. And he was my reverse mentor. I talked to him about leadership, and he talked to me about things to keep me fresh. I’m not going to understand the skibbity-riz, whatever the verbal jumbo is. My 14-year-old would be like, Mom, you’re so embarrassing. he kept me fresh. So he helped me, and I helped him, and that was one of my favorite mentoring relationships.
Adam: What a great point. And every single person has the ability to add value. It doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter who you’re sitting across the table from. You have the ability to add value. And it starts with your mindset. It starts with your desire to add value. It starts with your desire to be that person who is going to help the person who you are with. And if you approach every relationship, whether it’s a potential mentor-mentee relationship or any other relationship, with that mindset that you have the capacity to add value to anyone around you, you’re going to be successful. How do you do that? It starts with listening. It starts with being willing and being eager. To approach every conversation not as the person who is there to talk but as the person who is there to listen and to learn.
Laura: To your point about anybody adding value, anybody can be a mentor also. We actually learn a lot by mentoring. And a person who isn’t in a leadership role still has a lot of subject matter knowledge that they can give to other people. If you’re a claims adjuster, there is a less senior person that you could mentor. If you have been on a shipping doc, you can add value to another person who’s brand new. If you are in learning and development, there is somebody who’s just starting out that you can help too. So you can add value to any number of people. When you don’t have a formal leader role or title, don’t let your title limit your ability to help other people.
Adam: What advice do you have on the topic of coaching?
Laura: So, for people who coach others, I would say you have to learn to let people 100% make their own career choices and try not to give advice on which way to go. One of the most important things that I’ve learned over the years as a coach is self-determination. And when I’m there as a coach, my job is really to help people figure out I ask these questions all the time. What is it that in a new job would bring you joy? So what would bring you joy? What motivates you to get up? What motivates you to do well? And then, looking back at your life when you’re 80 years old, what would make you proud of your life? Those are three really important questions that I cannot answer for you as a coach that you need to answer for yourself. in order for coaching to have an impact on your future. And for people who need a coach, you have to be willing to do the work, knowing yourself, kind of back to where we started here, knowing yourself, knowing what would truly make you happy. I’ve said this to lots of different people. Some of the most miserable people are the people who have just chased titles in their career and who get to that next level and realize, This makes me miserable. And they have to find some way to climb back down to a role where their job tasks actually still bring them joy. And they wake up in the morning, and they feel motivated to do well by their tasks. And they know that when they’re done with their life, they’re going to feel great about what they’ve done. So, for coaches, you have to let people make their own choices, but you have to be like a sounding board. You have to ask them the right questions and help them figure out what they want. For coaching clients or for people who are even mentees, you have to be willing to put in the work. Because I can mentor you all day long, or I can give you coaching sessions. I can help you think through life decisions. But if you’re not willing to analyze yourself, figure out what your boundaries are, what particular things you would love doing. You don’t need to be in coaching or mentoring at all. If you don’t have the ability to rethink your life and rethink your career, you’re not going to be successful in coaching, and mentorship is going to be a waste of time.
Adam: What inspired your love of learning? And how can anyone develop a growth mindset?
Laura: The first part of that, the love of learning, was definitely something that my mom did really well, which was reading books to me all the time. We were homeschooled, and we did classes and things like that with other homeschoolers. We weren’t like weird kids in bobby socks and jean skirts kind of homeschoolers. We tried to be normal. I don’t know if we succeeded. But she read to us every day at lunch. And I had so many great days of reading Harry Potter. Every single time a Harry Potter book came out. Now I’m sounding like a millennial. We’re on the cusp of old and young. I spent so many days, so many great lunches, reading with my mom. And she did all the voices. And Adam, that was the thing that just ignited my love of books and my love of learning more and more and more. I had so many days when I would take a book to bed. My mom would say, okay, lights out, Laura. And I’d be like, okay, mom, sure. And I had a flashlight, and I would stay up until like one in the morning reading this dang book so that I could finish by the morning. I would get the new Harry Potter book, and my mom would read the first couple of chapters at lunch. I would take the book to bed and I would finish it by the morning. And then I would listen to it again when my mom read it the next day. That’s where I truly figured out the joy of learning and exploring new worlds. That’s why I was an English major in college. And that’s probably why I am in L&D now, in learning and development, because I love the light bulb moment that goes on. I love bringing in new information and making it a part of my life. I love the experience of going to new worlds and seeing new things. So that was the first part of the question. You also asked about how to help people have a growth mindset. I think the first thing is accepting that you don’t know everything, because I sure don’t. And the older I get, the more I realize I know very little. But that’s actually kind of freeing, knowing that you don’t know everything. When I was 20, 21, 22, I knew everything. And that was kind of obnoxious. I had to apologize to my parents later for knowing everything. And they were like, we’re good. Don’t worry, Laura, we know. But you have to be willing to accept, I don’t know everything. And then be curious. Start your day and start each interaction with curiosity. And if you start with – “Why would this be? What’s going on here?” – you’re more willing to take in information. I try to lead by example. In my teams, I’m trying to always learn something, take a class, do a certification. And I’m really thinking tired. I am so tired. I am certificationed out. But you know what? I learn a lot of new stuff every single time I do those. And it makes me a better leader. And it sets up an environment where other people want to learn, too. Because I have to model it if I want other people on my team to do it, too. So that’s really it. To take so many certifications, you’re exhausted all the time. That’s the key. And I think that’s my favorite thing about curiosity: When I teach people about curiosity, I always put up an image of a baby that’s just eyes wide open. And when I think about curiosity, I just realize adults stop asking why. We don’t ask why. My kids ask why all the time, especially when they were three and four, it was like, why, why, why? We don’t ask those questions anymore and we don’t learn and grow as much because we don’t do that anymore. And I think you can greatly increase the amount that you learn and grow your skill set if you just say why, like little kids do. And I think if you look at how kids take in information, one of my sons, I have twins, they’re 10. One of my 10-year-old twin boys is so excited about black holes and the universe and stars, constellations, quantum mechanics, he’s constantly just voluntarily learning about this stuff. He’s constantly watching YouTube videos, National Geographic, or watching the Cosmos documentary, stuff like that, because he just wants to know why. And we can learn a lot of lessons from kids. I think that when we stop asking why, it’s like experiencing brain death. That’s when we truly become old.
Adam: Is there anything that you think anyone in the field of healthcare should know?
Laura: That’s a good question. I would say that healthcare specifically is a very change-legged industry. We are impacted by a lot of different trends and financial ups and downs and regulation. Lots of rules change from year to year. It depends on who the current administration is, or Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rules, all that stuff. I have been through a lot of changes in my time. And at first, I was very frustrated by them and sometimes angry if the change was something that impacted me personally. But I tried to start shifting my thinking. And I would say for anybody in health care, that’s something that we probably all need to do. I have tried to start thinking of those changes as opportunities to do something different. Because in the end, I’m always going to have to do something different. It’s just probably sooner than I hoped. But it’s an opportunity to learn a new skill. It’s an opportunity to change what I’m doing. It’s an opportunity not to stagnate. And, man, I’ve been through some tough stuff. I’m sure everybody in the work world has, but there were some things that were really painful. And it took me a while to put a different lens on it and say, but look what I learned. But look how I grew through those situations. Years later, looking back, I’m really grateful for those changes or for those shifts because they also made me different. And if I’m not different from day to day, then I’m just stagnating and my skill set’s going to wither away. So every time I have a change, I just try and be grateful for it. I got this great book recommendation a couple of months ago, and it’s by Ryan Holiday. It’s called The Obstacle is the Way. Really fantastic book. I listened to it on an audiobook. But one of the key points in the book is that when you see an obstacle like a giant boulder in your path, try to embrace that as an opportunity to rethink your path. How is it that you can use this obstacle to move you forward in a different way? And that’s more stoicism for you. I’m just like in baby steps into stoicism, but it’s really helping me figure out how to own the things in my life that I think are going wrong and figure out how can I use those things to propel me forward in a different way. So highly recommend the book. It’s one of the most impactful ones I’ve ever read. And I think you have to look at it as this is really tough for people. It’s not about me. I’m not the victim. These changes happen. People are not out to get me with these organizational structure changes or team moves or whatever it is. You have to think about what is it really about. We really start personalizing it and make the changes about us, especially in a work setting. We can start to kind of go inside of ourselves and be in a really negative place where we’re not able to be productive or help move forward or help other people accept the change. And we get to kind of a toxic place. I’ve been there. And it is brutal and it took me a long time to recover from that.
When I teach people about change, I actually teach them that we have to go through the grief cycle when we approach changes. I know other people do this too, but you have to first accept it. Denial, there ain’t no river in Egypt. You have to get through bargaining. You have to get through grief. You have to get to acceptance. All the parts of the grieving cycle, you have to go through those in your own self, so that you can actually move forward from a change. You have to sit with it, and you have to figure out what is it that I’m actually afraid of? What is it that makes me nervous about this? How is this impacting me physically? And move through the grief cycle.
