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Leadership Levers
This podcast spotlights leaders' actions so they may enhance their organization’s performance and culture.
We feature CEOs and industry-recognized Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who share their experiences and insights on three key challenges: people, performance, and profit.
If you are a leader who wants to learn from your peers about improving performance and financial returns, please join us.
Leadership Levers
Building a Unified Workforce - Post Merger Success with Thomas Fondren
What if merging two competing organization's divisions could lead to remarkable growth, employee alignment, and financial success?
In this episode, Thomas Fondren, CEO of Advanced Orthopedics of Oklahoma, shares his journey - unifying a recently merged organization and leaning into a a patient-first approach.
He discusses the importance of a cohesive culture, aligning communication across the team, and bridging gaps between different business units to drive growth and success - highlighting the transformative power of consistent leadership and clear, shared values.
Whether you're a leader looking to strengthen your organizational culture or just curious about effective leadership strategies, this episode offers invaluable insights that you won't want to miss.
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Welcome to the Leadership Levers Podcast. I'm your host, Will Gladhart, CMO at the Culture Think Tank. At the Culture Think Tank, we empower leaders with metrics that strengthen culture, drive performance and return. We're here today to learn about the actions leaders have taken to address organizational change. Our guest today is Thomas Fondren, CEO at Advanced Orthopedics of Oklahoma. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.
Thomas Fondren:Well, you're welcome. Glad to be here.
William Gladhart:All right, well, let's start by having you share with our audience a bit about yourself, your background and your organization.
Thomas Fondren:Yeah, I'm recently new to the organization. I've been here about a year, a little over a year I guess. Throughout my whole career I've been in healthcare, so I have 30 or 40 years of experience now. But this organization is new to me. I was born and raised in Tulsa so I recently moved back here to become the CEO of this organization.
William Gladhart:Excellent. So, as far as the orthopedics piece of it, what does your organization exactly do?
Thomas Fondren:Yeah, we're a medium-sized orthopedic group. We have 22 physicians, seven PT clinics, MRI. We own part of a hospital, so it's kind of a full-service organization. We're really focused in as a patient-first organization. We cover all body parts. We do trauma, we do a lot of sports medicine, spine, hands, total joints we're full coverage.
William Gladhart:Wow, that's amazing, and you have a lot of staff and a lot of different clinics, so that makes for a lot of things going on. So we'll be discussing three questions today as a warm-up to our conversation. Would you share why you believe a healthy culture is critical?
Thomas Fondren:Yeah, I mean, I think it starts everything. Patients have to feel the culture as they come in. Staff have to feel it, so they'll stay here. Doctors have to feel it because they want to work here and if you want to grow as a company, your culture has to be one that will allow for that growth.
William Gladhart:Absolutely. It's been our experience that leaders tend to struggle in three key areas people, process or profit. In your role as CEO, especially since you're newer to this organization, would you share or identify which of those three areas represented a cultural challenge for you
Thomas Fondren:Oh, absolutely, and so I think it begins with the first two. The short story is, this group was formed by two competing orthopedic groups merging, and that merger happened before I got here. But we still I mean, you still hear people talk about it and we've taken stances. That's the past. We're going to be a forward-thinking company. We don't really acknowledge it as much anymore and as staff turns over, it becomes less and less we get to do really good things with that the company itself.
Thomas Fondren:You know, our motto is we exceed expectations, and that is with staff, that is with patients, that is with doctors, that is with payers, with patients, that is with doctors, that is with payers, it's with every single customer, family members. And so, if you, my opinion is, if you fix people and you fix processes, profits will follow People before profits. Yeah.
William Gladhart:Yeah, I really liked that you share that. You know, in our prior conversation you had shared that it was a really big challenge to kind of merge and bring these organizations together. But as you looked at that challenge across the board, how did that negatively impact the organization or the culture?
Thomas Fondren:Well, I think you had shortly after the merger. From what I've been told I wasn't here, but what I've been told shortly after the merger the company still kind of ran separately. You had staff and providers doing things one way and you had the rest doing it a different way. And as time has kind of taken its effect on this, now we have all the doctors hearing the same message from me in the board of management.
Thomas Fondren:Very concise. We've had to raise the bar for employees to hey, this is now the expectation, this is now what it means to be successful. All of that, as time has gone on, has really started to pay dividends for us.
William Gladhart:Yeah, I really like that that you identified an action. But you know, could you share maybe what was the one thing that you did as you stepped into a role as a new leader that helped impact the culture, the people, the process positively?
Thomas Fondren:Yeah, so in our organization our clinic is in one part of the building in the business office. Our clinic is in one part of the building in the business office, completely separate building. And what we did was I realized that people in our business office employees had never even seen our clinic. They park in a different parking lot.
Thomas Fondren:They come to a different oh yeah, and so immediately we started bringing them down, forcing them to come down and meet with the doctors and meet with the staff that they're talking to on email. And we've had to buy a bunch of lunches is what we say, you know to get them down here so we can all be on the same page, you know, and, like I said, it is finally starting to pay dividends. Everyone's buying into the vision. Putting patients first was key. It's starting to be successful. We're starting to feel that success.
William Gladhart:Yeah, I really think that's a great story for other leaders of bringing not only two different organizational structures together, but now two different business entities within the same one business unit, that now you are focusing on continuing to align those individuals, those conversations, the culture. So is there anything else you'd like to add or share with fellow leaders today?
Thomas Fondren:I think the one thing that probably say that I would say that was I had to really kind of grind home in the very beginning was the message of we're going to be business first, we're going to grow and here's how we're going to do it. And the message from the executive team and the board of managers to other doctors and doctors were recruiting and staff and managers was the exact same. And so they all hear this we are going to, this is the route we're going to go and here's why we're going to go that way. And the growth of this company has really taken off because of that.
William Gladhart:Yeah, I think that's a wonderful nugget to share here at the end is, you know, aligning the communication strategy, the consistency everyone's talking, and speaking the same way about the goals and mission of the organization. That's really exciting to hear. So, Thomas, I've enjoyed having you on our Leadership Levers podcast. Thank you again for your insights.
Thomas Fondren:Thank you so much, appreciate it.
William Gladhart:Thank you for joining us on the Leadership Levers podcast. Find all our Leadership Levers episodes on the Culture Think Tank website at www. theculturethinktank. com or listen on your favorite streaming platform. We'd love to hear from you about the challenges you have faced as a leader. Tune in weekly as we invite leaders to share their experiences in strengthening culture and performance, one action at a time.
