Katie Balls-white

I attribute my success to a few things. First, my support system - my husband, who's helped balance things at home when things get a little busy or rough at work. My parents really helped me pursue what I was interested in. And then there's that intrinsic motivation of wanting to succeed. As far as being a director, I've always just, in my opinion, been a natural leader, and so it just kind of aligned with who I am.

I don't know that I really got a lot of advice or mentorship. For me, my career journey was really about what did I want, and just going after it. In college, jobs were pretty hard to come by, especially as the recession was kind of coming back. I chose to do some internships, which introduced me to the workforce and ended up being my first job after I moved. And then from there, it was just pursuing anything I found interesting, and just trying to grow my skill set to fill gaps or continue to grow. For me, the biggest thing is just you own your career, and it's up to you to kind of pursue your passion and where you want to go.

Whether it's my profession or any industry, you are your best advocate, and you know your value, and don't listen to voices that don't raise you up. Anything that diminishes you is not there to help you, so you've really got to know your value and your worth and pursue it, regardless of what obstacles get in your way.

The biggest challenge is the evolving labor market, which puts a lot of pressure on the work that my team and I do. It's an interesting dynamic right now. A large portion of our organization is in healthcare, which is one of the most rapidly growing labor markets and one of the areas of biggest need, which typically drives compensation up. Yet the other segment of our organization is more in that general industry, which is slowing down. We're seeing a lot of layoffs and a higher rate of unemployment, which then starts to soften compensation. Typically, we've seen it move very similarly over my 10-year career at St. Luke's, and now it's just hitting some of the challenges of how do we manage that when it can feel really hard. You see a big segment of your organization looking one way and another looking different. It's been very interesting to navigate and then maintain, because it's a very quickly evolving situation. We're just trying to maintain a pulse on it so that we can be more proactive versus reactive to what's changing.

We follow CARE values at St. Luke's, and I think they resonate pretty closely with me: integrity, compassion, accountability, responsibility, and excellence. I use all of those in both my professional and personal life.