Laura Ortega

I'm made of 100% resilience, I'll say. I came to this country at a young age, and my journey has been in the middle of all that path of struggle and growth. I think it's just having a fire to keep going despite all the challenges, and whenever I hit a sequence of good moments, recognizing how much of that is truly the value of all the other effort that I made and all the other times where I had to push through just out of grit and resilience. I don't take things for granted, and I always push myself to keep going even if I don't see anything yet coming to fruition. That persistence and resilience is what has gotten me to where I am today.

The best career advice I received wasn't necessarily framed in a sentence, but it was through seeing and learning from a great leader I had when I started my career as an LPN at Jackson Memorial Hospital. She was very seasoned with 35 years at Jackson, and she was so humble. She always kept the relationship with the mindset that we don't know what tomorrow will bring, and tomorrow I may be her leader, and that's okay. Life flips around every time, so she taught me to never let your ego step in and take anything for granted, because life changes. At the end of the day, what you have in front of you are humans and interactions, and that's truly all that is left about all of this constant day-to-day work. I took that to heart, and I actually had the immense privilege to then manage her years later at Molina. She was one of my delegates, and without it being said in a sentence, by really seeing how she would lead, I truly learned that life is about ups and downs, and those interactions truly matter. Staying humble through that process in leadership is key to staying true to your core. One of the biggest concerns or risks I see in leadership is you could deviate so much from your core, from who you truly are, if you just follow whatever life is throwing at you or whatever people may be reflecting on you as you go in your leadership journey.

I'll say stay curious and keep pushing. You're going to find ups and downs, and that's going to happen. If you don't really find ups and downs, you're basically not moving. There's a lot of fear of failure, but the reality is there's a lot of discovery in the failing space. The good thing about the bad moments is that they're also temporary, so it's a matter of staying on the move. Even if it's not in a good space, always stay curious and be in the move and follow your gut. The second piece would be to always reflect on your journey and think about what your main purpose is. What do you want to look back and feel or see when you look at yourself? I always think about this myself, like when I'm in my 50s, my 60s, when I retire, what is the overall feeling that I want to have over all my career? That is the meaning to me of a fulfilled career or professional life. To me, it would be that I did something good for the community alongside great people. That is truly the core of what it would mean for me to look back and feel that I lived a good life professionally. So my advice is stay curious, be in the move, go with the ups and downs, and always reflect about what you do. What is the purpose of what you're aiming for? What's truly at the core of who you are and what you want to accomplish? Besides those titles and noise, at the end of the day all of that is truly noise. It's truly a feeling of fulfillment for you as a person when you look back.

I'll say primarily the biggest challenge is how do we find the balance between professional and personal life and drive both in a way that you feel whole as a person. I think finding yourself as a whole is critical. I truly believe in balance, and I think it's not easy. It's very complicated to find that balance in the sense that sometimes you put too much effort in one area and you concentrate too much on the other one, and somehow a piece of you is unbalanced. You lose sleep, you get too worried, and then all of a sudden you're not really feeling that this is the life you worked so hard for and this is what you really want. So that's my main thought right now, my main concern about the biggest challenge in the field.

For me, it's integrity and staying true to your core. I'll say that's the biggest one for me. That's the type of person where you know who they are because this is their core, regardless of where you see them. You see them at work or you see them as a person, this is the person. The ability to recognize that core for me is key. I'll also say transparency and accountability. I think one of the main pieces that a leader may avoid is having difficult conversations and being transparent with their teams during difficult times, or not driving accountability or taking ownership of things that may have not come out the way that we were expecting or hoping them to be. So I'll say those three: integrity to your core, transparency, and accountability.