Laurah Jackson

Early in my career, I will never forget a leader that I was working with told me, never miss the forest for the trees - keep a big picture perspective. That was really helpful, because when you're new in a leadership position, you want to be very by the book, and you should follow the rules and guidelines, but there's a lot of gray areas that you have to navigate when you are working with people. You have to get to know someone, and you have to see, well, how does this decision impact the other? When you step back and look at everything all together, it creates a new and different perspective. Then, fast forward almost 19 to 20 years in, one of our senior leaders just retired this past month, and she said, do everything you do as if you're working for the Lord and not man, but in all of that, don't hold it too tightly. Those were her parting words. She said, put everything you have into your job, but don't let that take away from the most important things in your life, such as family and values - finding good balance.

Be bold and confident, and never take no for an answer. Keep searching. If someone doesn't take your first question or request, and you get a no, it's not a failure, it just means keep trying and change your story, change the narrative. And never stop pursuing learning opportunities.

Healthcare is fast-moving, rapidly changing, and very dynamic right now. From the leadership perspective, just staying relevant is hard, because we show up and we have things that we need to do every single day to make sure that the operations run smoothly - everything from revenue cycle to compliance, and the nuts and bolts of running a healthcare organization. What I usually do is make sure that our leaders have a platform to get together and brainstorm and share ideas. After this call this morning, we have a team call every Monday morning called Monday Morning Motivation, where we just get on a call together to say, here's what our leadership focus is of the week, here's how we can support each other, help each other stay grounded and connected in a fast-moving world. We share articles, and we read books together, and we just lift each other up as women. Those 15 minutes every Monday morning really just help set the pace and the tone of the week. We start there, and then we just get the work done throughout the week, but we always know that we have a strong team to lean on for collaboration and support.

Definitely being a person of your word, so being someone that's a person that can trust you to do what you say you're gonna do and follow through. Honesty and integrity - just lead with the intention that you would be willing to do anything that you're asking your team members to do. And then another big one for me is just continuous learning. Every day, I wake up thinking, I need to learn something new and different, and try to be a better version of myself.