Chapter 10: Chair of the Department of Surgical Oncology: Practicing Servant Leadership
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Description
In this Chapter, Dr. Pollock discusses the strategies he used to build morale in the Department of Surgical Oncology and build the department’s national reputation after becoming Chair in November of 1993. He begins by noting that in 1986 or ’87, Dr. Charles Balch (his predecessor) changed the name of Department of General Surgery to the Department of Surgical Oncology (a formality that did not express any change in department philosophy or direction).
NOTE: the recorder is turned off for about 15 minutes at this point.
Dr. Pollock gives several examples of choices he made to set the tone for his Chairmanship and address low morale in the Department. (For example, he remained in his own small office rather than take over a large that was earmarked for him, but in use by physician’s assistants.) He points out that he didn’t know much about leadership, but wanted to make connections with department members as people first, and as employees second. For information, he contacted his brother, who had been to business school, for some readings and discovered Robert Greenly’s Servant Leadership. The message that leaders should provide service to people who report to them resonated with Dr. Pollock. He conducted “walk around research,” talking to Department members to find out what was important to them. He secured resources and got out of the way as people put them to use, never taking credit for others’ work. He notes that he also admires the leadership principles of Colin Powell, who advocated respect for the chain of command without being a slave to it.
Identifier
PollokRE_02_20121010_C10
Publication Date
10-10-2012
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Raphael Pollock, MD, Oral History Interview, October 10, 2012
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - The AdministratorThe Administrator The Leaders Leadership On Leadership Professional Practice The Professional at Work Influences from People and Life Experiences On Leadership MD Anderson Culture
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Would you like to shift gears now and talk about your administrative work?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Sure.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Between 1994 and 2010, you were Chair of the Department of Surgical Oncology. I was wondering, first of all, if you could just sketch the history of the department. How old was the department when you assumed the chairmanship?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Well, the name of the department used to be the Department of General Surgery, and that’s what it was called when I was a fellow here. And when Charles Balch replaced Richard Martin as chair of Surgical Oncology, which I believe was in ’86 or ’87, he changed the name, or the name was changed at that point in time, to Surgical Oncology. Charles Balch was a very firm proponent of surgical oncology as both an academic discipline as well as a clinically distinct discipline, apropos our conversation of the other day. So that was when the department name changed. But there’s been a Department of Surgery at MD Anderson ever since the founding of the hospital. I think R. Lee Clark actually was—he was certainly the most prominent first surgeon. I don’t know how much actually clinical care he was able to participate in when he came to Anderson as the first president, but I know that he was always very interested and still, in his time, did quite a bit of writing in what we would now recognize as surgical oncology and would have identified himself, I’m sure, as such had that question been posed to him.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, I can imagine he would, given how important interdisciplinary care was for him. Was there a kind of—? So the name change was really a pro forma kind of thing. There wasn’t a philosophical shift at that time? It really was a continuity—?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
No. Continuity.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Okay. So tell me about how you came to be chair in ’94. How did that come about?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Oh, my. This might be a turn the recorder off for a moment. [The recorder is paused for about 15 minutes.] CLIP A: The Leader A: The Administrator C: Leadership C: On Leadership B: MD Anderson Culture Building Esprit de Corps in the Department of Surgical Oncology
Raphael Pollock, MD:
So I became chair in November of ’93 and spent much of the next six months trying to help the people in the department come to a better understanding of who they were and where we could go as a group and instilling a sense of confidence. Even though it was a relatively young group—that we really had messages to deliver and things to develop and skills to hone and that we should go at it, and that if we work together doing this, that we’d get there that much faster and thereby be able to leverage our expertise and so forth. There was a strong need to help develop an esprit de corps, and so we did. That was what we did. There was a very large office in the area in the Department of Surgical Oncology that our physician assistants were in, and that office was actually earmarked as the chairman’s office. I made the conscious decision to stay in my small office rather than take that over because it would have displaced the physician assistants over to the Houston Main Building which would have been very inconvenient for them and for the faculty, and my own office was very adequate for my purposes. And I also did not want other people in the department to think now that I was the chair that I somehow had something over them or that I was hungry for different types of recognitions and trappings and symbols, which was not always the case among my predecessors—my immediate predecessor, in any event. So the offices that we had were on the tenth floor of what is now the Clark Clinic Building, and the offices had a door that opened up to a corridor and then there was a half wall with a window that you could pull the blinds on. I always like to have the blinds up so I could see what was going on outside. I hurt my back in a college football game, so I had spine surgery. It was hard for me to spend long periods of time sitting down, particularly long telephone calls, so I would frequently take them standing up. Someone snapped a photograph of me standing up, talking on the telephone. Which I didn’t know exactly where that would show back up again, but we have this tradition—at least we did at the time—that at the end of the year we have this graduation banquet, and the fellows roasted the faculty and the faculty roasted the graduating fellows, all in good fun. When it came time for me to be roasted, whichever fellow had shot that picture showed it on the screen and said, “This is our new commander-in-chief calling out the artillery targets, and here’s the target.” The next slide was a picture of the man who, at the time, was the chairman of surgery at Sloan-Kettering that they had superimposed on a dart board, and there was a dart right on his nose, which was the bull’s eye. It was like a parody of how much time I had spent—because at the time, the Sloan-Kettering fellowship was absolutely considered the top training program and Anderson was a distinct second place. Here’s this young upstart running around saying we’ve got the best program. So it was kind of a fun thing.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And also underscoring that your efforts to restore esprit de corps were working, for sure.
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Yeah. So that was the transition time.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So what were some of the specific challenges you found you had to address in those first months of being chair?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
The morale issues had to be addressed.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What were some things that you did to address that? You talked about your own personal choices, but how are some other ways you tried to intervene in that?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Well, one of the things that I did, I didn’t know much about leadership, not having any personal experiences and being called on to provide much in the way of leadership. Actually I recognize, in hindsight, that many of the activities were actually formative in that direction. I had a research technician, I had a secretary, I had a physician assistant—that was the group that I was leading. Some of the things that I always did was talk to these people on a first-name basis, celebrated birthday parties—things that connected me with the human side of these people that reported to me that I wanted to value as humans first and employees as sort of second. So I knew I didn’t know much about this. I have a younger brother who had gone through the Harvard MBA program. I called Benji [Pollock] up and said, “Benji, I know in business school they teach leadership. Can you send me the syllabus from the course you took at Harvard?” Which he did, and off of that I had a chance to read some books and do some thinking about how to prepare myself for this role. And one of the books that I read which has made a tremendous impression on me through the years is a book called Servant Leadership by a man named Robert Greenleaf. He’s now deceased. Greenleaf was—I think he was actually the CEO of Mid-Atlantic Baby Bell. Bell had to split into seven companies. After he retired from that position, he went to the Union Theological Seminary and became an ordained minister, so a very interesting combination. His basic premise is that you may be appointed to your leadership position from above, but the only way that you will be sustained, including your own spiritual sustenance, will be in direct proportion to the quality of service that you provide to the people who report to you. And that simply resonated. One of the quotations that he harps on in his book and comes back to—and I’m Jewish, so I can quote St. Francis with impunity. St. Francis says, “Seek ye to listen, rather than to be listened to.” I think that’s the most powerful concept about leadership. As soon as you make a commitment to listen to someone, that automatically means your ears are open, your mouth is shut, you engage in eye-to-eye contact. It’s heart-to-heart talking, and it forces you to be able to empathize with someone else. You have to be able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, and then, looking through their eyes, look out to the horizon and see what does the horizon look like to them and what do they see are the issues in the way of getting to that nirvana point out there—their aspiration. And so once you come to that, you come to understand very, very quickly that true leadership means understanding what other people are trying to accomplish and making their agenda your agenda. It doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily absolved from personal productivity demands, but your personal demands cannot be at the expenses of the needs of the other people around you. So doing the walk-around research, going into other people’s office, learning about what are they trying to accomplish, what are the important things for them, working with them to come to an understanding of what resources they need, securing the resources, getting the resources into their hands, getting the heck out of the way so that you aren’t in their way as they try to use the resources, never take credit for their successes, celebrate their victories in public and their defeats in private—these were just some of the things that I learned from reading and rereading the Greenleaf book. It’s had a tremendous impact on my own personal thinking and how I’ve tried to carry myself in my activities. There’s another book that was very, very important to me—The Leadership Secrets of General Colin Powell. One of the points that he makes is respect but don’t be a slave to the chain of command, which is another great piece of advice. And then I had these two wonderful examples in my earlier years as mentors—Dr. Martin, who clearly understood that patient care was the absolute top priority, that everything else derived from that, and then Dr. Lotsova who made it very, very clear that there’s always more than one way to skin the cat and to go after your goals and be tenacious in your pursuit of them. So it represented a wonderful opportunity in this new leadership role as a sort of amalgam of putting these things together. There was someone who was chair of one of the other surgery departments who was approximately my contemporary, several years older. When I was offered the chairmanship I was an associate professor, and I was asked if I wanted a field promotion to full professor. I said no. The currency was too precious to be debased that way. I wanted to stay as an associate professor and be proposed when I had the accomplishments that would enable that to happen of its own accord. I’m mentioning that not as a pat on my own back but to tell you about this funny little episode. I noticed, shortly after I became chair, that this other individual that had been chair of their department for a year or two longer than I had was also an associate professor. I received a memo from this person on their letterhead, and it had the person’s name, and it said Chairman, Department of, but it didn’t say Associate Professor. And I thought that was kind of funny in a sort of pretentious way. I wrote this person back, “Thanks for the memo. I noticed that your letterhead didn’t have your academic rank on it.” And he wrote me back saying, “No, I didn’t. I don’t put that on there because I’m concerned that if people see that I’m just an associate professor that my status and stature will somehow be diminished and I won’t be able to compete for resources as effectively.” And I wrote him back and said, “I think you have it 180 degrees opposite. It’s a tremendous measure of who you are to have become chair of a department as an associate professor, and people will respect you much more for that as a point of recognition.” And so the next memo I got from him it said Associate Professor on it.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
That’s good. And so you never felt that you were hampered in any way by—?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Not at all—not at all. And actually, I think it helped in many ways because it provided a sort of lack-of-experience cover for some of my miscues, which there were many in the first couple of years.
Recommended Citation
Pollock, Raphael E. MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 10: Chair of the Department of Surgical Oncology: Practicing Servant Leadership" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1322.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1322
Conditions Governing Access
Open
