Chapter 13: Becoming Head of the Division of Surgery
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Description
Dr. Pollock explains the process that led to him assuming the role as Head of the Division of Surgery, noting that the Division’s structure enabled him to remain as Chair of Surgical Oncology. He did not switch offices, to underscore the equality of all units within the Division. He notes that as an individual, he had roles in four administrative levels. This enabled him to bring a broad viewpoint to Division matters.
Identifier
PollokRE_02_20121010-C13
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 Institutional Processes MD Anderson History
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 talk to me now about how you came to be head of the Division of Surgery? We can go back and pick up some other themes from the chairmanship period.
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Well, I’d been chair for about four years, and Helmuth Goepfert [Oral History Interview], who was a head and neck surgeon, had been division head ad interim during that period of time. Dr. [John] Mendelsohn [Oral History Interview] decided that it was time for a permanent division head to be selected. A search committee was assembled. [Waun] Ki Hong [Oral History Interview] was the chair of the search committee. A number of people inside and outside the institution applied for the position. Ultimately we went through an interview process—two-day interview process—and a short list, I presume, was generated. That was given to Dr. Mendelsohn, and he asked me to take the position. So it was after a national search. That’s how I became the head of the division.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
What do you think were the specific qualities or perspectives that you offered that they really wanted to capitalize on?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
I think that John [Mendelsohn] wanted someone who had research credibility and was respected as a clinician. He was looking for a surgical clinician investigator, and I think that he saw in me such an individual.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So what were your goals when you took on that role?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Well, it was an interesting situation because I had been chair for only four years. I was really just sort of coming into my mode, as it were, in that role. Actually, one of the questions that I was asked by Ki Hong in the search process was if this comes to you, are you going to stay as both chair as well as division head? And I said, “Yeah, I want to. I’d barely begun to scratch the surface, and I see that these are very, very different functions in surgery.” It was a ticklish question because the way that Ki Hong ran the Division of Cancer Medicine, it was much more sort of a centralized command-and-control approach. I felt very, very differently. I saw the programmatic activity in the departments and it was a different structure. Each of the seven departments in the Division of Surgery was a clinical entity that had its own board certification mechanism. That’s not the case in cancer medicine, for example. So you had that very independent base to begin with. And when I became division head, there were four of the other chairs of departments had been candidates. They were all older than me and more experienced. So I recognized that the potential to over assert myself was very high, and one of the things that I chose to do—we were still on the tenth floor the Clark Clinic Building. The division head office was this beautiful oak paneled room. It was very large—much larger than my department office, which was about this size. I made a conscious decision that I wouldn’t move my office from where I was in the department to the division as a statement that the programmatic activities in the department, not in the division—this was not going to be centralized command and control—that instead it was going to be a confederation of independent Italian city-states or strong Canadian provinces. And to sort of put an exclamation on the end of that sentence, I converted the division head’s office into a second conference room which we desperately needed because we never had enough room for conferences. The door said Division of Surgery-Charles Balch, Division Head. I took that off, and it said Division of Surgery-Administrative Core. It didn’t have my name on it. I was very comfortable with that. And it worked. People responded to that. We created a Division of Surgery Executive Committee that consisted of the seven department chairs, and it was just an amplification of the same strategy as running the department meetings—open agenda, everyone can participate, very respectful of each other. But it was also exhilarating, because I was now dealing with very senior people who did not have some of the young faculty ego issues that I had to contend with. They got the message. They knew where they were going with their groups.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So when you made the shift, how did becoming head of the Division of Surgery expand your role? What was now under your responsibility?
Raphael Pollock, MD:
Well, all the department chairs now reported to me as well. There was a period of time where Dr. Mendelsohn had created something called the Management Committee that consisted of his executive group and one division head representing the division head group. There was a window of about eighteen months where I was a member of the Management Committee, Division Head of Surgery, Chairman of the Department of Surgical Oncology, and a professor of surgery with a very busy practice, so it was like on a personal level I cut across four layers of the organization, which was hugely valuable, because setting at the Management Committee, someone would bring up some idea and I would say, “Listen, I practice surgical oncology. I do 150 operations a year. I can tell you that your idea is not going to work. This is how it will impact in the clinic.” It had gravitas and truth because of direct experience. No one can trump those cards. So that was very, very useful. We looked for specific areas at the division level, functions that the individual departments didn’t have sufficient wingspan, breadth, or depth to perform themselves that nonetheless needed to be performed, so it was much more of an overarching, facilitating, administrative structure and the executive committee meetings were good meetings. There was, again, a sense of we’re being listened to. The institution is paying attention to the surgeons. We’re moving forward. We’re getting things done.
Recommended Citation
Pollock, Raphael E. MD and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 13: Becoming Head of the Division of Surgery" (2012). Interview Chapters. 1325.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1325
Conditions Governing Access
Open
