Chapter 06 : Thoughts on the Presidents’ Communication Styles; the Challenge of Working in the Office of the President
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Description
Ms. Hale begins this chapter with some observations about Dr. John Mendelsohn’s temperament and how he grew into the social dimensions of his role over the course of his presidency.
Next she shares her observations about differences among the presidents’ communication styles. She also discusses the challenges of working in the Office of the President and comments on how better communication patterns could have made work run more smoothly. Finally, she reflects on the power that an administrative assistant has in an executive office. She gives examples of how quickly things would get done when she was assistant to Dr. LeMaistre (1978 – 1981) and how she felt her power dissipate when he stepped down from the presidency.
Identifier
HaleJ_02_20180531_C06
Publication Date
5-31-2018
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Overview; Overview; Portraits; MD Anderson Culture; Working Environment; Professional Practice; The Professional at Work; Building/Transforming the Institution; Growth and/or Change; Critical Perspectives
Transcript
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Today is the 31st of May, 2018. It is about 10:25 in the morning and I am in my office, on the 21st floor of Pickens Tower, talking today with
JoAnne Hale:
, for our second session, which is actually a recapture session because we had an equipment failure the last time, unfortunately. So thank you very much for your patience and for coming in. We were strategizing a bit and kind of going to use this not only to recapture but also to revisit some areas.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So I know you made some notes, but let me ask you one little final question to kind of tie up one of the things that we missed on your last interview. You had mentioned that when Dr. Mendelsohn became president, he had this academic, scientific sort of style, and you had reflected on how he changed over his years in office, and I wonder if you could think about that again for me. What was that change in him?
JoAnne Hale:
One of the things that I noticed was that he was not into the employee events, like when they had… I think it was the first Thanksgiving, we were still --the leadership served the rest of the people, we worked on the [serving] line. Or different things, where he would just greet them when they came in, his role was greeting them as they came in for the Thanksgiving dinner, things like that. He didn’t want to do it and you know, why? He just wasn’t that into it and over the years, he just became very involved kind of, with the—not as much as Dr. LeMaistre, but then Dr. Clark did not either. He was, well we just didn’t do those things. It was under LeMaistre that we developed all of the employee events that connected us as a family. But towards the end, Dr. Mendelsohn, I mean you could joke with him and things like that, he had loosened up quite a bit.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
You mentioned that you also thought a bit about the different presidents and how they communicated, how they spoke. What are some of those differences you observed?
JoAnne Hale:
You mean like when they gave their…
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
You had said you made some notes.
JoAnne Hale:
Oh yes. Well, Dr. Clark, he would read all of the manuscripts and publications, which kept him up on all the research that was going on, and he would give scientific talks all over the world, but I heard that they were very boring, because he would just read. A lot of it wasn’t that… So I would say he was just more of a just facts type person. Dr. LeMaistre was more of a motivational, and he was a great fundraiser, and he just made people feel like they were part of everybody, part of all of us and everything like that. Dr. Mendelsohn was a very passionate speaker about his work. He didn’t use any notes, he just spoke from his slides, and actually increased our intake from the Development Office, because they would go through the various communities, meetings that were set up or things that were set up by the Board of Visitors, in those areas. He would go in to potential donors and talk about our research and about his research, and so that motivated them to give. That was the different styles that they had. Dr. LeMaistre used notes but he often went away from them or would change them. He had a speechwriter and Dr. Mendelsohn did not.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Interesting. Yeah, it was Steve Stuyck [oral history interview], I think.
JoAnne Hale:
Mm-hmm. Mendelsohn, he gave one that I know of, one speech at a commencement. I want to say it was Kinkaid.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, really?
JoAnne Hale:
I want to say that. I’m not sure that that was the place, but in any event, when he got back, they wanted copies of his speech. He said oh, I didn’t write a speech. He just had it in notes type of thing. So, he had to write a speech, write off of that, similar to what he had said. But at a lot of places, they would record their speeches anyway.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
That’s interesting. So, Dr. Mendelsohn really was kind of a natural public speaker in that way.
JoAnne Hale:
Yeah, it just came natural for him. I told him, in all the years that I worked for him, I never heard the speech and he said, well I’ll just give it to you one day and I went no, no, no, I’ll just try to find one. But I never did. It was very inspiring and a lot of people mentioned that.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now, I was also curious, now that you’ve spoken about all the presidents that you worked with, if you could talk a little bit about what you found most challenging in working administratively, in the Office of the President.
JoAnne Hale:
Well, from the early days, was just getting to know the institution and working with that. Probably the most challenging was—in the early days, I did not do the calendar or anything like that, schedule any appointment, it was strictly taking the dictation, because he dictated everything, and typing those letters.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And this was Dr. Clark.
JoAnne Hale:
Dr. Clark. I think I mentioned that one time he went overseas and had all this information that he couldn’t get someone to write it up, and I did that. That was a little challenging, to put it all together, with his brochures and things like that. With Dr. LeMaistre, when I first went to work for him, they had appointments scheduled every 15 minutes and of course naturally, just the niceties didn’t—you know took almost that. The challenge was to get them to—just gradually, I would schedule them every 30 minutes, and then I got to scheduling at every hour. Dr. Mendelsohn did not like that, every hour, but I told him, I said that gives you a chance, if there’s a phone call that came in while you were in a meeting, you can return it, or if you want to make notes from that meeting. So finally, you know, but those were challenges with each one, because they wanted to get as much in as they could possibly get in for the day.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Right, the timing.
JoAnne Hale:
They found that they didn’t—they were able to be more relaxed, I guess, when different ones came in. Dr. Clark, he was steadfast in his decisions, it was hard to get him to… If you got him to approve your program, he pretty much stayed with you. [ ] He kind of listened to everybody and I think Dr. Mendelsohn was the same way, he kind of listened to various … e had people—Dr. Mendelsohn always wanted his staff to question him, because maybe he needed not necessarily my level but above. He’d say, “Now if you don’t agree with me, give me reasons why.” So he was more that way, which was … you know. And I think the biggest challenge with him was just the personalities, because he just automatically didn’t think you knew anything. He had a level of researchers and clinicians. I don’t know how he was with the administrative staff, leaders of the clinic and things like that, but I just know that he was used to one person when he came, he didn’t have several. He tried to keep everything close at hand, and so those were challenges, to get him to release it and let us file things. We had people that did certain things in the office, and that was their expertise or that was their particular position, and so you didn’t have one person trying to do everything. We had one lady, she still works in the President’s Office, that was just super in all his presentations. She could read Dr. Mendelsohn’s writing very well and she knew all the terminology, she knew graphs and everything like that, she was terrific at that. Another lady took minutes and was great taking minutes at everything, and she kind of looked at the mail and things like that. I did the travel and his appointments and briefed him, pulled together material and briefed him, and I would go to those different ones to ask for materials, to different ones.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now as you think back, you know from your perspective, was there anything in the workings or the organization of the President’s Office, under the different presidents, that could have been done better, more efficient? From your perspective.
JoAnne Hale:
Probably in the early days would have been a little more communication, because there were times that—back then, we worked on a Saturday, a half a day. I remember one particular incident when—I can’t remember, but it was some property, I guess, up near Bastrop, something. Anyway, an opportunity for faculty members to buy this property, and it was also hush-hush, hush-hush. Then, it came on a Saturday and they were finalizing it and nobody wanted to work on Saturday, so I had to work on a Saturday. Well, you don’t know all the ins and outs of those things. So that was a little bit—and probably in all three, you know, but I think by the end of Dr. LeMaistre’s… And basically, that was because of where I was positioned, because I was right outside of Dr. LeMaistre’s and Dr. Mendelsohn’s door, and then the lady that handled all the patients and the reimbursements and everything, we could hear. Even though we had separate offices, it was a glass wall and a door that opened, and I could hear what was going on. So you could kind of put things together, you know, and so it made you a little more knowledgeable. But I would imagine the biggest challenge would have been the communications as to what and why things were, how the programs were working.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
So it was actually pretty important for you to do your work, to have a good sense of detail.
JoAnne Hale:
Yeah, you had to know. Today, I’m still detail oriented, you know, I want to know all the things. If this doesn’t pay, well I want to know why and all of that. But yeah, and I know when I left, when I retired, that was one of the things that I think Mendelsohn had expressed, that he wanted the new lady to research it down to the level that I did, and I said that just has to be something a person likes to do, you can’t [teach anyone how to do] that. But yeah, it was, because when you brief him on a meeting, you have to let him know everything that’s there. Then when I worked for Dr. Clark, because he was so nationally and internationally involved, when we would get all the correspondence, I would read it and highlight what would be of interest to him, so that he didn’t have to spend a whole lot of time. I did that for Dr. Mendelsohn too, and Dr. LeMaistre. Dr. Mendelsohn, I would just underline, particularly for Dr. Mendelsohn, just underline key phrases in the paragraphs and things like that, that they could do. I was not a good writer, and I couldn’t do a lot, and basically, a lot of it was because I didn’t know the background.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Well I think people find, in any role, people find their strengths, and then of course we all have weaknesses.
JoAnne Hale:
Yeah, right.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah. Now, you had also reflected, the last time we spoke, on the kind of power that your job had.
JoAnne Hale:
You really have a lot of power.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Tell me about that.
JoAnne Hale:
You have a lot of power. You ask and they produce.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Give me an example of what do you mean when you say that, what do you mean by that?
JoAnne Hale:
Well, I mean if you say that I want a meeting on such and such a day, with a particular doctor, a time, they would do it if you ask. Now, Dr. Clark was notorious for having people run all kinds of… I’m trying to think of a particular incident, but I remember we put together a great big report. In fact, we had hired a man to do this, he was an efficiency expert. Anyway, we had hired him to do—you’d ask him for documents, you would ask him to put together… I can’t think of anything in particular right now, that we asked for, but just anything that you—either a meeting or a program, you know? If you say I want it by such and such a date, they did it. Well, one example I’ll tell you about was Dr. LeMaistre was president of the American Cancer Society and one of our doctors wanted an invitation to the big dinner, the black tie dinner up in New York. You know, you just call and you say I’m representing the president of the American Cancer Society and he wants this person invited. Those type of things is what you dealt with.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
Now did there come a time when you felt there was a change in the power that you had?
JoAnne Hale:
Yeah, particularly whenever Dr. LeMaistre came, and I still worked for Dr. Clark. I worked for Dr. Clark for about… I guess, Dr. LeMaistre, I think he came in ’78, and I didn’t go over to him until ’81. So all that time, I worked for Dr. Clark and yeah, within the community and within the other, it just didn’t have the, um, I guess it’s just power. I can’t think of the word but anyway, you could tell that they—well we’ll check or they’re slower getting back to you and different things like that. I don’t know that we did that much with the institution at that point, he was president emeritus, because he was still internationally.
Tacey Ann Rosolowski, PhD:
And this is Dr. Clark you’re talking about.
JoAnne Hale:
Dr. Clark. Dr. LeMaistre, of course he was still here with the transition, and I was still in the same office, so the only one was between Clark and Dr. LeMaistre, where I really noticed that you don’t have the power any more.
Recommended Citation
Hale, JoAnne H. and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 06 : Thoughts on the Presidents’ Communication Styles; the Challenge of Working in the Office of the President" (2018). Interview Chapters. 973.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/973
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