Title
Chapter 03: MD Anderson in the Age of COVID
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Description
In this chapter, Dr. DeVeau talks about the changes she observed at MD Anderson as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in terms of leadership challenges. She also discusses, “How are we making diversity, equity, and inclusion a cornerstone, not just an add-on, but a cornerstone, of our programs?”
From:
Michelle DeVeau, PysD, PCC, Oral History Interview, July 9, 2021
Transcript
Nina Nevill, PhD
Yeah, absolutely. It sounds like a great direction to head into. I’m sure there’s a lot of excitement there. In terms of the big year that we just had and with all the change happening, obviously at a global level and a healthcare level and every level you can put a pin in, pretty much, what aspects of the past year had an effect on the Institute, or on this plan, for September 1st? Were there any changes that you saw that you felt were directly related to either the pandemic or any disparities that you saw?
Michelle DeVeau, PysD, PCC
That’s a great question. So, I think some of the things that popped up as a result of the pandemic, so one of the big things is the whole idea of the myth that learning only happens when you’re physically in the same room with someone. So, it sparked the reorganization, the redesign, of a lot of our programs to be on Zoom, to be synchronous learning, virtual learning, and in that process, it allowed us to open up those learning opportunities to significantly more people because we were restricted by how many seats we can fit into one conference room. Now, we’re only restricted by how many people can a single facilitator handle at one point? (laughs) So, the delivery of learning has changed. I had a couple of ideas but they flew out of my head, Nina. So, virtual learning, I think what we also found, and what we have implemented is thinking differently about mentoring, too. So, mentoring is part of the Leadership Institute. Before the pandemic, we talked about this whole idea of reverse mentoring, or what we called mentoring up. So, that is an essence where a senior leader is paired up with a mentor who’s a frontline staff member. So, the frontline staff member mentors the leader on what he or she should be doing to be a better leader, gives advice, lets them know, “Here’s really how it happens on the front line. I know you talk about this at this higher level, but it doesn’t always translate as well.” So, it was a great opportunity for our senior leaders to get out from behind their desks, to walk in somebody else’s shoes for a little bit.
And what we have done is having those occur, historically, was in person, and arranging those times was difficult. So, we implemented of software package called My Mentoring, the software behind it is called Kronos, and that allowed us to have these electronic connections, these virtual connections. And it also allowed us the time and space to set up what we called mentoring circles. So, it’s not just a one-on-one it’s an entire group where they’re mentoring each other. So, that is another thing that sparked through the pandemic, that it’s not just a singular thing, it lets us lean on each other even more in a group aspect. I’m trying to think. What else? The whole idea in our partnership with other areas of Human Resources, specifically with wellness, taking the time out for self-care and then having that and the idea of emotional intelligence and empathy being really incorporated into leadership training, and also, into our Performance Management Systems. So, the whole idea of the leadership characteristics and having those embedded in our performance evaluations is another thing that we’ve done throughout the pandemic. It’s always something that was on our mind, but now, it’s forced us to really take a step back. And from a coaching standpoint, we were doing fabulously with coaching pre-pandemic. All the requests that we were getting were for developmental coaching for people who wanted to be even better in their current positions.
What we had seen with the pandemic is that some of those bad behaviors crept up. And it. When people are under stress, they’re going to go to previous behaviors. And sometimes those are bad behaviors. So, we saw a slight increase in requests from remedial coaching. Could have also been that people’s patience with those bad behaviors have decreased significantly, too, throughout the pandemic. So, people are just not as tolerant as they used to be. So, there’s a couple of different theories that I’ve got going on in terms of it, but what I can tell you is that our request for remedial coaching took a little bit of an uptick through the pandemic. The other thing that we had done is, coaching was seen, specifically, coaching was seen as something for the elite, something for not even just people who lead people, but you had to lead departments in order to get into a coaching program. We have changed that and we are now really leveraging this internal cadre of coaches that we have as a result of graduating them from CoachRICE to use them as what we call on-demand coaches. And on-demand coaches. they are available to everyone across the institution. You just have to ask for it. So, it goes back to the need for people to be self-directed. We are not going to blanket and assign everybody a coach. There’s 22,000 of us. It’s just simply impossible to do that. But if you’re really interested in it you need to connect with the Leadership Institute and we’ll get you a coach. We have the capabilities to do that. So, we developed other programs, coaching programs, to help individuals get through all of this. We’ve also partnered with EAP in order to really help people understand what is the difference between coaching and therapy? And help our colleagues in EAP with that, too. So, there’s a couple different things throughout the pandemic that we have learned. But some of the biggest things are the ones that I mentioned that learning does not have to be within the same room as someone, physically in the same room as someone. It doesn’t have to be in person. And really leveraging the whole idea of microbursts or microlearnings, this idea of the flipped classroom, read a couple things in advance and then let’s get together and discuss them. So, we really began to redesign what we thought our programs could look like, or should look like, as a result. Is that what you were looking for, Nina?
Nina Nevill, PhD
Yeah, absolutely. And in thinking of redesigning, and it sounds like it was a period of a lot of learning, a lot of new data coming in. Most of what you’ve mentioned has been somewhat positive and I guess I would like to know how the Institute can act differently, moving forward to advance its goals. Or act in the same way if you just think it just requires more time, more resources, more energy, whatever it may be.
Michelle DeVeau, PysD, PCC
So, what I see moving forward is the idea of really educating all the employees about, and having think through what is their leadership journey? I know it feels very simplistic but the whole idea of, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is still a perpetual question that so many people across the world have, even though they might be 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, or 70. They still question, “What do I really want to be when I grow up?” Or, “What do I value?” And I think that what I see in the future is putting out tools to help people think, to help people reflect. One of the things in the beauties of the pandemic was that it forced us to stay at home and we slowed down and in slowing down, it allowed us to reflect. We need to figure out ways to continue that reflection because with that reflection comes intentionality. And intentionality is what you need in order to enact your journey, and your dreams of leadership, your dreams of your best self. Without that intentionality, you’re kind of dead in the water. You’re just this mindless person going through life. So, that’s one of the things I think we will continue to be challenged with as things begin to pick up pace more. It’s how do we make sure that people are giving themselves the time and the energy to reflect, to think through what worked, what didn’t work? Just like the question you just asked me. We’re going to be going through an entire period within the Leadership Institute, and we’ve already started, about what is our after-action review? What did the pandemic teach us? What are the some of the things that we’ve changed as a result? What do we still need to change? What are some of the things that simply aren’t working for us? So, there’s lots of things that we are trying to do and lead the way in that process. And what we’re finding is that a lot of our clients, our client groups need help in that disciplined reflection.
So, a lot of our requests for working within tech teams have increased as a result because the leaders are recognizing that need, and they’re also recognizing that they, themselves, are feeling incredibly overwhelmed and they don’t have time to do it themselves and how they can lead an entire group to do it? So, they’re calling us in to help them with that process.
Nina Nevill, PhD
Well, it sounds like reflection is one of those things across the board that has been a big part of this last year. And a lot of introspection and time to really turn inward and for all fields and for all of people, like you said, at every position, in any position. So, it’s definitely a huge—it must be a huge piece of it. It’s good to hear that that’s something that’s being in conversation and that people feel comfortable talking about, as well, because I think it’s different to have that internal process happening but then to be able to translate it to a conversation or to be able to have discourse about it, I think is really important, especially in a workplace setting where you typically maybe wouldn’t think to do that. But this has been such a huge event that it might require that.
Michelle DeVeau, PysD, PCC
Yeah. I think the other area that popped up as an area of need is the whole idea of equity, inclusion, and just racial tensions and racial inequities, in general. So, having more of a focus on that has been another emphasis for us within the Leadership Institute. How are we making diversity, equity, and inclusion a cornerstone, not just an add-on, but a cornerstone, of our programs? So, I think it’s, for us, in that redesigning, we’re continuing to redesign that because it feels like it’s an ever-evolving thing. But that’s one of the things, the areas that we are focused on and we struggle with.
Nina Nevill, PhD
And regarding these disparities, and in my conversations with other folks it’s the thing that, “Well, these have been here for a long time and of course they’ve been just exacerbated,” but how do you then plan to train others how to navigate these disparities, in terms of coaching if we’re talking about people who have many people reporting to them who probably also have these concerns, what’s one of the ways to move forward with that?
Michelle DeVeau, PysD, PCC
So, one of the things that we’re really emphasizing is for the leaders to have the courage to ask the question, for the leaders to have the courage to take a look at their own biases and how those biases may or may not be impacting their decisions to hire, their decisions to put certain people on certain projects, their decisions to put certain people in certain programs as they nominate people. So, it goes back to the whole idea of those leadership characteristics, of what are they doing to be reflective? What are they doing to raise their level of awareness and the level of emotional intelligence around it? How are they asking questions and being collaborative? Do they have a group of trusted advisors that they can talk to and say, “You know, I’m thinking about this idea,” or “How should I approach this with my team?” or “Should I do an analysis of the compensation equity in my department?” or “Let me take a look at my department and how many people of color do I have in my department?” So, we have a number of leaders that are beginning to look at that or even just to open up the questions of, recently, it was one year post the death, or the murder, of George Floyd. How many departments actually talked about that? I don’t know. Those are the things that we are advocating for, and like, why not talk about it? And it does, it takes a lot of courage from the leaders to be open and to be vulnerable.
Nina Nevill, PhD
Of course. And is that something that you’ve seen in the past, before this past year, those conversations, do you feel like they had been taking place, or how were some of these racial and gender inequities addressed before this past year?
Michelle DeVeau, PysD, PCC
Yeah, I think that’s an interesting question that you ask. I think that we were much more comfortable at addressing gender inequities, not necessarily racial inequities. And I think that we had some great counterparts like Liz Travis in the faculty world who really looks at minority faculty leaders. We had an incredible leader, Dr. Harry Gibbs, who was the Head of Diversity before he passed away, and then, he passed that on to Larry Perkins. And I think the next—I think it’s a slow evolution. And I think our evolution at identifying gender inequities has been much further along than it has necessarily in the racial inequities. And I know that in Liz Travis’s group, there are a number of really fabulous leaders who are focused on that, and having that group now report in through Human Resources has been another huge stance on, we’re one organization, one institution, and should all of us, regardless of the population we serve should be focused in on it. The whole idea of the living wages increase has been another thing. So, there’s been lots of different things that we have been doing, but it’s slow. There is more work there. And part of it is, what are we doing to help leaders be more comfortable in very uncomfortable conversations?
Nina Nevill, PhD
Sure. And in your own experiences working through the last year, are there any examples that you could give of things that you maybe saw first or secondhand with whether it be this issue of gender disparities in caregiving in a virtual workplace, or even this culture of burnout and things that we see maybe changing, not necessarily increasing or decreasing, but definitely changing with this virtual world of the past year? Anything that comes to mind?
Michelle DeVeau, PysD, PCC
So, when you were saying that, Nina, some of the things that popped into my mind and conversations that we continue to have is just the general disparities about who gets to work in the virtual world. So, if you look at some of the articles out there, the science, the research around it, and you look at COVID, and what populations, racially, that were impacted the most by this disease, it is people of color. And if you also look at what kind of jobs do people of color, and especially those who were most impacted, they are in those kinds of jobs that don’t even offer the opportunity to do virtual work. So, it just goes back to the inequities. And what are we doing as an institution to balance those out? Can we? But then, that’s where I think some of the things that you had mentioned earlier about how others talked about it, this is a huge systemic problem. It’s not just MD Anderson. And sometimes it feels so big that we become paralyzed by it and we choose not to talk about it. What we’re advocating is, you need to talk about it with the understanding that, yeah, there are going to be moments when we’re going to be paralyzed by it but it shouldn’t preclude you from talking about it. Am I making sense?
Nina Nevill, PhD
Yeah, of course. I think that’s been a lot of people’s headspace, is being able to relate it to a much broader societal issue, and then, that all of a sudden makes you feel very small, even if you’re a huge institution with a lot of resources, it’s like, well, really, at the end of the day what can we do about these issues? And I guess this is more of what I’d call a dreamland question, in a hypothetical situation in which resources were somewhat endless and we weren’t as deeply connected to the rest of society what would you like to see happen in terms of combating some of these disparities? Gender, race, socioeconomic, pretty much anything you can think of.
Michelle DeVeau, PysD, PCC
Yeah. So, it’s funny you say that because we started something like this in the Leadership Institute. So, what I ideally would love to be able to see is incorporating this at the Leadership Institute at MD Anderson is too late. We need to go into grade schools and high schools. We need to educate those kids on what does it look like? How can we help them develop this dream, this utopian society, where things are equitable, regardless of how you look or how you think? What does leadership look like? And how do we define leaders? So, starting at the grade schools and high schools. And I know Dr. Josiah Halm and Liz Travis have been working, or thinking through this, about how do we mentor those kids who, as society deems them to be in the lower socioeconomic classes, what are we doing to mentor them, to help them see the possibilities? It starts at that younger age. If we wait until they become professionals at MD Anderson, it’s too late. I feel so defeatist when I say that. There’s always opportunity to grow and to learn but if you really want to have a huge impact, you have to start earlier.
Nina Nevill, PhD
Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s a great answer. That’s one thing that I always say to people, for myself, personally, when asked about racial inequities I have a hard time not pointing to three specific pillars of society, and one of them is education, and another one is healthcare. And I think if we start there, in terms of equity, that’s not a bad place to be. In terms of this past year, what was the institution’s response to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, or specifically George Floyd? Was there any communication when this is happening, or did it feel like you all were left in the dark a little bit? What was your experience with this?
Michelle DeVeau, PysD, PCC
Oh, no, I think the institution did a fabulous job of beginning the discussions. So, Dr. Pisters, throughout the pandemic, had released communications. Sometimes he did it daily, sometimes he did it weekly, but around the time of, specifically it centered around the murder of George Floyd, we had a panel discussion where we brought leaders who represented various different groups. So, like Dr. Lorna McNeill spoke to the whole idea of health disparities. You had mentioned about inequities in healthcare. Dr. Lorna talked about that. Her entire career is looking at disparities in health, healthcare in general. We had a number of our leaders who were sponsors of our employee network groups, like—and I’m never going to get all the letters correct, but the LBQ, you know what I mean, right?
Nina Nevill, PhD
Oh, sure, LGBTQIA-plus, the whole gamut.
Michelle DeVeau, PysD, PCC
Yeah, I know they call themselves the Alphabet Mafia.
Nina Nevill, PhD
I haven’t heard that before. That’s great.
Michelle DeVeau, PysD, PCC
We have leaders who were sponsors of that employee network group. We also had our Chief Diversity Officer up there, Dr. Larry Perkins. And then, Shibu Varghese was there, too. And I’m trying to think who else was on there. But a number of our senior leaders held a panel discussion to talk about what impact this has had on them, their own life experiences as a result of being Black in America and what does that mean? So, there was discussions. There was more of an emphasis on diversity and training in these areas. So, there was a number of things that had happened. So, in honesty, it was really around George Floyd, not necessarily Breonna. But you know, I think we were able to get both of them addressed. One of the other things is that if you ask a couple of employees, it was like, “Oh, that’s great that we talked about it. What are we doing now?” How are we talking about this? How are we talking about how we changed our selection processes as a result? So, I know some of the things that executive recruitment has been doing, working with certain executive search firms to help us have a much more of a diverse candidate pool, we operate by the Rooney Rule.
Don’t ask me exactly what the Rooney Rule is, but in essence, the Rooney Rule helps us ensure that we have a diverse pool of candidates that, in that last final bit, at least one person is a person of color. We’ve also talked about the whole idea of blinding our resumes, so extracting names, extracting student organizations that people might have been part of, colleges if they might have been part of, to try to eliminate some of that biases. We’ve upped the whole idea of our unconscious bias training. We incorporate unconscious bias training to all of our selection committees, as so you might know, in order to get hired into MD Anderson for a senior leadership position, it’s a lot of work. There is a ton of group interviews that they go through, and everyone who serves on a panel as an interviewer has to go through unconscious bias training so that they become aware of what some of their unconscious bias is. So, we’ve been doing a number of different things, I just don’t think we were very—I don’t know how effective we are in translating those practices down to the frontline employee.
Nina Nevill, PhD
And that makes sense. It’s a situation that the more you do and the more you know, the more there is to be done, and the more there is to know. So, it’s definitely not a destination. But it’s good to hear that conversations have been had, and it sounds like from you and other folks that steps are being taken, at least. In terms of your understanding of other institutions, similar institutions to MD Anderson, is there anything that you can think of regarding racial inequities but even more broadly regarding the pandemic or even leadership that you think MD Anderson does differently?
Michelle DeVeau, PysD, PCC
So, a couple of thoughts are popping. I think as a result of the pandemic we have become—this is going to sound horrible—less of an elitist. So, here’s what I mean. Prior to the pandemic, we have poo-pooed any idea of working remotely. It was just not a possibility. We would never even entertain it. And as a result, I think we probably lost some pretty great talent. Now that we went through the pandemic and we see that it works and it works quite well, we have begun to look at and take a beat from some of our, I wouldn’t say competition, but our partners in industry who have been doing remote work for decades and incorporating some of their best practices. When I look at the Texas Medical Center, I think that there are—we’ll look at Methodist. So, Methodist during the pandemic, they never really truly adopted the whole idea of remote work. From my understanding, they are requiring all of their employees to come into the office and it’s an oddity if you’re working remotely. So, I think there’s things that we’re doing better but there’s still a lot to learn about the whole idea of working remotely. The whole idea of future of work—so, before I came to MD Anderson, before I went to Independence Blue Cross, I worked for Merrill Lynch. And this was 20 years ago. And my role was what they called “A work-life strategist.” So, my job was to go into areas of Merrill Lynch and to talk about the idea of flexible work arrangements, and then, analyze through interviews, surveys, et cetera, the possibility of implementing flexible work arrangements there.
Now, granted, they had some restrictions for FCC, but so do we, for joint commission. But they still implemented some of it. And one of the things that they talk about was this whole idea of face time. And the way that they defined face time was from a performance management perspective, from a leadership perspective is, “I will only believe that people are working if I can see them at their desks early in the morning or late at night.” So, I think that philosophy is still living, and I think it’s still living at MD Anderson, from the sense that, how do I prove that you’re actually working if I don’t see you working? So, now it’s helping leaders think differently about what is work? Isn’t it about the deliverables? And if somebody can get something done in hour hours, why should we penalize them for that? Let’s help build their productivity. So, I think that there’s stuff to learn, there’s things that we are relearning, things that we can learn from other industries to help us with this. Am I answering your question?
Nina Nevill, PhD
Yeah, absolutely. I think from the outside point of view, it’s hard to know what others are doing and if a lot of these initiatives and practices are commonplace or if they are truly unique, and so, just talking to people like you, it helps put the pieces together, at least, in my mind in being able to know, especially with the amount of change that has been in the past year, it’s even harder to get an idea for some of this stuff. So, yes. It is very helpful, thank you. I think I have—sorry, go ahead.
Michelle DeVeau, PysD, PCC
I was just going to ask, is there anything that you need me to expand on?
Nina Nevill, PhD
So, far, I think I have down what I am—I think no is the short answer but I might come back to at the end if there is anything that could use a little bit more clarification. I guess for now, and this is another hard question because as they say, hindsight is 20-20, but if you could have done anything differently in the past year, whether it’s within specifically your professional capacity or in the dreamland situation at the broader institutional level, what could you go back and do? Or what would you do?
Michelle DeVeau, PysD, PCC
So, I think part of it would be to think about how to best get some of these learnings out to mass populations. So, it goes back to the whole idea of everyone can be a leader. So, it is much more about how do we partner with other areas more effectively in order to get some of this information out? Or some of these resources. How can we effectively market these resources? So, it’s a double-edged sword. Part of it is, how can we communicate more? But the other piece is, we’re so overwhelmed with all of the messages, do I just want to add another message? What good would that do? It’s about thinking through of how to have the best impact, or the most impact? And I’m of a continuous improvement mindset. I don’t know if we’ll ever really know the answer. But it should be worth a try. I think the other piece is, why did it take the murder of two people to raise the social consciousness of this? And granted, it’s been going on for hundreds of years, so what took us so long? What took me so long in that process, too?
So, the whole idea of white fragility, and my white blinders, and how does that impact others, microaggressions that I might have done, conscious or unconscious. So, it’s just that own awakening of me, too, in that process. Other things I would have done differently, I think the other pieces, which I commend the organization, is we need to stop taking ourselves so seriously sometimes and be kinder to ourselves and take care of ourselves. I think one of the things that the pandemic has forced us to do is to take a look at what is really meaningful, and how do we devote our lives to the stuff that’s meaningful rather than the busyness of it all?
Nina Nevill, PhD
Yeah, absolutely. It seems almost, ironic is not the exact word, but in an institute that deals with cancer, you would think that idea of what a meaningful life is, and what a fulfilling and kind experience is, and then something like this happens, and I get the sense that it still had the ability to re-shift a lot of people’s perspective, and to reframe what we can each do for ourselves, what we’re allowed to do, what we’re allowed to ask for, to be able to even do that. And I think that’s maybe another piece of the puzzle that will probably change and grow and move over time, too.
Michelle DeVeau, PysD, PCC
When you said that, it resonated with me. So, I think one of the things that the pandemic did—as an institution, we’re really great at serving our patients. We kind of suck at serving each other and serving ourselves. So, I think the pandemic has allowed us to take a beat, take a moment, and think through, “What do I need to take care of myself because if I can’t take care of myself, I can’t take care of my patients. What do I need to help my colleagues so they can take care of themselves? Or how can I take care of my colleagues? How can I be nicer or kinder to my colleagues? More compassionate to my colleagues?” So, I think that is the awakening that several people have had in the institution, is they’re realizing that their gas tanks have been depleted for quite some time and they expend all their energy on their patients and then their family lives suffer, their personal lives suffer, their health suffers, all of that.
Nina Nevill, PhD
Yeah, that’s a tricky thing, and I’m sure it’s something that most people toy with. And it’s knowing how much can an individual be asked to provide for themselves, as well, and at what degree is it required for there to be something bigger in place, in order to allow for that? And I’m happy to hear that it sounds like in a lot of fields, that that’s a conversation that is starting to happen. Or maybe in some more than others has been happening for a long time, but it seems to be taking some precedence, now. In terms of the—to me, I feel like we’ve covered a lot and I don’t have a lot of questions left. I suppose one of the last few things I’d like to talk about, or to ask, is if you have—this is going way from the pandemic but just your experience broadly at MD Anderson, if there is a big project or something that you worked on or contributed to or piloted. that comes to mind is something that you’re really proud of or that you are proud of yourself for, for doing, if you don’t mind talking about that a little bit.
Michelle DeVeau, PysD, PCC
Identifier
DeveauM_01_20210709_C03
Publication Date
7-21-2021
Publisher
The Historical Resources Center, The Research Medical Library, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Topics Covered
Working Environment; Portraits; Obstacles, Challenges; Critical Perspectives; Diversity at MD Anderson; Leadership
Recommended Citation
DeVeau, Michelle PsyD, PCC and Nevill, Nina, "Chapter 03: MD Anderson in the Age of COVID" (2021). MD Anderson 2020 Interview Project. 4.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mda2020_interviewsessions/4
Conditions Governing Access
Open
