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MGMA Insights: Leadership Insights for Navigating Modern Healthcare Challenges

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Daniel Williams:

Well, hi, everyone. I'm Daniel Williams, senior editor at MGMA and host of the MGMA Podcast Network. We are back today with another MGMA Insights podcast. And I met our guest through a mutual friend who's a MGMA member in a medical practice. And so I went, I gotta talk to this guy.

Daniel Williams:

So our guest today is Mark Noon. He is a retired US Air Force medical leader and founder of Leadership ten. Mark's also an executive coach. He's a speaker who's worked with hundreds of health care organizations. Some of you listening today may have worked with Mark at some point in your medical practice.

Daniel Williams:

So let's just welcome him into the show. Mark, it's good to talk to you again.

Mark Noon:

Hey, Daniel, thanks so much. I appreciate the opportunity and love being, know, say back in the medical community. I don't thrive there with my new business, but I certainly have spent a lot of hours, on-site with a lot of medical practices, that are MGMA members. Glad to be a part of the show.

Daniel Williams:

Yeah. It's so good to have you here. You and I talked. I think it was a week or so ago. Time just kind of It was fine.

Daniel Williams:

It just sort of floats these days. Trying to keep things. You said you were traveling today. I was telling you, I thought I'd had maybe seven meetings total today. Y'all have probably all y'all listening have been had days like that where we're just going, I don't know if what time of day it I don't know what day it is.

Daniel Williams:

So I

Mark Noon:

don't know what day it is. Exactly. I know. I've had days recently like that. I have no idea what day it is.

Daniel Williams:

Exactly. So let's just start with your story. It's so interesting. Anytime I talk to somebody who has maybe a military background or has a background that might be different than, I want to say traditional, but these days there's no traditional pathway. I guess the most traditional, if we think about it, might be, I want to be a doctor, and you say that when you're in fifth grade, and then you just go to college, then you go to med school, and then you're a doctor.

Daniel Williams:

But other than that, there's usually so many permutations. There's so many different ways to get to where we get in our careers. So let's just hear a little bit about your background.

Mark Noon:

Yeah, I love to hear people's stories too. Why did you become a nurse? Why did you become an anesthesiologist? And there's always something in the background. It's not usually you just woke up one day and went, I'm going go into this.

Mark Noon:

There's usually something that happens. Me, was really, it was joining the military many, many years ago, more than thirty years ago now. I just needed a job. I wasn't looking for a medical profession. I wasn't looking for anything other than I needed a job.

Mark Noon:

I had a wife, a young son, and we lived in an area of the country that not a lot of jobs. I didn't have no education. So I said, you know what? Let's join the military. They gave me the job in the medical laboratory world.

Mark Noon:

Didn't know anything about a lab tech, didn't know what lab techs did. So it wasn't like one of those dream jobs for me. That's the one they gave me. Most people who know me know that my personality is not the typical lab person who loves to be quiet in the back room kind of thing. I'm very much a people person.

Mark Noon:

But that's the job I got in. And in that job, went through the ranks, got an opportunity to finish my four year college degree, which took eight years to do. Got a commission as an officer, began the second part of my career in the same career field, clinical laboratory. My degree is medical technology. And then was able to finish a master's degree as well and then finish out just a little over twenty years in the Air Force.

Mark Noon:

And so that's where my medical experience comes from. In that time, especially as an officer, a lot of executive experience, a lot of time at the executive table, lot of time in leadership roles, not just clinical roles, but leadership roles within the medical community. And even then, doing a lot of speaking and a lot of talking about leadership.

Daniel Williams:

Yeah. That is so good.

Mark Noon:

That's the military part of that. That got up about 2012. So.

Daniel Williams:

Okay. So bring us up to speed then. I mentioned it in your intro, Leadership 10. Tell us about this organization, what it does, and anything else you might wanna share about it.

Mark Noon:

Yeah. So between 2012 and 2020, I worked for a company called The Studer Group. Many of your listeners are familiar with Quint Studer, one of the, probably the premier leadership and clinical guys out there The United States. And then, of course, that became Huron Consulting Group at some point in time in that eight years as well. And I worked for them.

Mark Noon:

I traveled all over the country and to Canada. I spoke at probably more than two fifty healthcare organizations during that time. I did a lot of coaching, a lot of leader development because one of the main focuses was not just the clinical elements of HCAPs and CGAPs and all those other things. It was really about how do we develop the leaders? Cause we know the leaders leading well is going to have great employees, great employees are going to bring great healthcare.

Mark Noon:

And then in 2020, 2020 happened and there was no traveling, there was nothing really much going on. And so it was a big time when it was just time to transition. I made the transition, a partner and I developed Leadership ten. Leadership ten is simply an organization of the three of us, three founding principals who wanted to develop leaders. And we really started it as sort of a side hobby.

Mark Noon:

And it just sort of blossomed from there. We're not specifically in healthcare. We do all industries. I have industries in government. I have private sector businesses, large scale industries, industrial places, real estate agencies, all kinds of different elements, but still love to be in the healthcare practice.

Mark Noon:

You're in and my mutual friend, Oscar, the one that sort of partnered us together. I'm coaching their practice right now as a medical from a leadership and patient experience perspective. So that's kind of how Leadership ten came about, sort of a side hobby that developed into this business. And now it's sort of my full time travel around the country and the world talking about leadership.

Daniel Williams:

Yeah. So one last question. What's the 10 represent? So I know what leadership is.

Mark Noon:

What's ten? Know, it's interesting that that, we came up with this name one day. In fact, some of sometimes the three of us, my my two partners, Diane and Rob, we we think about, where did it really come from? And and I think it was just at lunch one day, one of them said it. I didn't come up with it.

Mark Noon:

One of them did. We found out leadership ten ten is really this. 10 is sort of the perfect. Right? We think of everything on a scale of one to 10.

Mark Noon:

If we get a 10, even on HCAPs, CGTATs, all those, it's perfect. We've done everything right. 10 is complete in our opinion. One of our core values is integrity. And integrity for us is not just about honesty, it's about fullness and completeness.

Mark Noon:

And then interestingly, when we started coaching, we ended up with 10 sessions of coaching. We do four leader development times with the organization and six coaching sessions. That added up to 10 coincidentally. And then the word leadership has 10 letters in it, which was something we discovered after we developed the name. Never even thought about it.

Mark Noon:

Right? So, so that's really kind of how it came about. There's no real meaning behind it other than than that.

Daniel Williams:

Yeah. I love the synchronicity of life. You know? You're trying to brainstorm for something. You come up with this name, then you just realize, well, there are also 10 letters there.

Daniel Williams:

So we didn't go with leadership three, so, you know, because there were three of y'all, but you went with leadership ten. Some of your trainings are in groups of 10. So that really is synchronous there. That's really cool.

Mark Noon:

Well, what's interesting too is we sort of are nicknamed L10, just for shortening the term. But a lot of our organizations that we coach will develop their own. Like we had one organization just recently, there's six executive leaders on their team and they decided to call themselves the L6. So it's the leadership six because there's six of them. It sort of morphed itself into some of our clients as

Daniel Williams:

well. Okay. Let's talk about medical practices and the leadership found there. You have talked, as you said, our mutual friend Oscar, he is leading a practice. You're working with them.

Daniel Williams:

You've worked with hundreds, maybe even thousands of healthcare professionals that you've talked to over the years. What are some recurring themes that are challenges that medical practices have as far as from a leadership perspective?

Mark Noon:

Yeah. You know, it was different before 2020. Like, a lot of things in life were. You know, the the way we delivered medicine, different. The way we deliver anything now is different.

Mark Noon:

The way where packages are delivered or, you know, or or the way we conduct meetings are different. But I think there's a common theme in all leadership, and it's not just medical practices, but there's some nuances to medical practice. I'll talk about those in a second. Truly, the challenges for leaders are typically four things I find in every organization. It's communication.

Mark Noon:

Imagine that, right? Everybody has communication, number one. Motivation, delegation, and culture. So it's communication. Yeah, everybody knows that one.

Mark Noon:

Motivation is learning how to motivate your team. And a lot of that is shifted with different generations now. We've got four or five generations in our organization. The difference between a boomer and a Gen Z is there's many, many differences, but their motivations are different. Delegation, it's the ability to give up things.

Mark Noon:

In healthcare, we really, really struggle with delegation because we have this need to nurture and take care of people. A person becomes a nurse because they want to take care of people. So then they become a nurse leader. And I will just tell your audience this point blank. I think there's not a harder job in the world than being a nurse manager in a hospital.

Mark Noon:

But a nurse leader who now is responsible for all these people and all these patients and they want to take care of everybody, and so they don't delegate. They go, I'll take care of that because I don't want to burden my staff. And so delegation is really, really a hard one for a lot of them. And then culture is that last one. And culture is not a lot of people can do a lot about the culture of their organization, but they sure can within their department.

Mark Noon:

And even though they may have not great leaders in the upper levels of their area, they can do something about the culture and creating that culture. But they struggle with that. They struggle with it because they feel like it's not always their responsibility. If you're my boss, it should be your responsibility to help me develop culture. Well, what if you're not a great leader?

Mark Noon:

I need to still take good care of my people. And that seems to be a struggle for a lot of them.

Daniel Williams:

Yeah. You were bringing in the context of 2020. That is a really monumental year globally because of

Mark Noon:

the

Daniel Williams:

pandemic. We saw in a

Mark Noon:

lot of

Daniel Williams:

organizations people you know, we had the lockdown, and people worked from home. Certainly clinicians, they needed to see those patients. A lot of the administrative people in health care, they might have seen their work life, the way they work, change. In the context of culture, how has culture changed? You've been consulting with and working with practices and other organizations, so you're seeing it in other walks of life as well.

Daniel Williams:

How has culture changed over these past five years?

Mark Noon:

I think a lot of organizations, especially large health care organizations, really struggle with culture because there's so many entities within the system, if you will. I mean, I've spoken at some of the largest healthcare organizations in the country and some of them eighty, ninety thousand employees. How do you develop a culture in that? It's really hard. Every individual building or department has their own culture.

Mark Noon:

Now it became even more difficult when a lot of those people went to their own homes that are working and some of them still working from home. And so it's that, how do I incorporate them into a culture? How to create a culture when you're sitting in your office there on the other side of the screen and I'm sitting in this office and that culture is very difficult, even more so now to manage than it was then. But there's ways to do that. And that's what I think I want to encourage leaders is there are ways to do that.

Mark Noon:

There are things that they can do. It may take a little bit more work because you're not face to face in the sense of live and in person. You're by a screen. You don't know what's going on all day long. I'm here.

Mark Noon:

I told you I'm visiting my daughter at her house. She works from home. She'll work for two or three hours and then go take care of her son for two or three hours and come back to work for two or three hours or whenever it's flexible. So you want to meet with at 03:00. May not always be a convenient time to have a meeting because people are working real.

Mark Noon:

I love to get up early in the morning, 05:00 in the morning, be at work, get everything done before the day starts. Who else wants to have a meeting at 05:00 in the morning? Nobody. So I'm going have a meeting at 02:00 when I want to take my afternoon nap or whatever. Those are some struggles, but they can be accommodated.

Mark Noon:

They can they can be worked. Leaders just need to, you know, sort of adapt, if you will. I think the needs for people are the same. It's the adaptation of how we deliver that is a bit different now.

Daniel Williams:

Right. I was thinking about that. I am also an early bird. I use that five a. M.

Daniel Williams:

Time to have the me time, whatever it might be. I belong to a gym, and once that day gets going for a lot of us, I can't really turn it off. And so if I wait to go to the gym at five, I might find an excuse not to go, so I go there. So I get all that out of the way, so then I can focus in. What I love what you were saying is that flexibility.

Daniel Williams:

I think that's one of the pros that has come out of that. Any of us who's had, Zoom meetings or other video type meetings, we see our furry friends show up. I had one of my cats or my cat jump into the screen two days ago when we were having a pretty important business partner meeting, but everybody, they're so used to it. They said, well, I'm going go get my dog and bring it. So we have that sort

Mark Noon:

of

Daniel Williams:

flexibility there, flexibility to maybe go to that class or that go see our child perform in a performance or compete in an athletic endeavor and then get back to work. The thing that comes up there is it is the trust factor. Know, if you're the boss, can I trust you? Can I give you this much rope? You're to get get the flexibility to do some different things during your day, but then are you gonna be present when you need to be present?

Daniel Williams:

So is that something that you build in in some of the training so that that trust is there, but we gotta it's a two way street, you know, for us.

Mark Noon:

It is. You know, there's a lot of statistics that even show that work from home is is more productive. You know, like I said, if I get up early in the morning and I hit hit my computer, I go to the gym like you do it, but I get home and I hit computer, I'm doing all my work. I get more done in an hour and a half than I would for three hours at the office because of interruptions or just the time of day, whatever those kinds of things. I think that flexibility is absolutely important.

Mark Noon:

I had to laugh when you were saying, the cat jumped in. I was on a Zoom call one time. I was going to speak in an event and we did like a pre call where we're talking about the event. The young lady who was on the call, she had to breastfeed her child and she was doing that while we were having it's all covered up, of course, but she's doing that while we're having the meeting. And I'm like, that's just the way we've adapted.

Mark Noon:

And some leaders can't do that. They have a hard time making that adaptation. And again, I'm not saying that's maybe a little extreme that we don't do that, but I don't have to go get the dog to show you. But my dog's going to bark on the other side of the door times if the UPS guy hits the front door and I'm in a meeting.

Daniel Williams:

Right.

Mark Noon:

We've adapted. Okay. How are we doing that with our team? Are we allowing some of that flexibility? I think that's a big key.

Daniel Williams:

Yeah. In reading about your company, Leadership ten, your company's tagline is, I wanna get this right, we challenge the thinking that shapes leaders. What do you guys mean by that?

Mark Noon:

Yeah. There are absolute principles, I think, when it comes to leadership. I think there's tried and true studies. You read all the greats of time, John Maxwell, Patrick Winston, only different ones of those, our timeframe that have there are things that are absolute, but at the same time, to challenge people to do things differently. That's where I go to that adaptation.

Mark Noon:

I coach an organization up in Upstate New York, travel there every month. It's a group of guys who have never had any real leader development before and have led teams on their These are underground construction guys. They have led teams, they've led people, but they've never been challenged in their leadership. What they think about leadership is what they were taught growing up in the business. You yell at somebody to get them to do what you want them to do.

Mark Noon:

Okay? Maybe that worked twenty years ago. It doesn't work today. So I'm going to challenge that thinking and say, okay, what can you do differently? Challenging the thinking is, what are you experimenting in leadership right now?

Mark Noon:

What are you doing and trying as a leader that you think might work? What are you willing to put out there and be vulnerable and say, I'm going to try this, see if it works with my team. And if it doesn't, I'm going go back and say, Hey guys, I tried this, it didn't work. Let's go a different route and let's make it happen. That's challenging the thinking.

Mark Noon:

It's getting them to actually think, critical thinking. We use a line like this. If somebody would come to me and say, let's say you worked for me, Daniel, and you and James worked for me and somebody came to me and said, Mark, do you guys are you a good leader? And I'd say, well, I think I am. Okay.

Mark Noon:

And then they said, well, would Daniel or James say you're a good leader? And I'd say, well, I think they think I'm a good leader. Right? And then we go one step further. We go, well, I think that they think that I think I'm doing a pretty good job.

Mark Noon:

Right? So I want to challenge that thinking. I want people to go, okay, maybe my thinking isn't where it needs to be. How do I and then the other side of that is critical thinking. I want people to be good critical thinkers.

Mark Noon:

Not just, okay, I got to put this here because that's the way we've always done it, but does that really make sense, or can we do it a different way?

Daniel Williams:

That leads right into my next question. Have coached and offered trainings to everybody from physician leaders to office managers, everyone in between. Does the training change? Do you have it, depending on what your person's role is in an organization, do they go through a different type of leadership training? Or talk about that, how you tailor Yeah,

Mark Noon:

it's going to be dependent on the practice, dependent on the patient population. Obviously, if you have a pediatric clinic, is it going to be a little different how you handle patients than it is with a geriatric clinic? Yeah, absolutely. There's some differences because patients are different. There's differences because employees are different.

Mark Noon:

There's differences because roles are different. What I love to do, especially in medical practices, I've done this for many, many years, is do a lot of role play things where, okay, let's say, we'll pick you and James and I again. So James is the provider, nurse practitioner, physician, whoever he might be. You're the nurse in the clinic. I'm the front desk person.

Mark Noon:

Okay, does James as the provider have any idea what I do at the front desk? Maybe not. He doesn't know what I'm telling patients. He doesn't know how I'm processing patients. He just knows when the patient gets back to the room, they might be tipped off or a little annoyed by something.

Mark Noon:

He has no idea why or what happened. You might not even know what I do at the front desk, but you come out and get the patient who I may be upset in some way or wasn't really communicating really well to, and then you have to try to explain things. Or you don't do a good job explaining. And then they get back there and James has to take all this time to explain it. So I love to take people through the whole scenario.

Mark Noon:

Patient walks in, how does Mark interact with him? What does he say? What does he do? What kind of things does he lead up to? So when Daniel comes out to bring them back to the room to triage him or do whatever, that communication is already there.

Mark Noon:

They feel like you kind of already know what their concern is or what they're there for without having to ask the same questions over. And then when James walks in, the patient's almost excited to see James as the provider because they've heard so much about him or they've heard what this provider has done for other patients. It's that kind of thing. Call it concern, coordination and confidence. There's three elements and I walk through the entire clinic.

Mark Noon:

Everybody watches what Mark does at the front desk and critiques it. Everybody watches what Daniel does in the triage part and critiques it. Everybody watches what James does as a provider and critiques it. Then you come together at the end and say, What did we learn? And James is like, Well, I learned that Mark says this and I don't want my patients to know that or to think that.

Mark Noon:

Or we find out James is telling something in the back and I've told something opposite in the front. I got to get those things coordinated. That's what I love doing in clinics. Lunchtime, workshop one hour, two hours, and we just walk through these scenarios and people go, Oh my gosh, they had no idea these kind of things went on in other parts, especially if it's a pretty large clinic.

Daniel Williams:

But that's

Mark Noon:

the fun part. I love going in places and doing those kinds

Daniel Williams:

of things. Yeah. Yeah. Just for our listeners, James is the superpower we have here. James is our producer that puts this thing together and makes people like Mark and me look good on camera and sound good on camera.

Daniel Williams:

So if you're going, Who the heck is James?

Mark Noon:

Yeah, we just made his name up. No, but he's actually part of he was in the background. I should have probably said that.

Daniel Williams:

No, no. I just wanted to James has long been the secret sauce here, and I think think people needed to know who he was, so thanks for bringing him into it. Yeah, good. Were talking about trust earlier, and this is sort of a play off of that. Let's talk about accountability.

Daniel Williams:

So when you're talking to a high performing medical team, what does accountability look like and what can they learn about that or grow that accountability factor within their practice?

Mark Noon:

Yeah, accountability is a two way street. A lot of people look at accountability as, okay, you're Daniel, you're the leader of the practice, you're the COO or the CEO or the whatever role you have, the top person. They think your responsibility is holding everybody accountable. And it is, absolutely is. But what do I have in responsibility and accountability?

Mark Noon:

I have three or four people that are under me that I supervise. I have to hold them accountable, absolutely. I have to hold myself accountable. My team has to hold me accountable. I don't think we do a lot of upward accountability.

Mark Noon:

You say to me, Hey, Mark, I'm going to do this and this for your team. And I tell my team that, and then you don't do it. What am I supposed to do? I need to go to you and say, Hey, you said you were going to do this. You didn't do it.

Mark Noon:

Now, it should be upon you to take accountability and the responsibility to do that. But I tell leaders all the time, if your boss, your supervisor does not take accountability does not take accountability for themselves, you need to hold them accountable. Well, in a lot of organizations, that's hard to do. They don't have the culture that allows that to happen. I remember one of my first months when I worked for the Studer Group, I remember one of my colleagues who I was supposed to have some information to her on a Friday.

Mark Noon:

She was going to have a Monday call with my hospital CEO that I was coaching and she was not my supervisor. She was just a peer, but she was going to help me with some things. I was early in her career and needed some help. I didn't get the material to her on Friday. And she emails me on Sunday.

Mark Noon:

She says, Hey, Mark, you didn't send me that stuff. One of our core values in the organization is commitment to our coworker. When we say we're going to do something, we do it. And you didn't. She called me on it.

Mark Noon:

Now, I could have blamed the system. I could have said, Oh, I sent it on an email, unless it got lost in the system or whatever. You know what? I owned it. I owned it.

Mark Noon:

I said, You know what? That will never happen again. And it did. It was the first even though I'd been in the military twenty years, accountability was not that strong. And it was one of those lessons I went, I took personal accountability.

Mark Noon:

I was wrong. I admitted it. Never happened again. And it has now, it's been, I don't know, thirteen years since that point. I still remember that as a very strong lesson.

Daniel Williams:

Sure. And when you think about accountability, you describing it in that way, reminded me of one of our guests and authors that we've worked with at MGMA, that's Owen Dahl. And he has a saying, he teaches a course at MGMA on lean leadership and has just written a book for us on lean leadership. And he has a saying that if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. And so I think if you have a repetitive project or a process, say it's a monthly report that goes out, but if you were measuring that and it somehow went off the rails every month, you could maybe go back there and measure that and see where the bottleneck was.

Daniel Williams:

It might be Jim over there. He has that one aspect of it, and you go, okay, so let's go back and coach Jim. So giving you that scenario, what do you think about that? Is that something that you, teach in some of those leadership programs?

Mark Noon:

Yeah. There has to be a, sort of a checks and balances. Right? There must be something to measure again. There has to be a standard to hold people accountable to.

Mark Noon:

And it can't be different throughout the organization. If you have a standard for your team that's three points above my standard and I'm holding people to the standard, let's say it's organizational standard, but you've changed the standard, either raised it or lowered it, those people are going to talk to my people and they're going to say, Well, why are we held to this accountable standard and this one isn't? So it's got to be measured. Yes. Healthcare, we say all the time.

Mark Noon:

If it's not measured, it's not it's not done. If it's not measured, you can't manage it. But there has to be a coordination of that information. There has to be a standard that's set that says this is where we're going to be. Now, if I go to my team and I say, I know the standard is this and everybody is at this standard, but I want to raise it two levels above and my team says, Yes, we want to do that.

Mark Noon:

Move forward, absolutely. Then there's no comparison in that way. But if it's because I'm not holding my team accountable and you are, they're going to talk. There's going to be some grumbling and complaining. And when that lack of standard is there, it will ruin an organization.

Mark Noon:

It will ruin a culture.

Daniel Williams:

Okay. Now, healthcare can be very localized because you have your bricks and mortar space that patients come into. But in reading about you, I did see something that was really interesting that I just wanted to explore in front of the MGMA audience, just so we could get an idea of things. And that is that you've worked with organizations across five countries. So when we talk about culture, leadership, resilience, any of these things, have you identified any similarities or any differences when you're working in The US and these other countries that you've worked in?

Mark Noon:

Yeah, I've been in a few other countries. And in some of those groups that I've spoken to have been multiple countries represented. A lot of times it was a conference of multiple countries. And A couple of those have been healthcare and a couple of those have been other industries. People are people.

Mark Noon:

I used to get this asked in the military all the time, What do military people like compared to others? I said, People are people. We have the same motivations, the same desires. The difference is in the military is could hold people accountable to things because we had absolute set standards and we had processes for that. In other countries, it's very different.

Mark Noon:

I was in Thailand earlier this year and doing a conference on leadership, and it was probably one of the most difficult audiences because of the differences in Far East. There was Far East, a lot of people from the Far East, India and other places. Just a different mindset on how leadership is. I also think that part of it is as an American, I talk very fast. I think a lot of other countries don't talk.

Mark Noon:

I think that's part of my communication is I need to slow down. Where I was in Dubai a couple of years ago, multiple countries there, all public health officials. For whatever reason, I slowed down everything that I said because a majority of them English was like a third language, not just second or third. And so there was a lot of I tailored the information differently or how I presented the information differently because of that audience. So there's things like that I think that leaders have to be able to do and understanding even today.

Mark Noon:

Even in The United States, we have people from multiple different countries and languages and culture and backgrounds, and they don't all see things the same. I was coaching an organization in Florida, the Panhandle Of Florida where I live. And there's a young lady there who was originally from The Philippines. English was her second language. Of course, Filipino people are very Americanized just because of how many Americans have been there and them being so closely associated with us for years.

Mark Noon:

But she's also a very hard personality from behavioral standpoint. She's a high B on the DISC scale, which means she's very direct and she's very forward. In her country, that worked. And what she realized is that with the people that she supervised in Florida, she had to sort of tone down the way she delivered her message. Should we get people, colleagues of hers to read her email messages so that they didn't sound so direct and so sort of overbearing?

Mark Noon:

She knew enough about herself to do that, and I think that's the cultural differences that we have to look at sometimes.

Daniel Williams:

That is so fascinating. So I could talk to you all day. I mean, you and I have already chatted a couple of times now, and we just have a really good rapport. But for the sake of time here, I want to be respectful to you. So as a final question then, what would you want to leave these MGMA members?

Daniel Williams:

These are practice administrators. These are physician leaders. These are people on the front line that are working with patients, either through the billing side or the clinical side. What would you want to leave them with about leadership and how they can grow their leadership skills?

Mark Noon:

Yeah, let me give you three things, and this is standard for everybody. In fact, you will find that this is exactly what every employee in every medical practice around the country wants from their leader. They want to know who their leader is. They may want to know them personally. They want to know what their values are, what's important to them, who they are as a person, their behavioral style, all those things.

Mark Noon:

They want to know them. Secondly, they want to know that they're good at what they do. And I don't mean being a good physician or being a good nurse, being a good billing clerk. I mean, are they good leader? Are they a good leader?

Mark Noon:

Or are they trying to become a better leader? Are they working at becoming a better leader if they're new to the role or they haven't had a lot of experience in the past? And thirdly is do they care? Do they care about the people that they work with? A lot of times in medical practices, we get hung up on the processes that we have to try to get patients through and try to get the billing done and insurance and all those kinds of things, but we forget about caring about the people.

Mark Noon:

Now think about this from a patient perspective. What are the three things every patient wants from their provider? They want to know who you are. They want to know you're good at what you do. And they want to know you care about them.

Mark Noon:

Same exact thing. So if we can nail those three things, we got our employees taking care of, we got our customers taking care of, we got our patients taking care of, everybody that we come in contact with will be well cared for in the medical practice if we can get those three things across.

Daniel Williams:

All right. Well, Mark Noon, thank you for joining us on the MGMA It podcast is a pleasure.

Mark Noon:

Thank you so much.

Daniel Williams:

Yeah, that was so much fun. So everybody listening, I'm gonna put information in our episode show notes. And as if y'all are loyal listeners to the podcast, you know that we always create articles as well. So we'll have a lot of information about Mark and his, leadership skills and tools in our articles and the episode show notes. But if you wanna go out and learn more about Mark right now, go to leadership10.org, And you'll find a lot of tools and tips out there as well.

Daniel Williams:

So until then, thank you all for being MGMA podcast listeners.

MGMA Insights: Leadership Insights for Navigating Modern Healthcare Challenges
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