Week 3: Leader/Follower Relationships

Now that I have more knowledge about the true structure of the enterprise, my department and more specifically my organization, I thought week 3 might be a good time to reflect on some of the leader/follower relationships I have witnessed so far. As I mentioned in my first reflection about organizational culture, CVS and Aetna employ over 350,000 people all over the US. As a result, there are a limitless amount of leadership styles and tactics, but one thing is clear: CVS has some strong leaders who educate and empower their followers to provide the best possible care at the lowest possible cost for their members.

To simplify, the leadership workflow follows a uniform structure: C suite, Senior VP’s, VP’s, Senior Directors, Managers, Associates, and Interns. Everyone has a specific title and different titles signify different positions on the leadership ladder but for the most part, work is directed through those channels. There are also plenty of opportunities to autonomize work and leaders are always open to their followers suggesting new personal projects and helping connect those followers to resources. Innovation and new ideas are necessary in the healthcare space and leaders are aware of this and will pretty much do anything they can to help their followers succeed.

An additional interesting concept that has been drilled into the inters, or at least to me, during these past 3 weeks has been the concept that everyone with a CVS or Aetna email is a “colleague”. Even though it is just a name, it is empowering to be able to call some of the world’s most influential healthcare leaders my colleague, which is a symbol of just how supportive CVS and Aetna have been and will hopefully continue to be.

As for decision making processes, managers and supervisors look to their team members for advice and opinions. Decisions are made collaboratively, and leaders actively look for their employees input on how decisions are made and how to forecast the impacts of those decisions. My team specifically makes lots of decisions everyday about how to manage and maintain plan sponsor relationships with employees who offer Aetna insurance to their employees. Deciding which benefits to include in which member plans and which platforms to utilize are all decisions that are made collaboratively with other team members but also clients.

I think it takes a certain person to want to be a leader, especially in such a large enterprise. Obviously, they have to be driven professionally, but within healthcare I think leaders also need to be driven personally in order to enact real change and contribute to the end goal of making healthcare simpler, cheaper and more equal. All the leaders I have met on my team and across the company have made some astute observations about this theme as well. None of them were in it for the money or the title, but really to help people get healthier. I think the most common leadership style I have come across during my internship is somewhat of a mix between servant leadership and transformational leadership. Obviously specific differ from manager to manager, intern to intern, but I truly think leaders want to transform their colleagues by serving them and populations in order to promote happier, healthier, simpler lives across the board.

As someone who assumed an informal smaller-scale leadership goal within an intern team on a volunteer event project, I think there are lots of examples of leadership without leader labels within the company. Although we did not assign clear roles to the group, I had to pick up where the group fell short and organize external communications, speak up in partner meetings and plan the agenda for the event. Leaders we have gotten a chance to hear from during program-wide speaker series events have mentioned that filling in where teams fall short is an imperative to becoming a leader. Teaching the team how to fill in with you comes with practice but knowing where you fit in the dynamic of a team differentiates the leader from the follower. Many leaders have also mentioned the importance of mentors and how both formal and informal mentorship really shaped their career to where they are today. I think mentorship is a great example of informal leadership that can have an incredible impact on people and their career trajectories.

When thinking about the relationship and trust levels between leaders and members in your organization and the way in which followers regard the leaders in the organization, I think of it two ways: one with the members served are the followers and another where us as interns and prospective full-time employees are followers. Both are similar because CVSH is trying to establish trust in both groups: one as a sound insurance provider and one as a strong company to work for. I also think the question of trust in the healthcare space is constantly under scrutiny, especially with everything that has gone on these past 18 months. For me, I as a follower and prospective full-time employee and consumer of insurance, I think CVS is a trustworthy leader in the health care industry. Inspiring messages from the CEO, continuous improvement in the hiring of diverse talent, and all the other initiatives to accurately represent the populations the company serves, goes to show CVSH’s trust in their employees and their trustworthiness from their consumers.