Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Nancy Agee Will Shine as Carilion's CEO: Guaranteed

Nancy Agee at news conference today.^
Ed Murphy talks to TV reporter.^
A couple of years ago, I told Nancy Agee that some day she was going to be a great CEO for Carilion Clinic in Roanoke. She immediately corrected me: "Ed (Murphy, the CEO then) is younger than me. I'll retire before he does."

Age and retirement notwithstanding, today Carilion announced Nancy will be the new CEO as of July 1, so one of us was right about Nancy, a very dear friend of mine for some years, and the CEO job.

She will, indeed, be a superior chief executive at one of the region's largest employers for the reasons that she should be: she is compassionate, smart, driven, a person who listens and absorbs others' opinions and she simply adores teamwork. All of those are traits women tend to bring to management, but traits some women tend to forget about when they get there, thus becoming the men they replace. Women don't make good men and my guess is that Nancy won't try. She is comfortable with who she is and confident in her set of skills. Those running Carilion share that confidence and fairly gushed when asked about her.

The test for me here, though, is to go into the halls of the hospitals, the mist of the laundry, the cubbyholes of building maintenance and ask people who work a number of pay grades below Nancy (whose salary will be in seven figures). They will tell you that not only does she know who they are and what they do, she cares. She asks about their children and their sick parents and their gardens.

She is a woman of considerable humanity who will care about every worker and every patient in every hospital in the Carilion system. You can take that to the bank.

2 comments:

  1. I hope you are right, but I doubt it since she has been responsible for running the place for awhile now. As an employee I can say that Carilion is not well run and they are losing money fast. As a patient (thankfully I was only once) I had a bad experience with the scheduling and billing - at least my care was decent.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I had 2 surgeries at RMH to repair a fracture within the past 6 months. Both times, I was treated well, the staff listened to my issues, and the outcome was good. No issues with billing either.

    ReplyDelete