The National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME) is an organisation with a crucial mission: advancing assessment of health care professionals to achieve optimal care for all. NBME is a non-profit, independent organisation and a leader in medical education assessment. And, like many companies – especially ones which have existed for over a century – it has inevitably ended up laden with legacy technologies. Andy Farella, Senior VP and CIO of NBME, is working on changing that.
Building and maintaining relationships
Building relationships can be challenging, especially in today’s more flexible working environment. The post-COVID world has seen a lot of organisations become partially or fully remote – with NBME falling into the latter category – which means being far more intentional about relationship-building. Farella takes this process seriously.
“I have a spreadsheet with all the stakeholders; the people with whom I need to manage and maintain relationships,” he explains. “I colour-code them red, yellow, or green. Green means the relationship is strong. With yellow, some of the fundamentals are there, but improvement is needed. Red means I don’t have a relationship with that person, or it needs a lot of work.
“Then there’s a column for what I’m going to do; how I’m going to engage with them. Then I have a meeting cadence, because if you assume that you’re just going to meet serendipitously somehow, it’s never going to happen.”
Decisiveness as a necessary quality
Something Farella aspires to be in his leadership is decisive. He believes that teams yearn for decisiveness in their leaders. However, developing a sense of decisiveness – especially at a time when business is so changeable, and sometimes volatile – can be challenging.
“I would say this is an area of relative weakness earlier in my career,” Farella admits. “I had this notion that decisions should come from a consensus. My rationale, at the time, was that if everyone buys into a decision, the outcome will be more successfully implemented.
“In hindsight, that was missing a component: decisiveness. When you need to reach a consensus on everything, you tend to get analysis paralysis and decisions take too long to be made. That was frustrating to me, but it was even more frustrating to my team.”
Farella came across a book that helped him: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lancioni. One of the stories within this book is about how great leaders make decisions. “There’s a part that’s about hearing the point of view of all members of the team,” Farella continues. “It’s not about consensus – it’s about focusing on hearing everyone’s perspective and ensuring they know they’re fully heard. However, the leader still makes the decision.”
It was a lightbulb moment for Farella. As soon as he became more decisive, his team noticed – and they loved it. “Even when I made a decision that one of my team members disagreed with, they still preferred that I made that decision so we could move forward. That’s so important because even if the decision is the wrong one, moving forward allows you to live in that decision for a while, learn from it, and then pivot.”