How to Respond When a Crisis Tests Your Values

BY Cynthia Barnes | October 13, 2022

Successful institutions create cultures that further their vision and reflect their values. How do these organizations maintain those values–and that culture–in a crisis? The pandemic created unprecedented challenges for one of the nation’s best children’s hospitals.

In a fireside chat at From Day One’s conference in Denver this summer, Betsy Rodriguez, senior VP and chief human resources officer at Children’s Hospital Colorado sat down with me to discuss how the board and staff at her hospital kept their culture alive.

Rodriguez started her career at the University of Missouri, where she completed a doctorate in psychology and developed an interest in HR. After 20 years at the University of Colorado, she returned to Columbia, where she was chief HR officer at the university. An interest in academic health care led her to Barnes Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, where she spent three years as VP of HR. “But Colorado was calling me. This is home. I had a wonderful, wonderful opportunity to take the position I have now, and it is the best job I’ve ever had. And they didn’t pay me to say that!”

A Four-part Mission, a ‘Crazy’ Culture, and Core Values

One hundred years old, Children’s comprises the flagship hospital on the Anschutz Medical Campus (in partnership with the University of Colorado Health System), and a system of smaller hospitals as well as clinics across the state. “Our mission is really simple. It’s to improve the health of children. Can’t get more simple than that,” said Rodriguz. In addition to the first mission–patient care–Children’s focuses on education, research, and advocacy.

“We’re really proud of the research that we do. We don’t just treat their diseases. We actually try to find cures for them. Advocacy means that we get involved in legislative issues that impact the health of children, either positively or negatively.”

When CFO interviewing Rodriguez for her prospective role at Children’s described working there as “crazy,” Rodriguez thought, ‘That’s not for me.” But then her future colleague elaborated on what he meant by that: “We’ll do anything for a kid.” Anything, Rodriguez learned, could cover anything from paying for million-dollar doses of lifesaving medicine to helping parents cover housing and transportation.

The hospital’s four core values (caring community, humble expertise, generous service and boundless creativity) might sound like the product of a C-suite marketing meeting. They aren’t. A group of employees gathered stories and distilled them. “These values did not come from the top and they weren’t pushed down. We live these every day.”

Some of that boundless creativity is celebrated in rituals like the Halloween Flash Mob, in which a thousand or more costumed employees, including the CEO, dance in the hospital’s atrium to the delight of their pint-sized patients. “The music comes on. They line the kids up, maybe wheel out their bed. Whether they’re in a wheelchair, they may come out with mom and dad. And if they can’t come out of their room, we put it on the videos in the rooms. Things like that really cement our culture and bring us together.”

The second part of the culture at Children’s is their safety program, called Target Zero. “That means that we want to harm no kids. And you’re probably thinking, ‘Well, duh,’ but the reality is health care is really dangerous. You have to have a team of people who are laser-focused on safety. And we have it pervasive throughout our entire community, to the point that we have empowered the lowest-level team member to speak up. So if that person thinks that something doesn’t feel right, they are empowered to ask a question and the entire group will stop and step back and respond to that question. And we celebrate that. We say thank you.”

The Two Sides of the Two Pandemics

Initially, the Covid-19 pandemic battered Children’s budget, while improving children’s health. Kids weren’t in school, weren’t playing together, weren’t being in accidents. “Respiratory [illness] season kind of didn’t even happen that year, it was just unbelievable. In our biggest hospital, usually 350 to 400 kids, we had less than 100 for a very sustained period of time. So what are we going to do? We made people decisions, not financial decisions. That’s the thing I'm the most proud of. And that's where I say ‘Here, it’s different.’ It really was different.”

Led by the hospital’s “amazing, incredibly supportive board,” Children’s covered full pay for eight weeks for staffers who were idled during that period. “I remember the board chair saying, ‘You guys need to do whatever you have to do to take care of team members, we are not going to worry about the finances right now.’’

As the pandemic dragged on, the focus remained on protecting jobs. Some nurses painted walls and planted flowers on the ground, while some staff left, joining the Great Resignation. Executives took pay cuts, and benefits and paid leave were reduced.

Then came another wave of the pandemic. Highly contagious variants sickened workers and threatened the compromised children who suddenly filled the now short-staffed hospital. “Nobody wanted to work in health care. It didn’t matter if you were a nurse, or in food service, or in finance. People were scared, and they didn't want to work in health care.” The hospital hired traveling nurses, but at much higher wages, to the detriment of the morale of the long-term staff. In the midst of the staffing crisis, Children’s was one of the first institutions to realize the crippling effects Covid-19 had on pediatric mental health.

Leadership responded with boundless creativity, spending whatever was necessary (especially for recruitment) and increasing wellness resources. Weekly leadership calls helped to combat fear-mongering and rumors, as did total transparency on every decision possible.

Slowly, the pandemic storm is receding, and Rodriguez has found a few silver linings, including extremely high safety numbers even while the hospital was understaffed and overwhelmed. “I’m a very optimistic person. You build the right culture, and then when you have a crisis, you can rely on that. We had shortages of leaders, too. But we had team members who just knew what to do, and they did the right thing. We have a huge issue around health disparities in our country, particularly for communities of color. And the pandemic brought light to that. I think it’s going to make a difference for the communities that we serve, and I'm happy about that.”

And at Halloween, Rodriguez will dance.

Cynthia Barnes has written about everything from art to zebras from more than 30 countries. She currently calls Denver home.

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