Forging Giants: The Leader's Compass, Toolkit & Library

A Blueprint for Modern Leadership

WITH GUEST Matt Fry PhD, FACHE

Introduction:

You’re listening to Tiller-Hewitt’s Leadership Lens Podcast.  If you’re a leader - or an aspiring leader - who wants to stay relevant and impactful… YOU’RE IN THE RIGHT PLACE.

At Tiller-Hewitt we believe it’s faster, smarter -- and less painful -- to learn from leaders who have walked before us. That’s why we invite top leaders to be our guests on the Leadership Lens.

Your host is Tammy Tiller-Hewitt – Founder of Tiller-Hewitt HealthCare Strategies. Let’s jump into the podcast.

Introduction:

Welcome to the Leadership Lens Podcast! I'm your host, Tammy Tiller-Hewitt, and today we have a very special returning guest who’s been on an incredible career trajectory – Matt Fry, President and CEO of Freeman Health System.

Now, if you're imagining a healthcare executive reading dry business books, think again. Matt's current reading list includes the latest Stephen King novel - he’s read King’s entire library, the epic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer, and he’s absolutely captivated by historian Nathaniel Philbrick.

Why does this matter? Because Matt finds leadership lessons in the most unexpected places, including Philbrick's three-book series on the Revolutionary War. But he highlights Philbrick's incredible book “The Heart of the Sea," the harrowing account of the whaleship Essex, which was the real-life inspiration for Moby Dick.

This is a leader who believes that understanding human resilience – whether in founding a nation or surviving a catastrophic disaster at sea – directly informs how he leads a 5,300-employee health system through today's toughest challenges.

We dive into his unique leadership philosophy on why he works for his team in what he calls an "inverted triangle," his sacred responsibility to develop others, his commitment to data-driven decisions, and the "heavy crown" of being a healthcare CEO today.

So, if you're ready to explore how lessons from revolutionary wars, white whales, and real-life shipwrecks can make you a better leader, then stay right here. My conversation with Matt Fry starts right now.

Tammy Tiller-Hewitt:

Matt Frye, welcome to the Leadership Lens Podcast!

Matt Fry:

Thanks, Tammy. Good to be here with you.

Tammy Tiller-Hewitt:

Yeah, it's great to have you back. I can't wait to hear what's happened to you since our last interview. If you haven't, for our listeners, if you haven't listened to our last podcast, check it out, and you will be so inspired by the continued growth and explosion of Matt's career.

So, tell us where you're at now, and what you're doing in this role.

Matt Fry:

Yeah, thanks, Tammy. I am the president and CEO of Freeman Health System, based in Joplin, Missouri. We are a four-hospital system right now. We also have a really large mental health arm of the business. It's Ozark Center.  Collectively, we have about 5,300 employees, and we're just really proud and honored to be the preeminent healthcare provider in the four-state area down here in Southwest Missouri.

Tammy Tiller-Hewitt:

So, I was just getting used to you being in my home state of Illinois, and you got swept away. How did that happen? You were the market CEO, and then BAM! Somebody recruited you away.

Matt Fry:

You know, these things have a funny way of working out. I loved my time at HSHS and I learned a lot from that team, and I was really honored to serve in that capacity. But, you know, I had an opportunity to come down and serve in a different capacity down here, and hopefully bring some value to this community and to this health system, and it was an opportunity that frankly, we couldn't pass up.  So, my wife, who is my biggest supporter, and I, we loaded up our four kids and moved on down to Joplin, Missouri. Best decision I've ever made. It's incredible.

Tammy Tiller-Hewitt:

Really?

Matt Fry:

Yeah.

Tammy Tiller-Hewitt:

Oh, I love it. So, you went from California to Illinois, then over to the Missouri, which is the next state over if people aren't geographically informed about the Midwest. But I love that when I heard you were going to go take over a health system, so you were a market CEO, but now you're a health system CEO, so that's pretty exciting.

Matt Fry:

Yeah, you know, it's a little bit different. Heavy lies the crown, as they say. It's very stressful, and there's a lot of weight that kind of presses down, but you know what…we're surrounded by incredible physicians, incredible, nurses and ancillary staff, and we have just a really great, committed board, and a really great and committed leadership team, so… you know, I think we have all the parts and pieces to be just a world-class, exceptional health system. We have opportunities, like every health system does, but the cool thing is, is everyone is committed to identifying those opportunities, doing the hard work to make them better. We’re all unified behind one core mission, and that is to provide exceptional healthcare to our community, and we aim to do that.

Tammy Tiller-Hewitt:

Wow. Well, I am a fan on LinkedIn, I follow you, if anyone else listening isn't, they should, Matt Fry.  I love how you are constantly giving credit to your team. Like, you never, ever, ever take credit for anything. But you are constantly really raising them up. So, that is such a sign of a great leader.

Matt Fry:

I'm really big into mentorship. My doctorate, my dissertation was focused on the impact of mentorship for emerging leaders in healthcare. And so I've been the very lucky recipient of just really phenomenal mentors over my career. Early on in my career, I had a mentor, his name was Derek Marshall. He worked for Sutter Health for a long time, and now he's been doing some other things, but…Derek taught me a lot of things.

One of the things Derek taught me is any good leader should keep in mind that you work for your team. It's an inverted triangle, and you're at the very bottom, holding up the triangle. And he said, at the end of the day, when everything goes well, you should give all the credit to your team.  And when things really hit the fan, you should take all the blame. And then meet with your team, learn from the challenges and the opportunities, and then hopefully be able to move forward in a direction that allows for you to have less and less of those issues come up. And so I wish that I could, you know, credit my own thought on that, but really, that was something that I shamelessly stole from Derek, and, you know, it served me well. It's just really important that we're recognizing those around us, and we're building them up.

Tammy Tiller-Hewitt:

I love that. So, I bet then you would be a big fan of one of my favorite quotes. I don't even know who owns it. You can't call yourself a leader if no one grows when you're around. What do you think? It sounds like you live by that.

Matt Fry:

Oh, absolutely. You know it's one of our most sacred responsibilities as leaders is to grow the people around us, to develop them, to ensure that they're being fulfilled, personally and professionally, to ensure that they're able to work at the top of their license.

You know, we have really difficult jobs, and oftentimes, they're very thankless jobs. But it's important that people are able to learn and develop and grow and pursue their aspirational desires. And we, as leaders and as mentors, really need to ensure that we're doing everything we can to build them up, to prepare them for the next step, and then really to help them along in that next step.

You know, I used to, when I would talk to groups, I would often get the question of, well yeah, but what happens Matt, if you mentor someone and they leave the organization, they leave your team? You've now invested a ton of time and energy into that talent, and then you're losing them someone else is benefiting from that. And my only response to that is, that is absolutely acceptable, and we should never shirk away from our responsibility, because someone else is growing in a different direction, whether that's within healthcare, but with a different organization, or even into a new organization, or a new industry altogether.

And I think… What happens when people grow and they develop and they're able to take those learnings forward and further enhance themselves and their positions, respectively, they pay it forward. More often than not, I find these people throughout life, and, you know, oftentimes I'll stay connected to people, And it is almost always I hear, oh yeah, I have a mentee, or oh yeah, I'm really engaged in this group, or oh yeah, I serve on this not-for-profit organization board, and it's just really interesting, and I don't dwell on it when I talk to them and tell them how proud I am of them, but hopefully they know it, and maybe I should tell them more, but it's really interesting to see.

Tammy Tiller-Hewitt:

Yeah. Well, I mean, to me, that's the ultimate leadership characteristic when you are really investing in others, whether… what's that old proverb that says you're planting a tree that you may never sit under? So, I think that you are, you know, you represent that well.

Matt Fry:

Sir Isaac Newton had this quote that I absolutely love. I think it's…  it's such a timely quote for this conversation. If I have seen further, it is from standing on the shoulders of giants. I think, you know, really what he's recognizing there is no one does it alone. And we are a product of the people that build us up and develop us.

Tammy Tiller-Hewitt:

That's awesome, Matt, that's incredible.

Hey, I'm curious, if you could only have… really be strong at one characteristic, asking really good questions or being a really good listener, what do you think? You have to pick one, you can only pick one as the… you can be the expert at one. Which one would you go for?

Matt Fry:

Well, you must ask this a lot, because I… I would probably say both, but if I had to pick one, I would say, asking really good questions.

They're both critically important, but I'll tell you why I would choose asking questions. And it harkens back to developing people. You know, oftentimes our frontline leaders, they… they know the answers. They can figure out the answers. Typically, their biggest challenge is they don't know what questions to ask.

Either because they don't have the experience, or because they don't have a wide enough lens. So, really challenging people and asking them questions and making them critically think about those answers, not providing those answers for them, I think it develops them, it develops their credibility, their knowledge base, but it also leads to better outcomes, because they're closer to the work, they know the teams better, they know the workflow better, they know where, the challenges and the opportunities for waste reduction are. So…If they're able to critically think through the processes, they'll likely come out with a better outcome than I ever could.

Tammy Tiller-Hewitt:

Okay, so for our listeners, you need to stop right now and rewind, and re-listen to what Matt just said around asking questions. That was genius. I love it.

Okay, I’m just hot off a training from ACHE on evidence-based decision making. It was a phenomenal day, and we ran through several models and kept with the same decision that we were… our solution or problem we were trying to solve for, whatever it was, everyone kind of worked on different in their different groups. But we work through tons of different models. And so I'm just curious, do you have any really proven model that you run mission-critical, especially decisions through to ensure you reach the best solution possible?

Matt Fry:

It's a really good question, Tammy. I don't know that I have a model in mind. What… what we do here, what I have found to be really beneficial, and I have not done this all the time in my career, and I've learned from some of my mistakes on this.

What we try to do is be data driven. So, when we talk about evidence based, I think data, fact. What I challenge our team to do, always, is, let's ensure that our assumptions and biases are validated through data. That they're validated through having qualitative and quantitative information that helps us to ensure that what we're doing makes sense.

If you're going to build a surgery center, or if you want to build a hospital, or if you want to acquire a clinic, you need to understand the market dynamics. You need to understand payer mix, patient flow, provider supply, provider demand, and patient migration patterns. You need to understand these factors because something can sound really good when we just kind of talk about it, but oftentimes, when you peel back the onion, you learn the nuances that will better inform your decisions, and you know, the answer might not be black and white sometimes, and oftentimes, there is a world of gray. But if you're data-driven, and I'll give one other piece here that I challenge the team on as well. If you're data-driven, and you cast a wide net for really seeking information sources, then I think if you do decide to move forward, if you decide that something's accretive to the system, for example, and you want to move forward. You can better position those assets, or that model, the operating model, to maximize value, not only to the patients that we serve, but to the health system that's the delivery mechanism.

The other thing that goes along with that is I told my team from the onset, I expect all of you to challenge me, and I wanted to challenge all of you, alright? It's about being respectful, it's about being professional, but… we need to… Steve Jobs has this saying a long time ago, he put this out, and… It was, I've hired really smart people to be around me, because they're going to be able to inform our decisions a lot better than I will. And I think, you know, the whole premise of his point is, more heads are better than one, right? I don't want to go in and…be an authoritarian that has a siloed vision, I make decisions, I enforce those decisions, and then we move forward. I want to be in a position where I surround myself with really smart, capable people, oftentimes smarter and more capable than I am to have dialogue, and brainstorm, and come up with solutions together, collectively a lot of times, when I go into those discussions at the beginning, I have assumptions on what I think the outcome is going to be, and I will tell you, Tammy, 80-90% of the time, I walk out of that with a different direction or corrected assumptions.

Tammy Tiller-Hewitt:

 Wow.  Okay, so data and facts, cast a wide net, and challenge and be challengeable.

Matt Fry:

Yep.

Tammy Tiller-Hewitt:

That's good, that's good. I still… am so surprised at some very smart people that I know that data is not their first go-to. And it's, you know, I mean, we're in an emotional business and industry as it is, with all that we're doing, so bringing emotion in is so easy and letting it take over, so I love hearing that not only are you using data and real facts around your assumptions, but you're involving so many people. And a lot of people say, we don't need all these people, more people, look at all the salaries around the table. It's like, well, you at least need representation from anyone that this decision's going to touch, or influence, or…And then, you know, then they'll have their DNA all over it, too, and so I love it.

Thanks, that's… that was really awesome.

We're in the physician business at Tiller Hewitt, so in terms of physician relations and growing volume, so I always like to hear from the top executive, what's your secret sauce in terms of your involvement and what you consider your responsibility around physician recruitment, retention, and relations? And when I say physician, I should say provider, because I also mean APPs. So, recruitment, retention, and relations.

Matt Fry:

I think, providers, physicians, mid-levels, I think providers want to work in an environment where they are respected, they get to work at the top of their license, they have some agency and autonomy, and they are provided an opportunity to weigh in and provide insight.

I think, you know, sometimes in this industry, we run into situations where people get very top-down. Large organizations get very top-down. They say, you know what, we're switching to this one implant. We're going to be a sole source vendor for, say, joint replacements, and take it or leave it. You don't have a say in this. And I just think that's fundamentally flawed. I think how we should approach that is, we have an opportunity to go to a sole source vendor, this is the vendor. Or we can do dual source, and these are the two vendors. Let's work through collaboratively what this looks like, and let's hear people's feedback along the way.

At the end of the day, you might still wind up at sole source, right? And people will have to make sacrifices and let that change their practice patterns. But at least you gave them the respect of providing their feedback, voicing their concerns, and then giving them an opportunity to advocate in a platform to really advocate their position. Sometimes we still have to make those tough decisions and say, I'm sorry, we're going in this direction, this is why. But to me, that has always been much more fruitful than being exclusionary and or just not providing that platform to advanced providers and physicians to voice their concern and get involved in the sausage-making.

Tammy Tiller-Hewitt:

Yep, I agree, a thousand percent, and that's really been proven through physician satisfaction surveys over the course of the last 40 years. The top 4 out of 5 issues that providers have, have something to do with communication, not involved in the decision making, not in the know. So, what you're doing is spot on, you're hitting 4 out of 5, the others about surgical scheduling, which, you know, is an animal all in and of itself, and I would still say some of that comes down to communication around the why they can or can't, or, you know, why it's working. So, that was a great answer. Thank you so much.

Let's talk about what's going on from an innovation or transformational level at Freeman, and then what you're seeing across the industry that you would like to bring locally. I heard a saying on a recent SG2 podcast, where they said, how can we bring the technology to the patient instead of bringing the patient to the technology? So, what are you doing around innovation, technology, and transformation?

Matt Fry:

Well, I'm glad that you asked that, because we actually have a very seismic transformation that

we are endeavoring upon right now.  We currently have Meditech for our EHR on the inpatient side of the house. We have Athena on the outpatient side of the house. We are migrating the enterprise to Epic.

We’ve done the implementation phase, and we will be, fully live on Epic the last week of October, and then it'll carry over into the first week of November of next year. So, this is a very, very expensive investment …several hundred million dollars, but it's going to be vastly worth it. And our physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and other mid-levels are going to have the opportunity to work smarter, not harder.

We're going to be able to provide our patients with more information at their fingertips. We're going to be able to more easily and more conveniently schedule and register patients. I mean, all around we're going to have a much better experience utilizing the technology and the capabilities of Epic to elevate the healthcare that we deliver as a health system down in southwest Missouri into southeast Kansas, northeast Oklahoma, northwest Arkansas. It's really going to be a seismic shift for us.

The second thing we're doing is we are doing an enterprise-wide ERP migration onto Workday, which will actually go live in April of next year. So, that too is going to help us internally. Now, that will be less patient facing, but internally, that will help us manage our resources a little bit better, that will help us to find economies of scale and ultimately become more efficient.

So those are two pieces of technology that we are definitely bringing to the organization on a very broad, enterprise-wide scale.

In a kind of maybe more isolated implementation of technology at Freeman West, we've recently noticed that, from a mammography standpoint, we don't have full-breast ultrasound capability right now, so we are going to bring that technology to Freeman West.

We've been replacing our cath labs to ensure that we have the latest technology, to provide comprehensive cardiovascular care for our communities.

We have a host of other things that we're investing in as well from that standpoint. We actually just cleared a CON in Missouri to bring two more robots to Freeman West to expand our robotic surgery capability here.

So we're going to continue to invest in those types of things, because at the end of the day, what we are most concerned with, and I mentioned this earlier, and it'll sound like I'm just kind of repeating myself over and over on this, but at the end of the day, we want to be able to provide the most exceptional care possible to our community. Yes, we have to do that in a sustainable way. We have to do that in an affordable way. But as I say to a lot of people in a lot of different venues, the rising tide lifts all boats. Where we're able to demonstrate value to our patients, our patients will select us whenever given the opportunity.

Tammy Tiller-Hewitt:

Yeah, wow, Matt, that is some serious financial investment, and labor! I mean, my goodness, all of those things you talked about are heavy, heavy lifts, so congratulations for that.

Well, I want to end today, I want to do some rapid-fire questions for you, and one of them is this question that I want to spend, instead of a rapid fire, I'm going to move it up to spend a little bit of time, because given your history in the past few years, again, how you continue and rapidly advance your career to bigger and bigger health systems across the country, what's one thing that you would tell your younger self that may encourage some leaders or aspiring leaders listening today?

Matt Fry:

I'm glad that you asked that question. I was recently speaking at an event and was asked a similar question, and the answer I gave them will be the same answer I give you, and that is, always do what you say you’re going to do.  Be dependable to your team.

I was challenged a long time ago by a mentor of mine to answer all of your emails every day before you leave the office. That can be somewhat grueling. I do work very long hours, but it's important to show the respect to our teams and those that are reaching out to us through being attentive and being responsive.

You know, I had this other mentor of mine tell me, you know, Matt, you can be on point 99 times out of 100, but that one time that you're maybe dishonest, or you do something below board, or you know, you do something that isn't in the best interests of the patients that you serve, or the organization that you serve, you know that can completely and totally tank your reputation and the trust that you've worked so tirelessly to build, so I just would encourage everybody to be ethical in your dealings, always. There's… there's never a chance or there's never a time where it's acceptable to deviate from that.

And the last thing is put in the work. There is no substitution for hard work. We have become a society where we look for quick fixes. Artificial intelligence and chat GPT is an example of how people can kind of abuse that and look for those mechanisms to, you know, kind of be a solve-all for the things that they're dealing with.  But… I would just encourage everyone to do the hard work. It will pay off, and in the end, you will develop yourself and your own skill sets so exponentially that you'll be able to serve others in a much more meaningful way.

Tammy Tiller-Hewitt:

That's good. That's powerful.

Well, I'm going to end today within the rapid-fire 4 questions, for our audience. I love this part. So, the first question, what are you reading?

Matt Fry:

Okay, right now, I am reading the latest book by Stephen King. It's a really good book. I'm kind of a King fan, so I've read his entire library. So, when this one came out, I couldn't pass up the opportunity.

I'm about halfway through The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which is a very comprehensive history on World War II.  That is a phenomenal book, William Shirer wrote it back in the 50s, and it's really an incredible book for anybody who's interested in history.

And then finally, Nathaniel Philbrick. I absolutely love him. I've read all of his books as well. He has some Revolutionary War books, has a three-book series on the Revolutionary War that is just exceptional. But he also wrote this book, it too is an exceptional book, it's called The Heart of the Sea. And it talks about the Essex, which is a ship that was really the inspiration for Moby Dick.

Tammy Tiller-Hewitt:

Really?

Matt Fry:

It's, yeah, it's an incredible book, but I'm really into history and Stephen King, if you can believe it.

Tammy Tiller-Hewitt:

I love it, I love it. Okay, so that's probably going to be the same answers, but is there any author or book that you would recommend to another leader? And why, or what would it be, and why?

Matt Fry:

Yeah, you know, I really love reading about great leaders that have come before us, and one of the reasons why is because when you actually read about these people, George Washington's a great example.  So, an author that I would recommend for all is Ron Chernow.

He writes really good, comprehensive biographies of key leaders. Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, and a number of others. David McCullough, as well, has written some great ones. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. As you read about these leaders, you realize how human and flawable they are.

You know oftentimes we place people on pedestals because we just don't understand them well enough, or there's mythology around them. But really, when you dig deep, you learn so much about who they were, how they lived, all of the plethora of mistakes they made, and I think it's very humbling, and frankly, I look at those things, and I take those lessons, and I say, you know what… they're just as human as any of us, and if they can do these things, anyone else can do these things.

So, those authors, I would highly recommend for folks that are trying to gain knowledge of leadership and how to command a strong leadership presence amongst your teams.

Tammy Tiller-Hewitt:

What's the biggest accomplishment in the last year, personally and professionally, that you would like to share?

Matt Fry:

Probably, moving into this role and working to develop this leadership team and get to know this community, and get to know the exceptional colleagues that work at Freeman Health System and Ozark Center.

Tammy Tiller-Hewitt:

Awesome.

Okay. Well Mr. Fry, that wraps up our interview today, and I just want to thank you again for spending time with me and our listeners, and I hope you will continue to do other series down the road as you continue to grow and develop and help other leaders and aspiring leaders to challenge them to keep moving up.

Matt Fry:

Well, thank you, Tammy. As always, I love connecting with you. I really appreciate you making the time and providing me an opportunity to chat with you today.

Tammy Tiller-Hewitt:

Awesome!

CLOSING:

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The organization is recognized as the leading experts in strategic growth, network integrity, and physician engagement. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Leadership Lens. For more leadership resources and strategic growth solutions, visit tillerhewitt.com.