🔒Executive Q&A: Jack Roche asks Eric Dickson about crisis response

Dr. Eric Dickson took over as UMass Memorial president and CEO in 2013, leading the largest single employer in Central Massachusetts. After joining Hanover Insurance Group when it was under the leadership of then CEO Fred Eppinger, Jack Roche took over the top leadership of Worcester’s only publicly traded company at the end of 2017. In this new feature from WBJ, Roche and Dickson interviewed each other about their rise to the top seat, using their positions to influence social change, and keeping their workforces motivated during challenging times. 

Roche: Both of us are internal successors to CEOs in our firms, which is a positive reflection on both companies when you can develop the talent from within. But there are challenges with being the internal successor, when you are leading people who used to be your peers. How have you dealt with that?

Dickson: It was a little more difficult for me, too, because I was a medical student here and then a resident. People remember you in those roles and have a hard time thinking about you as CEO.

I had a great boss for many years here, John O’Brien, who was the longest-running CEO at UMass Memorial. The organization was in rough shape when he started, and he really turned it around. He immediately set a vision for the organization, and he drove toward it.

As John was leaving, he did six weeks with me and introduced me to everyone. It was great. He said to me, “Eric, you’re going to need to pick a new vision. They are going to want to see something different.” What we came up with was perfecting the patient experience and perfecting the caregiver experience. The slogan we came up with was, “The best place to give care; the best place to get care.” That has driven us now for seven years, where we have a culture built on respect for people.

I know it is a source of pride for John to see someone he developed in this role, and I know it is a source of pride for Fred to see you in your role. When I bump into him, he is always very laudatory about the job you are doing.

Roche: That’s awesome. 

We’ve talked in the past about how vision-based organizations have an advantage. Employees need to know where they are going and feel they are part of something special. That is what attracted me to the Hanover 15 years ago. I thought Fred and his team had put together a business strategy, looking at where they thought the industry was going – not where it was – and how we could reposition the company to be an even more significant player and eventually a leader in this business.

Dickson: One of the things that surprised me in becoming CEO is people want you to comment on things that seemingly have nothing to do with your business. Now, we are in a period of social unrest and are seeing how racism still exists in this country. You see all these hot-button issues you would typically want to stay away from, but people look to us as CEOs to take a stance and use the megaphone we’ve been given. How do you balance all that between your personal beliefs and what’s best for the company with more than 4,000 employees, knowing you’re never going to please everyone?

Roche: There’s no doubt that comes with the job these days. As a publicly traded company, a good portion of the capital we attract comes from passive and active institutional investors, who now look beyond just quarterly earnings and pure financial views. It was harder to speak out five or 10 years ago when the feeling was investors wanted to get a higher return on equity and didn’t care so much about how you got the job done. Today, it is a requirement. What I’m most grateful for is the culture here made that important long before it became fashionable.

What is important, though, is you don’t want to take your personal views and drive them through the front door of the organization. You have to get a sense of what the company should be stepping up on. The racial equality issues and the unrest today is a problem for society and our business, especially if we don’t step up and help some of the systemic issues of our society go away. We are going to do more than say nice things. We are going to change the way we recruit into the community and change the folks we engage with in order to address these issues. We don’t want to look back a year or two from now and say, “A lot of people said nice things, but much of the engagement went away.” The No. 1 thing I heard from our folks inside the company is they want to see these courageous conversations perpetuate. We are really motivated to do so.

Roche: We’ve been through a lot over the past few months with the COVID-19 pandemic. Being in health care, I can only imagine how daunting it has been for you. Particularly as the surge was building, you were running out of personal protective equipment and the hospital capacity started filling up, what did you do to keep the optimism among your staff?

Dickson: One of the interesting things about medicine is when it is slow and you have time to complain about things, that is sometimes the hardest time to keep people motivated. But when the trauma rolls through the door, we put all that aside and we put patients first. It is automatic.

With the pandemic, we saw it coming, and we all just united against the common enemy that is COVID. We wanted to save as many lives as we could. We knew we were going to lose people. We knew it was going to be bad. My job was to say, “We will get through this, and we will keep you safe.”

I spent as much time as I could on the floor and in the COVID units taking care of patients, working in the COVID tents, so the staff wasn’t thinking I was putting them in a hazardous environment I wouldn’t go in myself. Keeping them motivated was the easiest job in the world. When they realized how much this community needed us, they were incredibly focused.

Roche: I would be remiss if I didn’t congratulate you for all the work UMass did during this time. I know it’s not over, and we can’t declare victory yet; but I want to say thank you on behalf of a lot of people in this community, who really depended upon your services and the services of the hospital.

Dickson: I’ll make sure to relay those thanks to all 14,000 people at the hospital who really did all the work.

This interview was edited for length and clarity by WBJ Editor Brad Kane.