Meghan Trevorrow Podcast Transcript
Meghan Trevorrow joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Meghan Trevorrow. Meghan Trevorrow is a leadership and culture practitioner currently serving as Chief Operations Officer at This Week Health, a healthcare IT platform dedicated to exploring innovations in the field.
Meghan specializes in fostering healthy team dynamics and embracing conflict as a growth tool. Her leadership approach is informed by her belief in the power of embracing discomfort to build resilient and thriving communities, whether within corporate teams or healthcare environments. At This Week Health, Meghan’s leadership focuses on improving operational efficiencies while promoting a positive and collaborative culture.
The podcast and media platform provide healthcare IT leaders with insights into digital innovation, strategic decision making, and evolving leadership roles in the healthcare space, which aligns with Meghan’s expertise in leading change in challenging environments.
Well, good afternoon, Meghan. Welcome to the show!
Meghan Trevorrow: Thank you for having me. Glad to be here!
Brian Thomas: Awesome. I appreciate you making the time and I get to talk to an amazing person out of a wonderful state and city. I used to live in Huntington Beach, California. Great surfing. I think it was the surfing capital of the world at one point, if it’s not still that, but I love that place really, really do.
Meghan, so glad that you’re here and we’re going to jump right into your first question. Meghan, as your role as the COO or Chief Operating Officer at This Week Health, how do you balance the pursuit of operational efficiency with the cultivation of a positive and collaborative workspace culture?
Meghan Trevorrow: This is a question I appreciate because most conversations try and divide operational efficiency with culture and from my point of view, I have a working theory. They’ve never been more tied together than then. Now they should have never been separated. And what I’ve noticed recently is the amount of effort and energy towards efficiency within teams. Just let’s just say within the operations world.
However, when it comes to cultures that haven’t invested in positive work environments, the amount of waste due to let’s just call it internal drama goes through the roof. If that makes sense. So, without a leadership proactively investing in their team culture to create that safe environment. I’m watching a lot of waste happen with internal drama, and I think the best way I can explain this is if someone shows up to their team.
Most of us are virtual, but let’s just say they walk in their office Monday morning and their 1st thoughts are towards. How can I prove myself? How can I protect my own back and trying to kind of it’s a self-focus because they’re not feeling safe and what they’re not thinking about is the mission and, you know, confidence, creativity around.
How can I play my part? Advance the mission forward, collaborate, get creative. And so it’s this internal focus. That’s not necessarily able to contribute to the larger mission because there’s lack of that positive work environment, that great team culture.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate you breaking that apart for us.
The saying goes, the old adage. Culture each strategy for lunch. Right. And it’s so true. You’ve got to keep those two things melded together. You really do everything that your company does, it goes back to its foundational culture. And again, you can move mountains with the right culture. So thank you for sharing that.
Meghan, can you discuss a time when embracing discomfort led to a significant breakthrough or positive change within your organization?
Meghan Trevorrow: We’ve had a lot of conversations within my team about embracing discomfort and it came from, I forget the author, but I’m going to reference a book that planted the seed in my mind.
A few years ago. It’s a book called the comfort crisis and it’s basically saying we vastly underestimate the influence that comfort has over our lives personally, professionally. As a team, as individuals. And so, if we started embracing discomfort as like, Hey, it’s normal, there’s going to be things that are not going to be comfortable within our work environment, within our team, let’s embrace it rather than try and avoid it or make people feel comfortable.
And so, one of the specific things that I’ve used this with is embracing healthy conflict, which is a huge umbrella. It’s, it’s including the skillset to own when you’re not right. The skill set to apologize and I say skill set because these are things that if they’re not practice regularly, it’s really hard for it to become part of your operating system as your team culture.
So, one example, it happened within one of my colleagues, you know, first few weeks within her time here on the team. And I said, this is an honest, vulnerable moment for me, I said something about her that was just in a meeting, in a group meeting, she was included. I said something kind of off the cuff. And maybe a day, two days later, I was actually thinking about it and realized, man, I think that came across, that was pretty disrespectful.
And with this kind of backbone of, all right, we are going to be the people that do hard things. We embrace discomfort. That phone call to her directly the next morning, I looked up her calendar so that she had a meeting in about 5 minutes and I decided to call her and we’re still getting to know each other at this point in time.
And I decided to call her and just own it and say, hey, I said this and I shouldn’t have and there’s just no excuse. So, I want to apologize for that. And this could be a non-issue for you, but I just want to make sure that you knew that, and she was quiet. And I, when she started responding, I could actually tell there was emotion in her voice and come to find out she had been thinking about that and being new to the team.
She was wondering if she was doing a good job where she stood on the team and this 5-minute conversation. That was uncomfortable for me was totally worth it because it cleared the air for her. She, she didn’t have to worry. It also set a new tone of. Hey, you’re going to know exactly where you stand with all of us because we embrace the discomfort.
Of one-on-one direct communication, and it’s probably awkward and uncomfortable in the moment, but it’s going to build a culture that our team can land on for the long haul.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. You know, I appreciate that making you shared some vulnerability there, but back to your point, you know, we do need to embrace some of that the things that are uncomfortable.
We do need to brace to get more comfortable doing that. And so, I appreciate that. And again, love the moment you just shared with our audience. Meghan, the health care I. T. sectors rapidly evolving. How does this week health stay ahead of industry trends? And what role does leadership play in navigating these changes?
Meghan Trevorrow: It is very much changing. It’s one of the fastest paced industries ever. And this is a great conversation. I would answer this question with. Our strategy is team relationship community and to expound on that a little bit. If you could imagine 1 person trying to stay on top of trends or changes. And then that 1 person trying to strategize by themselves on how to navigate that.
You’ve got a very, very tired, heavy leader that probably feels alone and, like, the world, you know, is just resting on his or her shoulders. So, the way that we approach this is that there’s a collective ownership of staying on top of what’s going on in the industry and proactive. Almost like we’re trying to get into group conflict as quick as possible and share thoughts.
And for example, our leadership meeting every single week has certain time to discuss, like, what’s going on? How could it impact the industry? How could it impact us? And if the tone that we’ve said is, if you’re at the table, your voice. Needs to be heard and you need to own your voice too. So, this is not a culture that we celebrate people that just are yes, people all the time, because you’re not really bringing much to the table.
We actually want to experience as much diversity of thought. And opinion and preference to get all angles of changes and trends in the industry. So, there’s almost like more data and Intel that you have. Because that’s, that’s where strategy and informed decision making comes from is, is the best information in front of you.
And so, the, to take it 1 more step, we set the tone of, if you bring up a point and someone pushes back on it. Your job is to try and push back at least 2 more times. If you’ve ever been in meetings where you’ve got the strong voices, you know, that that speak a lot, and then you’ve got the quieter voices.
The goal is to make sure it’s a little bit more balanced because the quieter ones are usually the big observers. They’re probably more. In the know of things, because they listen more than they speak. So, the goal is to empower them to, hey, when you bring up a point and someone pushes back on it, don’t go quiet.
Don’t cut off your opinion and sit back, keep engaging in the conversation, keep pushing back at least 2 more times, you know, and say, thank you. That’s a good point. That’s a good perspective. But have you thought about it this way? So, the goal is to embrace group healthy conflict when it comes to 1, us all being in the know of changes going on in the industry and also coming in with what do we think about it and why.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And I appreciate you sharing some of your day-to-day operational things that you’re doing to make the team better. I was in IT healthcare for many, many years, the bulk of my career. And it’s certainly a rapidly changing high stakes, high stress environment. So, I appreciate what you’re doing.
And I know you’re going to make your team that much better because of it. And Meghan, last question of the day, looking ahead, what are your goals for this week’s health in terms of operational excellence and cultural development? And how do you plan to achieve them?
Meghan Trevorrow: Yeah, so right now I’m working with my team and a few other teams on what I’m calling culture of honor.
And it is the best way to describe it is from that 1st question that I talked about that positive team work environment. I’ve been trying to identify, like, what are the actual elements within building a thriving team culture? And right now, not to bury the plot, there’s three values or kind of three daily practices that the best teams that I’ve either worked with in the past.
So, this culture conversation that I’ve been in, it’s been the last decade of my life. I wake up thinking about culture. I love the dynamic of team and just, you know, a group of people coming together to pursue something massive and big and important. And how to unlock the power of that group and there’s 3 values that I see within the best teams that I’ve ever worked with.
And that’s what I’m trying to bring to my team right now. And it’s a slow world. Culture is 1 of those things. You take you take 1 percent gains a day. It is not a quick past process. It’s a slow, steady process. But the 1st value is. A daily practice of honoring who people are, even when trust is lost. So, it’s like honor is the lifeline.
Even when trust is lost, even when someone doesn’t meet my expectations or does something that rubs me the wrong way, I’m still going to treat them with honor and respect when they’re in the room, they’re, they’re not in the room. And the second value is building camaraderie, even when it’s not convenient.
So, I define camaraderie as a team environment where both mission and relationship exist. So, if you lean more towards mission and not relationship, you create that kind of coworker environment where we just work together. And then that’s that I go hang out with people outside of my work. But if you create a culture that leans more to the relationship side and not the mission, now you’ve got this like cozy hangout culture and camaraderie, the teams that have camaraderie, they actually hold tension and both mission and relationship and equal tension, if you will.
And then the, the last value I’ve already touched on a little bit is just embrace healthy conflict, make it normal. It’s a daily thing, whether it’s a group or 1 on 1. so, these 3 values of honoring who people are building camaraderie, even when it’s inconvenient and embracing healthy conflict, these 3 values are what we’re honing in on and it’s the basics that if these elements.
Don’t exist on a team, a team’s kind of sitting on a really shaky foundation. And so that’s what in this kind of off season, our team heading up, you know, into a season where it’s a little bit quieter for us right now, we’re actually kind of going back to the basics of these values to strengthen our base and get ready for next year.
Brian Thomas: Thank you, Meghan. I appreciate that. Breaking that down, those three items, but also the fact that you’re bringing in your, you know, your tenured career as far as a culture and diversity and looking to always improve. I like the continuous improvement that you bring to this conversation and to your team.
So I think that’s really important. And I really, really appreciate everything that I learned tonight. I learned something from every guest that comes on the show. So I thank you for that. And Meghan, it was such a pleasure having you on today. And I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Meghan Trevorrow: Thank you so much.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Meghan Trevorrow Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
