In our latest Conscient Leaders interview, we talk with Arun Mohan, CEO of Radix Health, about pivoting a growing organization, evolving as a leader, and building resilience during a time when COVID-19 has changed everything.

Read the full transcipt below.

Hannah:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Conscient Leadership. We’re excited to have my friend Arun Mohan with us today. He is the CEO of Radix Health. Arun, why don’t you take a minute and tell us a little bit about Radix and why you started.

Arun:
Yeah. Happy to. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. We are a technology company that tries to make it easier for people to see their doctors. So in a lot of places, it could take you weeks to get an appointment. At the same time, there’s a ton of appointment availability that exists. And so we started the company as a way to figure out how do you bridge supply and demand and make it easier, reduce plays in care, make that whole experience more modern than it currently is. And so we work with about 7,000 or so providers around the country, I think last count we’re about 34 States, a lot of medium to large size medical groups, think like big specialty groups, hospitals, health systems, that kind of stuff. And we have about a hundred folks who work for us across two offices, one here in Atlanta, and then one in Pune, India.

Hannah:
One of my questions, as I was thinking about our conversation was what have you done to pivot and or to focus?

Arun:
I think we’re at the stage that we’re in, what happens very naturally is you just kind of do, so you see a problem, you just respond. And I think what we realized as part of all this is that in order to, to move, you know, sometimes you have to slow down to speed up. There’s a difference between strategic speed and operational speed, right? And so I think historically we’ve often confused the two and, you know, especially in a time where you don’t have people together, you don’t have that sort of shared understanding. That sort of sometimes develops naturally when you put people in the same room together, you have to be much more explicit around, Hey, here’s what I want to do. Here’s the plan. Here’s how I’m gonna get there. You actually have to slow down and focus on a few key things. And that means you’re just going to have to let some fires burn. Like some things have to, you know, you can’t go out and tackle 20 different things. Something is not going to be done, right. Or you’re going to lose people along the way. And so, you know, the challenge for me as a leader and for all our team really is, how do you determine, what do you give up? And then as a leader, how do you push your team just to say, “Hey, listen, it’s okay to give these things up. And in fact, you have to give this up. You cannot do this.” Because it’s sometimes to your own detriment.

Hannah:
One of the things that we at Conscient Strategies see a lot with companies of your size is that leadership needs to evolve and continue to shift. And I’m curious how you’re thinking about the next stage of your company’s growth and what that means for you and your own leadership progression.

Arun:
Yeah. That’s a great point around how do you actually scale it? Just like you scale your business. You’ve got to scale leadership. You know, as we think about, as I think about scaling at the end of the day, it’s like, how do you actually empower your team to do their work? And so it’s gone from me doing a lot of the heavy lifting day to day to saying, “Hey, here’s where we want to go.” And then actually just getting out of the way. So I’ll give you one really concrete example is around hiring. So when we first came in, I said, “Hey, all right, I want to interview the first hundred people who come and work for us.” Because I felt like it was important for me to understand who they were and make sure they were good culture fits. And what I realized in the last three months is that actually gets in the way of a lot of stuff. And so my job as a leader is to trust that the folks working around me are moving in the same direction that I am. Uh, they have the same goal and they’re going to be, they might get there a little bit differently, and they should, I should empower them to actually make those decisions themselves. I’m going to trust that the team is as good as I am or probably better in terms of how they think about who they bring on a team.

Hannah:
I often work with organizations and have a conversation that “the people on your team are gonna make a decision every single minute.” So what are the frameworks? What are the rules of the road? So that everybody understands like here are the hard lines and then here’s the like soft dotted line of decision making.

Hannah:
Resilience is certainly a term that’s getting a lot of play these days. Um, and I think people are defining it a little bit differently than others. And I would love, just on a broader, like, what does that word even mean to you? And how are you using that and thinking about that, as you think about the future?

Arun:
As a company, you know, the question has been, there’s so much change happening and people are just exhausted with it. They’ve just been absolutely fatigued by it. And some of that’s good change. Some of it’s not good change. And the question is, how do we make people able to function effectively despite all that? And so what we ended up doing was number one, we said, “Hey, we have to be in a position where we’re just very much over communicating.” And so we started doing weekly virtual town halls. We started doing weekly emails. We started, doing smaller group sessions where we would bring people together and talk about things, sort of small things. But it was just this idea that, “Hey, listen, you’re not alone. And here’s how we’re thinking about it. We’re giving you everything that we know about how the business operates, you’re gonna know. And that way you’ll feel like you’re part of that decision making process. And that you can predict, you can start to predict what you think will happen next.” And I’m one of these extroverts, which is probably, you know, not surprising to many people. And so it has been, you know, I think number one, not being in the office, not having that energy, has been challenging. So you know, I was very intentional about putting together a peer group of other CEOs who I felt would understand some of what I’ve been going through, spent a lot of time exercising and you know physically getting stronger, which makes one more resilient too. So the other thing I started doing was I started doing walking meetings with my core exec team. So COO, my cofounders, we’d do walking meetings. We literally met like three times a week and we’d walk for an hour. So we got a lot of steps in, and that also satisfied some of that need for being around people. And then more recently, what I started doing is I started coming into the office just as a way to get out of the house and have more transition. There are other people who feel very similarly to me, they have to get out of the house, they have to have that transition. They actually have to get dressed up. And it feels good to do that. And it feels normal to do that.

Hannah:
Thank you so much for your time. I know that the people who hang out with us on the internet will really appreciate some of your wisdom. And I look forward to hearing how Radix progresses over the next quarter and over the next few years.

Radix Health is a technology company that believes that patient experience starts with patient access. Our data-driven solutions align provider supply with patient demand, maximizing existing capacity and reducing delays in care. We help leading medical groups to optimize every step of a patient’s appointment journey – from alerting patients to needed care, helping them find the right provider, scheduling an appointment across multiple channels, and engaging with patients until the day of their visit. We take the busy work out of getting patients in the door so you can focus on the hard work of keeping them healthy. To learn more, please visit www.radixhealth.com.