“One of the things that attracted me [to Tampa General] was actually what I just said, which was at this point, it’s understanding that finding a place where I’m valued and I can contribute and learn. For me, it’s so important to be able to learn as well and have space to learn and ask questions and challenge the status quo. I think it starts at the top. So, John Chorus is our president and CEO, and he is someone that I have said this to him. I’ve said it away from him also. But he looked for people that didn’t necessarily fulfill their traditional paradigm. So, I think by doing that, he didn’t go through a list and say, I want these demographics. He went through and said, I want these characteristics, and I want to challenge the status quo and I want to create something that is new and innovative. And by doing that, he created, I think, attractiveness of Tampa General that led to executives from a wide variety of backgrounds to come here and to stay here. And we get to create that continued thought process of we have a hierarchy. It’s a hierarchy of accountability, is what I like to say. So, if something goes wrong, that’s my responsibility. If things are going well, the team is creating that. The team can’t create that if I or the other team members or leaders don’t create the space for them to be able to say I have a different idea. They have contributions, they’re the one doing the work. Why aren’t we looking to them to solve the issues and to bring the innovative solutions?”  

“I think where we have started and continue to have the conversations, especially out of after COVID, not just at Tampa General, but in the industry, is building appreciation for each other. You have the caregivers and then you have a large group of individuals that care for the caregivers. So you’re talking about your IT teams, your quality teams, your human resources and human capital teams that also got very burnt out during this time because we quickly had to switch the way that we did things and the people that create and support those structures live outside of that paradigm. And so that is one of the things that I think is super important that we have brought forth.” 

“I was [at Tampa General] probably eight months and we have something called ‘Ask John,’ which is our CEO. People can submit anonymously, or they can assign their name to questions. So, we’re going through them and they asked, ‘Can we change our tuition reimbursement policy? Here’s what I’d like to do.’ And he looks at me and he says, ‘Qualenta, can we do this?’ I said ‘Yes. I’m actually working on a business case for us to be able to make the change.’ He said, ‘What’s the impact to the team member?’ I said, ‘This is what it would create for them. I really recommend we go this way, but this is what it would create. Here’s the financial impact of doing that.’ And he goes, ‘Great, let’s do it. Can we change it tomorrow?’ And I was like, let’s get some communication out first. Let’s update the policy. It’s going to take us maybe a week or two. I said, but we can start communicating this immediately for the first of the month. That to me was so exciting. I was like, I am at the right place. Because in a moment it was like we didn’t have to wait six months. We didn’t have to wait till the budget cycle. Not everything doesn’t work out that organically, but that’s how quick and real that change is and can be.”  

“What we’ve actually been focusing on is how do we get to the just do it? How do we empower our leaders to get comfortable? Because if you’re coming from a different system, that’s not something that’s a norm in healthcare. Right? We have to go through so much bureaucracy, and that’s not something that we’re really interested in doing here. We want to be safe always. Quality is our number one driver after our team members, but that’s our number one driver. We have to be safe. But it’s innovate and fail fast, and you don’t hear that in healthcare the way that you hear it here, and that’s something that’s innovative. I will tell you one of the things that friends asked me, ‘What made you choose Tampa General?’ And I said, ‘The CEO was going to present at South by Southwest during COVID and it got canceled. And they go, ‘Ah, I get it.’ 

“We got number one by Forbes Best Places to Work for Women. The things that resonated the most with those that self-identified as women were actually the education, growth, and development opportunities and the variety of them.”

“Knowing we have staffing challenges, knowing that our in the industry agency was booming. And so what we did was taking lots of all of this input. And I went to our president and CEO and I said, ‘John, you all had the foresight years ago to build a staffing company within the organization. It didn’t work out back then, don’t know what happened, but I would like to explore making it an actual internal staffing company.’ We talked about it for a few minutes. He goes, ‘Go for it.’ Wait, what? I said, ‘Okay!’ So I started to socialize it with my colleagues. A group of us came together and we were able to actually establish a staffing company. We have an internal staffing company that launched, so there was a big group around this, but it launched in October of last year. It is right now [only] nursing [but] it’s actually growing. So now we are transitioning it into a full-fledged staffing company that serves all of our internal organizations…The goal now is to serve our entire system…There were so many of us that shaped it, that influenced it, and now it’s live and now we’re iterating. We didn’t know it was going to be as successful as it is, but it was the welcoming of this nontraditional idea. The interesting thing is I had shared this idea previously in another company, great company, and they just said, ‘No, sorry, it’s not going to work.’ And I provided some examples of just even if we only got ten people in it, here’s our savings. Sorry, we can’t do it. Okay. So, to be at an organization where you put it forth, go build it, at that point it’s on me, right? I have to be able to appeal to my counterparts. I have to leave space for them to also help solve the issue and help shape it. I couldn’t have done it by myself, but in this environment, we had difficult conversations. We had conversations of why it wouldn’t work and let’s solve around it. But nobody said we can’t do it. They said, ‘Let’s go.’”

“You asked what made me this way? I would say my upbringing, for sure. I will never forget. My grandmother was an educator. She got her master’s degree later in life but went to college. She just was such a strong, smart woman. And my grandparents played such a big role in my life. They lived across the street from us, actually, my maternal grandparents. And so I remember my grandmother, I was always tall. I’m tall. And I remember shrinking, especially in middle school. And she would poke me in the spine and she would say, ‘Stand up.’ And I’m like, ‘I am standing up.’ She said ‘Be proud. Stand up, be proud.’ She would also tell me anytime someone complimented me, she said, ‘Beauty is only skin deep. Ugly is to the bone.’ And so I think about that all the time.”  

“Usually if someone comes and provides me feedback, I’ll say, ‘What can I do next time to provide you space that you could have felt like you could have spoken to me about that? Or at the beginning when we first interacted and you didn’t think I liked you, what was it and what could I have done differently?’ And a lot of times with that, there are always things it could be, ‘Well Qualenta, your tone with slightly off,’ ‘Okay, that’s helpful. Can you call me out next time?’ And that empowers them to share. But it’s also people taking ownership about the way that they feel as well. And somebody did that recently with me. I said, ‘What could I have done differently?’ And he said, ‘Actually, nothing. When I thought about it, I had assigned to you what you meant. You clearly didn’t say that, but that’s how I felt. And so, because I felt that way, you must have meant it that way.’ And he goes, ‘That wasn’t fair.’”

“If you’re coached on the court or in a sport, it’s very different because there’s a whole society that coaches around getting better in a sport. People’s intellect we don’t coach people’s intellect or their ability to lead, which is very different. Like, from a young age, being right was rewarded. So there’s this whole psychology around when you get to the workplace and someone says, ‘Hey, you might want to think about approaching this differently.’ I’ll never forget the first time I was sitting with some leaders and my leader was sitting there and someone gave me some feedback in real time. And these were leaders of mine, and my visceral reaction was, ‘They are wrong. That did not happen. That is not true.’ And then as I took a time away to reflect on it, and I went back and I sat with my direct leader and I said, ‘You know what? I thought about it. And I think regardless of my intent, I get how they received it. So, I think I’m going to try it this way.’ And so, I think that’s where my coaching came back up. You can be better, but when you’re getting corrected, you’ve been rewarded from a leadership and technical and intellectual perspective for being right.”  

“Someone was sitting, opening up and sharing, and the leader wanted to provide a solution. And I think a lot of times we don’t stop to listen and understand our role and it happens so often. I remember having a leader that I worked with, and she has now gone on to lead in other organizations, but I worked with in my past, and she says, ‘I have to quit being so emotional.’ And I said, ‘Why?’ ‘Because that’s not what’s accepted,’ I said, ‘But is it who you are?’ ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘So isn’t that part of your magic? That’s part of what makes people feel comfortable around you. That’s part of what makes you so effective. So why do you have to be stopped being so emotional? I would encourage you to stop being so uncomfortable with your emotion.’ And we sat there, and we had a great conversation. I said, ‘The fact that you cry when something moves you, it’s not like it’s inappropriate while you’re talking or presenting or there’s nothing inappropriate about it. That’s okay.’” 

“It’s interesting because I feel like this goes back to checking the box. That person, that amazing leader and individual, and I can call her friends now as well, but that was her magic, and that was okay. And she’s looking at me and she’s, but you’re not emotional in the same way, but that’s okay. Someone else’s discomfort with the way that I process emotion. I’m open to explaining to you, like, this is how I process emotion. It’s not going to look like tears, and that’s fine. But I remember someone telling me, I asked for feedback. I said, ‘What would you like for me to do differently?’ And he says to me, ‘Maybe be a little bit more vulnerable.’ And I said, ‘What does that mean to you?’ And he said, ‘Maybe you don’t have it all together.’ And I was like, if you would have asked me, I’ll tell you. I don’t have it all together. Do you want to sit and have the list? But again, it was me learning at some point that I can’t be responsible for the discomfort that someone else feels if I’ve provided the space for the conversation. So he was actually uncomfortable with the fact that I wasn’t as outwardly emotional or that I didn’t seem dragged down or he wasn’t interested in learning what does that look like for me. So, like, my team knows if there are papers all over my desk, they can check in with me, like something’s not okay. And I’m open about that. I’m like, ‘Guys, if you walk in and there are things at my table, just be like, what’s happening?’ And they do. But it’s seeking to understand, ‘How do you process emotion?’ As opposed to saying you’re supposed to be because you’re a woman. That’s how I took it. You’re supposed to be in my office crying about this. And I was just like, if that’s what you’re expecting, I’m not the right.”  

“Curiosity, that’s the number one thing. So this goes back to using an individual voice to shape your outcomes. I think we have to be curious. We have to be curious if we had to summarize this entire conversation. It’s about being curious about what drives other people and also being curious on how they show up in certain circumstances.  

• What does it mean to be emotional to you?  
• What does it mean to be vulnerable?  
• What does it mean to be authentic?  

And it means something different to everyone. I will share a quick story. When I started, one of the things that I was asked to lead was diversity, equity, and inclusion. And the reason I call it a thing is because it wasn’t defined. And so I had two things. I said, we cannot do quotas. That’s a non-negotiable. If I take this like, we can’t do quotas, easy checkmark, great. And then I said, and you have to let me go out and talk to the team members. So why I did that was because I knew a couple of things. I had to own that in somebody’s eyes I was going to fail. And that’s okay because I took the approach to use our individual voices, to use the academic research, to use my thought process and the culture of the organization to make sure we found the right person. And we did. And the way that she is approaching diversity, equity, and inclusion and bringing it, it’s not a program. I wasn’t interested in making it a program. It is part of our culture and we do have quantitative ways and qualitative ways that we measure it. And that was so important to me.  

So it’s curiosity, it’s understanding that I had to own, once I started hearing the feedback of what people defined as diversity, equity, and inclusion, I had to own that I was going to be a failure in someone’s eyes. And I had to get comfortable in that. And so, once I did, I said, ‘Let’s do it.’ And we hired the most amazing leader. Her name is Shanelle Rae. She and I joke a lot about not being traditional and we have a lot of great conversation about it. She is an academic by background. She has been doing this work for a number of years and she has such a deep understanding and passion. And so, I share that because unless we’re curious and unless we’re willing to take risk and understand that everything, like you said, it’s iterative, everything is not going to be perfect. But if we provide opportunities for people to provide feedback and we shape in the culture that we live in, that is going to make a difference. So you’re going to see our president and CEO, he rounds and he puts on a uniform with our board members, and they go and they work beside EVS and one of our board members, he said that is the hardest job beside environmental services, cleaning the beds. But we can’t do the work without our environmental services team. We can’t. 

And so I think that to me, is providing the space and then acting on it. I can ask you all day, what do you think? There’s only so much. Okay, great, thanks. And it gets tucked away. But to be able to say, you said, we asked, you said. And as a result, we did. And we are not going to do we’re going to celebrate the good things, but we’re also going to own why we can’t do everything…But we also tell people when they reach out, why don’t we have here’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to figure out an equitable way to approach this. If you have any ideas or solutions, please come meet with us, come talk to us. We’re not shutting it down. And the minute you shut someone down, I think you lose them.” 

“I think we all have ideas on what someone looks like in certain positions, certain roles in life. And for me, I’ve never checked that. I’ve never fit, that I’ve been the one in the room, that I look around and I’m the only one that looks like me for a variety of reasons. Or I ask the question thinking differently about things, whether it’s generational, whether it’s another demographic or background, it’s something that for me, I’ve never been the traditional person, which I think has worked in my favor, but it hasn’t always been comfortable.” 

“I think there’s a lot of different factors that contribute to that. There’s a lot of, I think, self-comfort that has to come and self-acceptance. And that’s something that is certainly a journey for all of us. Anyone that has 100% at that journey, I want to talk to them on how they got there. But I think it’s an ongoing journey, and then we get to choose places where we show up. And I think that is so powerful when we get to say, ‘You know what? If my voice isn’t valued, then I’m not going to contribute it.’ That’s one aspect. But I think the bigger piece is not only am I not going to contribute it, I’m going to find a place where it is valued. And I think that’s where we are in a time where there’s so many organizations, there are so many individuals that are more aware now than ever and are creating that space.” 

“If your voice is valued, you’re going to continue to contribute your voice.”  

“We can’t grow without making mistakes.” 

“We’re not going to get it right 100% of the time. Our goal with anything is zero harm, not zero mistakes. It’s impossible. If you have humans, you’re going to have mistakes. But it’s zero harm to our patients, to our team members, to our community. That is our goal.” 

“You either have to take the space, or the space is going to take over you. And that’s your choice…Your life makes sense, looking back and not forward. It was a constant encouragement to use my voice. To make sure that I took up the space or the space was going to take me. And so, I had to make that choice. And I think finding that energy and being able to channel your energy, it’s something that I will tell you I will work on for probably the rest of my life, but it’s knowing that if you’re valued, you’re going to provide value to that space. And if you’re not, then now I’m at the point in life and in my career that I’m like, this isn’t the right place for me. Luckily, that is not the case here.” 

“I think it’s important to note that we’re not always going to get it right. Someone’s going to listen to this and say, ‘Oh, my goodness, that’s not true.’ or I can’t believe. But the bottom line is, I think as long as we are on a journey to be authentic, to really be transparent, to be vulnerable, and to be honest. I will tell you that’s my number one thing is honesty. And if we’re curious, I think that invites so many more opportunities. The minute we start to assume and assign, I think we’ve lost the opportunity to learn about ourselves and someone else.”