Recently as part of our Best Practices Interview Series, we had the privilege of interviewing Matt Wadsworth, the new CEO of Life Connection of Ohio, an organ procurement organization (OPO) based in Dayton and Toledo, OH. We’ve been getting to know Matt and his team over the last year as we’ve planned a partners survey with them, and we have been greatly impressed by their forward-thinking perspective and their passionate desire to see more and more lives saved in Ohio!
Here are a few key takeaways from this interview:
You never know how who you know may influence your future career. Matt made his first connection to Life Connection of Ohio while he was serving bloody marys at a summer job to a group of women who met on Sundays. One of those women was the wife of Mike Phillips, then the CEO of Life Connection of Ohio. A chance conversation turned into an opportunity to join up with a profession in donation that Matt had only recently learned about… and became the launching point for his career!
Matt has long established a pattern of trying to identify and foster growth with every job he’s had. During his time at Life Connection of Ohio, Indiana Donor Network and Nevada Donor Network, Matt has been passionate about looking for opportunities to identify more potential donors to help save more lives. In fact, he cites the turnaround at Nevada Donor Network, where the OPO transitioned from being one of the worst to one of the best-performing organizations, as a key area of growth for himself as a leader of a team he helped to build.
As for what he’s seen at Life Connection of Ohio this year, “I think the growth that we’ve experienced hasn’t been by accident,” he says. “I think a lot of it has to do with changing how we look at the space and running it like a business.” His team, he says, has been eager to embrace change and try new things, which has helped them to grow their number of cases dramatically in a short period of time.
Matt is a big proponent of “eyeball to eyeball conversations” whenever they’re possible. While COVID-19 has made in-person conversations difficult, he says he’s made use of online platforms like Zoom to connect with key hospital partners and have discussions that are more personal and focused on putting faces with voices. Having these discussions before sending over paperwork, Matt says, is an important aspect of forging stronger relationships.
Matt feels the next generation of leaders in the OPO industry should try to learn skills and approaches from other industries whenever possible. “If you want to lead one of these places, look for motivation and inspiration outside the space,” he says. “One thing that’s helped me is thinking outside the box. We talked about customer service, right? Maybe you don’t learn customer service from the OPO space, but you learn customer service from someone who specializes in it.”
We would like to thank Matt Wadsworth for participating in our interview series and for being willing to share his wisdom and insight with us. If you’d like to learn more about his organization, please visit https://lifeconnection.org/.
Also, don’t miss our other interviews from this series (which we’ll be posting bi-weekly for the next several months) and feel free to review our other Best Practices videos!