Recently as part of our Best Practices Interview Series, we had the privilege of interviewing Jeff Orlowski, the CEO of LifeShare of Oklahoma, an organ procurement organization (OPO) based in Oklahoma City, OK. We have known Jeff for many years and have been greatly impressed by his commitment to being a strong leader to his team, his dedication to measuring his organization’s accomplishments and effectiveness, and his generous willingness to share his perspective and lessons learned during his career.
Here are a few key takeaways from this interview:
Jeff came into the industry by working in heart transplantation. A tip from a friend about working with an OPO led him into the organ procurement industry, where he’s remained for 33 years!
LifeShare’s success has come from a lot of hard work in learning to be flexible in the face of change. Jeff discusses the dramatic success he and his team have had in maximizing donation throughout their service area. It all boils down to being willing to accept the idea that anything that can be done can always be done better.
“The team here has embodied a very simple message,” he says. “We’re willing to take a creative approach to solving every problem, and we’re willing to embrace change, not because we’re not doing a good job, but because we always know we can do better.” Doing this has led his team to make huge gains in the number of donors and transplants across the state of Oklahoma.
“We’re helping a lot more donor families. We’re helping a lot more recipients with life-saving transplants and, in the process, we’ve built a much healthier organization that serves our community much more effectively than maybe we’d even dreamed of.”
Relationships are a key focus for LifeShare at every level of their process. The donation partnerships, Jeff says, are where it all starts. “With our donation partners, we have worked to build levels of relationships at all levels with the organizations.” This includes keeping the CEOs in the loop on what LifeShare is doing and letting them know how their hospitals can help. But that’s just part of the communication provided.
“We’ve developed good relationships with the CEO all the way down to the front line staff,” Jeff says. This includes providing donor resource teams to hospitals and ensuring that stakeholders can be pulled into meetings and communications.
“We’ve really sought to have relationships at every level,” he says.
Being available, being personable and being present are all keys to that undertaking.”
LifeShare is thinking about a future where employees will be remote and ready for rapid change as the pandemic’s effects and regulatory changes impact the OPO and broader healthcare industry. LifeShare is braced for many challenges, Jeff says, including thinking about how healthcare is changing and how LifeShare can be structured to be able to weather the storm of changing regulations and environmental changes. Being financially stable and keeping a focus on being nimble and adaptable is important, he says, to staying in business.
“We’re anticipating that the current environment with a largely virtual workforce is going to be our reality going forward,” he says. Even if COVID goes away and things change, he says, it’s going to have a major impact on the future of the organization. “We’re building our workforce, we’re reconstructing our environment and we’re building our technology around the assumption that our workforce, at the most, will only be in the LifeShare office 2 or maybe 3 business days, and that will only be a small percentage of our staff. Largely, they’re going to be mobile, virtual, working from a hospital or home office and be scattered all over the state.”
The essence of being a great leader, Jeff says, is to understand that that your role is to provide the strongest possible support, structure and vision for your team. Jeff says he would tell aspiring CEOs to first get grounded in their core purpose and to find ways to give back to the community, because leadership is ultimately about serving those you lead. “My job is to interface with the board, create a vision for the organization, build a team, provide the team with resources, and then let them lead the organization to success.”
“The more people you have bringing talent to the equation, the more successful the organization is going to be.”
We would like to thank Jeff Orlowski 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://www.lifeshareoklahoma.org/.
Also, don’t miss our other interviews from this series and feel free to review our other Best Practices videos!