Recently as part of our Best Practices Interview Series, we had the privilege of interviewing Joe Ferreira, the CEO of Nevada Donor Network, an organ procurement organization (OPO) based in Las Vegas, NV. We worked with Joe’s team recently and were absolutely blown away by their commitment to maximizing every opportunity for donation in their service area, and it seemed like every member of the team told us they were excited about Nevada Donor Network’s future because of Joe’s inspiring leadership and obvious dedication. His passion comes across loud and clear in this powerful interview, in which we learn he’s not only running a great OPO, but also finishing up a book and adjusting to having a baby at home!
Joe’s entrance into the industry began with being impressed by the heroics of an organ donation team he observed while preparing for medical school. Joe wanted to follow in the footsteps of his father and be a physician, and while he was preparing to apply for med school, he worked as an orderly in a hospital. Upon seeing a donation case firsthand, he applied for a job with the local OPO, thinking it would become a line item on his med school application. Instead, it blossomed into an incredible career that’s spanned over 20 years.
The team at Nevada Donor Network sets the bar high in terms of productivity and performance, but their mission is focused on finding ways to help others. Joe says that he and his team have measured themselves against a variety of OPO metrics over the years and have worked hard to excel in those areas (including the new metrics from CMS that were recently announced). But it’s not just because Nevada Donor Network wants to achieve an arbitrary goal; “It represents more donors that we’ve honored and more recipients that we’ve been able to help that are desperately waiting,” Joe says. “We don’t necessarily take pride in the numbers, but we do take pride in being able to help the maximum number of people possible through our heroic mission.”
Joe also says that his team looks for every opportunity to add value to every relationship and to communicate how cooperation in the hospitals leads to success. “I think that’s a piece we sometimes miss as leaders and as an industry,” he says. “It’s critically important that when you engage with those stakeholders that your participation and collaboration with them also adds value to their mission and the success of their mission.”
Joe feels gaining cooperation from key partners is about sharing in success. One of the themes Joe touches upon in the interview is the importance of engaging partners with not just a common ground mission, but communicating how the OPO help partners to be successful at the goal of following through on obligations and regulations. Making sure partners are aware of resources and the value and service that are being added to the process is key to ensuring that they follow through where the OPO needs them to cooperate.
“Typically when you’re asking someone to do something, they’re really going to go that extra mile and cooperate with you to a higher degree if you’re also going to support them in their success,” he says. “If we were going to drill it down to the most important thing our organization does really well, that is to add value to our partners so they want to help us and want to see us succeed.”
While COVID-19 has had many unfortunate effects on the medical world, Joe feels it has given OPOs an opportunity to re-examine their processes. The pandemic has resulted in serious levels of tragedy and change, but also provided many lessons, Joe says. “It has also given us a remembrance and an appreciation for process, for safety, for taking into account all of the moving parts in our industry to make sure that we’re doing the absolute best possible job at caring for the donor families, the donors themselves, and eventually, the recipients.”
This has required some rethinking in terms of process and safety, Joe says, but it has also helped OPOs to find opportunities to be better. “That is going to be critical for us to continue to remember as we learn a number of lessons from this pandemic,” he says. “It requires us to be very adaptable to this new world we’re living in.”
Joe’s chief piece of advice to aspiring CEOs: be inclusive. In order to reach your full potential as a leader, he says, you must be “inclusive to a point of discomfort.”
“You must be inclusive in all of your activities, projects, and any goals you might have, both in terms of yourself and any team you hope to lead,” he says.
Joe also mentioned that this will be a major theme in his upcoming book, Uncomfortable Inclusion: How To Build A Culture Of High Performance In Life And Work, which we’ll note is available for pre-order here!
We would like to thank Joe Ferreira 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.nvdonor.org/.
Also, don’t miss our other interviews from this series and feel free to review our other Best Practices videos!