How Listening and Leveraging Transformed Brad Shawhan’s Team Performance
By Neill Marshall, Chairman, HealthSearch Partners and Kurt Mosley, Associations Practice Leader, HealthSearch Partners
Brad Shawhan is an executive with deep expertise in customer experience, operational strategy, and digital transformation. He has led high-growth teams across healthcare, SaaS, and fintech—driving scalable success by aligning strategy with customer outcomes. Whether it’s optimizing CX operations, advising on AI innovation, or transforming post-sale journeys, he brings a blend of strategic insight and hands-on leadership that helps companies grow while keeping customers at the center.
In most organizations, new leaders spend their first 90 days talking too much and learning too little. Brad Shawhan did it differently.
A former Marine and National Guardsman turned enterprise CX director, Shawhan’s playbook started with what he calls “ninja meetings.” No introduction. No grand entrance. He joined standing team meetings, didn’t speak, and listened for nearly two weeks. It’s wasn’t about being mysterious, it was about absorbing facts before he made any moves.
And what did he learn? That his team of experts, tasked with implementing enterprise software for healthcare clients, was overwhelmed, underutilized, and, frankly, discontented. Their implementation model was a classic one-to-one implementation: one expert, one client, one meeting at a time.
He soon discovered that approach wasn’t working.
So Shawhan did what the best leaders do in their first 90 days, he “stole” a winning idea from another industry and made it his own. Drawing from his experience in cybersecurity, he shifted the model from one-to-one to one-to-many. Now, instead of answering the same onboarding questions ten times, his experts answered them once for ten clients in a group session, creating not just efficiency, but community.
“Everyone likes to feel like they’re not doing it alone,” Shawhan said. “Especially in healthcare.”
The results? Customer satisfaction scores jumped from 65% to 90%. Project capacity grew from 15 to 40 per representative. Perhaps most impressive, zero turnover during the transformation.
It’s a masterclass in what the first 90 days should look like:
- Listen before you lead.
- Audit before you act.
- Build buy-in, don’t mandate.
- Steal smart from other industries.
- Create early wins to spark momentum.
Shawhan reminds us that change doesn’t require a revolution—it requires trust, tactics, and a willingness to reimagine what’s possible when leaders listen.
Shawhan’s example raises a question for healthcare leaders: Is there a way to leverage your internal experts—whether they’re physicians, nurses, or frontline specialists—in a similar shift from one-to-one to one-to-many? Could group consults, collaborative care planning, or shared patient education models unlock scale and connection in new ways?
There’s no question it would take a paradigm shift. We don’t pretend to have the answers, but maybe you do.
Stay tuned for more insights as we continue exploring the innovative tactics used by healthcare leaders to make their first 90 days count.
If you have adopted this tactic, or any others featured in this series, we’d love to hear from you. Please contact us to share your story.
