By Neill Marshall, Chairman, HealthSearch Partners and Kurt Mosley, Associations Practice Leader, HealthSearch Partners
Shane Cerone (pictured above) is President and CEO of Kada Health, in Omaha, NE. He provides health system leadership and board advisory services to healthcare organizations seeking to achieve best-in-class performance in care quality, accessibility, and affordability. Using the Kada Health Operating System, he leads rapid transformation on a large scale for his healthcare clients seeking to transform their operating and financial performance. He is a passionate advocate for the importance of engaging the entire workforce in both rapid and sustainable performance improvement that achieves excellence for the long term. Prior to his current position, Cerone spent many years in executive leadership positions, including President and CEO, for large hospitals and health systems in Michigan, Missouri, and Iowa.
Harnessing Employee-Driven Change for Organizational Success
At the heart of every successful healthcare organization lies its people—the physicians, nurses, administrative staff, and other personnel who keep the system running. But too often, their voices and ideas are underutilized. Shane Cerone, CEO of Kada Health and a seasoned turnaround leader, has spent decades challenging that norm.
“Almost everyone goes home at night thinking: this could be a little better,” Cerone reflects. “It’s our job as leaders to create a system where those ideas can be harvested, prioritized, and acted upon.”
When rapid improvement or turnaround is required, Cerone’s first 90 days of work with the board, the CEO, the executive team and the staff begins by listening and then rapidly implementing improvements. To ensure he has the right voices at the leadership table, he meets in small and large groups with as many staff as possible. At the end of these sessions, he asks attendees to write down the names of the two or three most influential physicians in the organization. The resulting list includes hundreds of data points. From this list, he identifies a handful of the top physicians in the organization and invites them to join the executive committee.
It’s a bold symbolic move that does more than build a leadership team. It signals to staff their voice matters, and it greatly improves the organization’s ability to implement change quickly.
Start Small, Think Big: Structures for Local Decision-Making
Cerone has a philosophy: “In healthcare, we’ve trained people to be so compliance-focused that they’re often unnecessarily afraid to act. But you can’t drive improvement if every idea requires permission.”
To flip that dynamic, he implemented a set of rules allowing local leaders and staff to make decisions and act autonomously when four key conditions are met:
- Low cost
- Low risk
- Easy to try
- Easy to undo
If an idea meets those criteria, frontline teams are empowered to act—no approval necessary.
For more complex initiatives, Kada Health uses a standardized, one-page (front and back) executive brief to evaluate and track proposals. The brief forces clarity, enables transparency, and accelerates executive decision-making. The briefs are reviewed and acted upon at each leadership meeting.
Listening at Scale: Leveraging Technology to Source Innovation
Technology also plays a role. Cerone uses IdeaScale, a cloud-based idea and innovation management software that acts like a digital suggestion box. Any employee can submit an idea, and the entire organization can vote to elevate the best ideas to leadership for evaluation and implementation.
What makes the system powerful isn’t just the volume of ideas, it’s the promise that accompanies them. “If staff vote an idea to the top of the list, leadership will act on it or explain why they can’t,” Cerone says.
This mix of local autonomy and centralized feedback creates a flywheel of innovation, trust, and action.
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.
