Newleaf Training and Development’s Post

Transcript

Welcome to Take 5A podcast, brought to you by New Leaf Training and Development. Each edition is an inspiring interview with a leader worth listening to. Enjoy. Hey, I'm Paul Butler, one of the client partners that New Leaf training and development. And I'm so delighted to be joined today by Sonia Engel, who is the Chief Operating Officer at Sonora Quest. Sonia for 18 years now. Here at New Leaf, we focus on our core purpose of simply helping people and organisations better manage themselves, lead others and grow business acumen. I just wondered, what are your recommended best practices to help people and organizations be their best? But please do start, though, by telling us a little bit more about your organization, what you do, and who you serve. So over to you, Sonia, and I'll wrap it up when you're done. Sounds good at first. Thank you, Paul. It is such a joy and a pleasure to be here today. I appreciate the chance to to share 3 Seas, but I'll start with just an introduction about who I am and what I do. Chief Operating Officer, Sonora Quest Laboratories. Sonora Quest is the largest integrated delivery network in the US We served 97,000,000 patients through testing. And it is a fun fact that 70% of diagnostic information comes from test from the testing information, whether it be for your flu, Wellness check or cancer. We, we do it all and we bring forth thousand employees that are very passionate about caring for patients to make it happen every day. I'm super proud of that and I've been in that profession in healthcare. My whole career and. When I reflect on what's helped me as a leader and help the teams that I lead to be successful, I found just three simple seeds that can kind of summarize it. One communication, two was collaboration, and the third is continuous improvement slash innovation. Starting with communication. We know that. The people are what make it happen. It's not the even the process as much as I love process improvement, it's the people that have that passion to care for patients or that passion to care for each other. And so when we communicate effectively what our mission, our purposes, then they can get behind it. So at Sonora Quest, one of the things that I am very proud of is we have been recognized as market leader and been number one in bioscience and Arizona. For a number of years in a row, and it's because we communicate clearly annually with our road map so that all 4000 employees, most of them are in Arizona, understand what our goals are, what our key initiatives are and what our team is so that they can be a part. We communicate regularly through town hall meetings, huddles, department meetings, one-on-one. You have to be relentless, consistent and clear with communication to get that by it. So when you. Do that collaboration is easy when people understand that the shared goal things like developing them, understanding the why behind career ladder opportunities that we have. We have been able to have the most tenured staff in our in our our industry. I bring clients and elected officials in for tours and and ask any person, whether it be a scientist or a client service representative, how long. With the company, we have very tenured staff and it's because they enjoy working together and that purpose that I talked about shows up and not only the the testing and the important information that we do, but it is also in our mission and how we serve the community. We have more than 40 community organizations that we support. I've never worked a part with an organization that has the senior leaders. All required to be a part of a major organization needs American Cancer Society has served on the board and I get to bring in my passion as a cancer survivor with the testing that we do to bring. Insight, business acumen in that space and that context. So that collaboration within my company and outside my company just makes me enjoy my job. And then the third continuous improvement and innovation. Quick story for us, COVID for the whole world was a challenge, but we found that we were able to come up with unique ways, innovative ways to solve our problem. And it meant we could go from 6000 tests per day to 36,000. In a way that no one had done, even those that tried to replicate weren't able to do it. So communication and collaboration, continuous improvement and innovation or three sees that have been helped me and helped my my organization. So thank you again for the opportunity. Those are my key takeaways and back to you. Really clear, really, really like that, those 3C's. And again, thank you. Taking a few minutes with us today. And if I could just give a shout out to the subscribers to keep an eye on the events page for the activities that we have going on throughout the course of the year, most of which are available for free to subscribers. Sonia, could Ioffer you a dreadful virtual high five on the count of 3123? Sonya, thanks ever so much and it's so great to see you again. I hope you found that interview useful, and if you did, feel free to rate, review, and share this podcast. We'll be back next week with another episode, and we also invite you to check out our other weekly podcast, Going the Extra Mile, which assured to lift your spirit and encourage you in today's working world. Bye for now.