My 33 years with Procter & Gamble taught me the importance of effective management, strong leadership, and of being responsive to the needs of customers.

I’m a forward-looking leader who spent my business career expanding P&G to serve new, emerging, and underserved customers. That’s the experience needed to modernize the VA.

The department’s problems with access, transparency, and accountability and integrity have been well documented. There’s a lot of work being done to transform the department. It isn’t easy, but it is essential, and it can be achieved.

We’re putting the veteran at the center of everything that we do, consistent with our mission.

When I got here, I found immediately that we had to rebuild trust with veterans and all of our stakeholders, focus completely on veterans’ outcomes to improve delivery of our services, and set a course for long-term excellence and reform.

My charge is to provide veterans the care that they have earned in the most effective way possible, and VA employees have joined me in reconfirming our commitment to VA’s mission and core values.

 

When you arrived at VA in 2014, the department was clearly in crisis. Without listing what critics said was wrong at the time, can you tell us what your top priorities were to deal with during your initial months on the job?

In short, the overarching priority was to set a vision for change that is not only veteran-centric, but also veteran-driven. We mean to put veterans, our customers, in control of the VA experience.

That patient-centric, veteran-centric solution is called “MyVA.” It’s called “MyVA” because veterans should view VA as their organization – an organization that belongs to them and provides quality care and benefits in the ways they need and want to be served.

When I got here, I found immediately that we had to rebuild trust with veterans and all of our stakeholders, focus completely on veterans’ outcomes to improve delivery of our services, and set a course for long-term excellence and reform. Three things really stood out to me that led to my top five priorities: The veteran is the center of all we do; you can’t separate the veteran experience from the employee experience; and that the VA can’t do this by itself.

Informed by this, we came up with five initial priorities: provide veterans with predictable, consistent, and easy access to the care they have earned; improve the employee experience to unleash the power they have to positively affect veterans; establish a performance improvement culture (what we call a “lean” culture) to ensure safety, quality, and agility in the organization to meet veterans’ needs; identify the common support services across the VA and deliver those with efficiency and effectiveness; and leverage the community by establishing strong strategic partnerships.

These five initial priorities work together to create a new state of mind for VA. While today VA has many great employees and areas of excellence, we need to create an environment where we consistently implement best practices. VA systems and processes will support this improved veteran-centric culture, and employees’ behaviors toward veterans and fellow employees will improve.

 

You have often spoken, both during your time in industry and at VA, about having a “values-based” leadership style as your approach to dealing with challenges. What, in your opinion, does values-based leadership mean in real-world terms, and how are you promoting that at VA?

No organization can succeed without values to match its mission. Our mission at VA is to care for those “who shall have borne the battle,” their families, and survivors. When I arrived here, I found that VA had strong core values, but had lost sight of the veteran as the center of all it did, and didn’t realize it could not decouple the veteran’s experience from the employee experience. So, the first thing we did together was reaffirm those values – Integrity, Commitment, Advocacy, Respect, and Excellence – I CARE.

On day one, I told our team that it was critical that all of us at VA reaffirm our commitment to our mission and our values. Veterans must know we are “all in” when it comes to accomplishing our mission and living by our values.

 

Since you arrived at the VA, clearly the “800-pound gorilla in the room” has been the backlog situation you inherited from your predecessor. As we sit here today, how is the department doing at reducing that backlog; how far have you come since you started; and do you think that the department will have eliminated it by the end of the present administration in January 2017?

You know, the disability claims backlog dropped under 100,000 recently. The claims backlog has been reduced from a peak of 611,000 in March 2013 to 81,881 this week [Sept. 15, 2015], an 87 percent reduction – the lowest since we started measuring the backlog in 2007.