Meet Trey: Organizational change leadership (M.A.'17)

I'm the manager of organization development and learning at Bronson Healthcare.

I am responsible for  supporting a team that's responsible for the growth and supporting the growth and development across all of Bronson Healthcare system. From leadership development, new employee onboarding, and our learning technologies my team is responsible for that.

I was fortunate enough to have both my undergrad and my masters degree at Western, and in fact I was introduced to Bronson by a professor at WMU. And the work that I do, leadership development was also recommended by a professor at WMU. So, both of those two connections actually helped me move into my role at Bronson.

So the reason I chose organizational change leadership is I'm fortunate in my job to support all types of projects involving people. So I often will describe the work I have at Bronson is, I get to take care of the people taking care of the people. At the end of the day what Bronson does is we provide patient care. And so this program allowed me to to get better at that. Getting better at changing or managing change in a complex environment. Healthcare is complex and things change all the time, and our leaders needs support. So this program allowed me and provided me to really get some of those tools and those practices to then take, provide to my team and for us to step into those different environments and support our leaders and in different way than we could previously. So just again, more tools in the toolbox . Nobody's ever going to complain about that and the program definitely provided that. 

My experience in the program was really really great. One of the things that stood out early on was I had an opportunity to have a really good balance of both in person classes but also some virtual classes as well. And so I was able to meet a lot of other local and not so local leaders who were going through the program at the same time.

I primarily interacted with with Dr. David Szabla, and so he was a great challenge to me because it was part of that conversation of theoretical constructs and then how do I apply this to my job every day. And so he served as a great conversational partner through the many classes I had with him about taking that theoretical, academic research and then taking it and applying in the real world. And so we had lots of conversations, sometimes disagreements, but always turned out great about how we could take that work that we were talking about in the classroom and apply it on the job that same day sometimes. 

I would encourage them to do is look at a weekly schedule at work, or the things they do for a living, and then look at the program and try to start making connections. Like what about the program can you connect to the work you do? Even if you don't do change work formally or leadership work formally, what other connections may there be to the work you do and then they can draw those connections. I'd say just go for it.

The best part of working about Branson is that there's a lot of them. We are a locally owned and operated healthcare system in southwest Michigan and the work we do impacts the community. And so my family, my family's family, friends and families they all come to Bronson for patient care. So just the fact that I get to support the people who provide that care including to my own children is huge. And so that's the best part about working at Bronson.

In terms of the work I do, and the training and development that my team supports, the best part about that is being able to go to the hospitals to the practices and the different locations and provide that hands on support. I do a lot a non-clinical development, so things like conflict management, communication training, and we built a lot of e-learning content so throughout COVID because our employees couldn't come in person and they couldn't gather to learn. 

Another amazing thing about working at Bronson is we have an executive leadership team that puts a very very big focus on people development. So if you ever Bronson's strategic plan you'd see people, so we  live and breathe it every day so our our training team, our resources, are our leadership development team has the resources we need to make sure that our people get that growth and development and can grow through Bronson. Whether that's in the roles they already have or they grow into future roles at Bronson. We've also been acknowledged globally as an Apex Training Award winner, that really highlighted a lot of the work that we did throughout the pandemic to continue to grow and develop our employees.