Behind the Career: Richard O. Davis

Position: President of Sibley Memorial Hospital, a nonprofit community hospital in the
District.

As a child, Richard O. Davis was used to being in a hospital — not just because his mother was a nurse, but because a congenital heart disease forced him to have open heart surgery at the age of nine.

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That experience stirred an interest in health care, but he also took a liking to the construction industry, because that’s where his father worked. So he did both — running a residential construction company while pursuing a doctoral degree in health policy.

He eventually wound up managing administrative and building services at Johns Hopkins Medicine before recently signing on at Sibley Memorial Hospital.

You’ve talked about the importance of being a servant leader. What do you mean by that?

One of the things I had asked to do was focus on patient safety and innovation in Johns Hopkins Medicine. One of the large areas I ran was ambulatory care operations.

There’s a particular building that sees 1,200 to 1,300 patients each day, so it’s very busy. The first people you see are the people at the front desk. The folks at the information desk stopped me one day and said, “Chip, we know that there’s this big focus on patient safety. We would like to be trained as first responders.” I said, “Great idea.”

Within a week and a half, we had them trained. Two weeks later, we had a mom walk into the hospital screaming with a lifeless 18-month-old infant in her arms. The folks at the information desk took the baby in their arms, pushed all the computers off the information desk, called the hospital code team, and in the meantime, revived the child. When the code team got there, the head doctor turned to them and said, “Had it not been for you, this child would’ve died.”

This was a very powerful lesson to me, in terms of supporting good ideas that come from the people that are involved in the process everyday. I would not have known that if I didn’t leave the cloistered office and get out and talk to people.

How do you get people to talk to you?

I learned the value of listening posts, which are places in the organization where you can get true feedback. For years I played basketball with the guys that worked on the loading dock or transporters. We became friends and it bridged relationships.

How did your construction leadership lessons translate to health care?

Getting people to show up to work on time with a customer orientation to do a high quality job that pleases the client and is fair is important. At times, when you have people who aren’t doing what needs to be done, you need to change your focus and look for people that have that mentality and focus and not be satisfied with subpar quality. It’s hard to teach that. You really want to recruit people who believe that.

What business books are you reading?

I’m currently reading “The Soul of Leadership” by Deepak Chopra and some health care books. I think that I’m constantly looking to improve my own leadership.

— Interview with Vanessa Small