A closer look at companies executing leadership excellence
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In early 2013, Kyle Salyers walked into what he thought would be a typical post-financing board meeting. As Managing Director of CHV Capital and recent investor in Salt Lake City-based Health Catalyst, Salyers’ job was to ensure that his company’s investment was in good hands with the Health Catalyst management team. What happened in that meeting, however, was anything but typical. Rather than address the 128-page board packet previously submitted to Salyers and other attendees of the board meeting, Health Catalyst’s management team chose to focus on just two slides: 1) Cultural Attributes and 2) Operating Principles.
The team explained that they would put the new capital to work by hiring smart, hardworking and humble people. Those people would guide their decisions by making customer success a priority, taking personal responsibility for growth, participate in healthy conflict to support pragmatic innovation, and do so in a transparent environment.
Salyers was so impressed by how the management team concentrated on its operating ethos, he decided then and there that he wanted to do more than invest. He wanted to join the team. In August of 2014, Salyers became a Senior Vice President and has since witnessed firsthand how a company takes its values from off the walls to walking the halls.
In a post written by Salyers after joining the team, he describes how Health Catalyst measures the value of its values.
We believe that value in our business development activities will be evidenced through behaving in a manner consistent with our cultural attributes, and then making decisions based on our operating principles of customer success, ownership, pragmatic innovation, and transparency. These operating principles will serve as our decision-making framework, our investment thesis for the allocation of resources, and the basis on which we will choose to align ourselves in partnership.
That laser-focused commitment to culture and principles has drawn widespread accolades. Health Catalyst was named as the leader in the enterprise healthcare BI market in improvement, and has received numerous best-place-to work awards including Modern Healthcare, as well as “Best Place to work for Millennials,” “Best Perks for Women,” and the Number 1 spot in Glassdoor’s Top CEO’s of 2019.
Kudos to Health Catalyst for modeling how culture and principles are critical causal factors to sustainable success. To learn more about the Health Catalyst story, click here.