Meet the Board! Today's New Board Member Highlight is Rob Harding. Rob is the CEO of Billings, OBGYN. He has been working in healthcare management for thirty years.

1. Tell me a little about you personally: I’m an avid backpacker and professional BBQ’r.  I travel around and compete in BBQ and also steak.  I was raised in Salt Lake City and lived in Idaho for many years after that. 
2. Tell me a little about your background in healthcare: I graduated from Saint Louis University with my MHA and had some great experiences doing externships in large hospitals in downtown Saint Louis.  I did a year residency and a 1 year fellowship at a hospital in Terre Haute, Indiana.  It was a fabulous experience.  My position was eliminated as part of a large restructuring, so I was off to Idaho where I had my first physician practice gig in Hailey/Sun Valley Idaho.  LOVED IT!!   We implemented my first EMR in 2000.  What a challenge.   I have since then had many different roles in large system multispecialty practices to small rural clinics to owning my own consulting business.  I seem to keep going back to OBGYN.  I love my current job and clinic.  
3. If you had to choose one or two things you feel like others could reach out for advice on, what would those be:I am happy to talk about just about anything.  I have had the luxury of participating in lots of things over the years, so my experience is pretty broad.  Jack of all trades, master of none.
4. What is the best piece of advice/insight have you been given during your professional career that you’ll never forget or has stuck with you most: When I was a Resident and a Fellow, I was lucky enough to be a part of the creation and development of a state-wide delivery system with Indiana University and Methodist hospital in Indianapolis.  I was able to sit in and participate in very senior level meetings and planning sessions.  So I would sit next to different CEOs, Board Chairmen or Consultants and ask their advice for someone starting out in their career like I was.  The CEO of Methodist hospital, which at that time was a 1,000 bed hospital, told me that the best thing I could do was to hire people smarter than I was and to get out of their way.  He also told me that I didn’t have to know everything.  I just needed to know where to go to get the answers. 
5. What is the worst piece of advice you have been given and why: I think the worst advice I received was more of an example, than verbal advice.  I learned that micromanaging isn’t the way to motivate your employees and that you had to be the first one in and last one out to be successful.  I have found that that isn’t true at all.  The work will be there in the morning, but your kids won’t.  Go home and spend time with your kids.  It was way more important than trying to finish the work that day.  There will always be work.