How to Advance Your Leadership Skills in an Ever-Shifting Healthcare Environment

Winston Churchill once said, “to improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” Perfection is a lofty goal, but continual improvement is a great way to adapt to an ever-changing environment like healthcare.

But one of the biggest questions facing healthcare leaders is – how do you develop as a leader and advance your skillset in the midst of constant evolution? CJ Wolf, MD, invited George Vukotich, Ph.D., to share his thoughts for our latest episode of Compliance Conversations.

George Vukotich has a unique and varied background, having worked for large corporations, startups, academic institutions, and the military. He currently teaches in the Patient Safety Leadership Master’s degree program at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, Department of Medical Education.

Our latest episode, “Growing as a Leader in the Face of Change,” features CJ and George’s insights on:

• • The evolution of healthcare leadership styles – is there a time and place for “command and control” leadership?
  • Navigating planned change vs. unplanned change and how to pivot leadership styles
  • Tips (and unconventional ways) to build your leadership skills

Being a strong leader requires the ability to adapt your style to your various team members, and in a high-stakes field like healthcare, it can be tough to know how to pull people together and work towards a common goal. CJ and George discuss how to remain a sturdy and reliable leader as you tackle new and unexpected challenges.

Interested in being a guest on the show? Email CJ directly at cj.wolf@healthicity.com.

Episode Transcript

CJ: Welcome everybody to another episode of Compliance Conversations. I am CJ Wolf with Healthicity, and today I have a friend and colleague, George Vukotich, who is an expert in health care leadership. Welcome, George.

George: Thanks CJ, thank you for having me.

CJ: Yeah, I’m excited to talk a little bit about some areas of your expertise. George and I know each other, we both teach in a patient safety leadership program in health care for the University of Illinois at Chicago, and I’m so glad to have him, because I know he’s a real expert in a lot of these topics. George, we always love to have our guests just introduce themselves a little bit. Tell us a little bit about your background, what you’re doing now and then we’ll jump into our topic.

George: Sure CJ, yeah well actually some people find a career and they start out from day one and go all the way through. I use the example of my wife. She started out in the field of dentistry as a receptionist, then a dental assistant, then a dental hygienist and finally a dentist. For me, that hasn’t been a straight path. Mine’s a little bit here, a little bit there, and that’s what brought me today. So early on I worked in corporate America for organizations like IBM and Accenture, liked the innovation and technology that was going on. And then from there got to midlife and said, “Hey I really like teaching, maybe I can shift into it, or more appropriately I could afford to teach,” so I switched into teaching. I became a professor and then a department chair and a dean of a college of business, and then about 10 years ago I got real interested in the whole area of startups and innovation and how they all work together, so I got into the startup world. But for our purposes, what got me into health care was when I was in the military, so after spending time as a finance person, then as an inspector general, they allowed me to do something that was more interesting, that was to allow me to become a health services administrator, so I become that and spent about eight years in the military working with hospitals and clinics and doing traditional work as well as being involved in the command of what they call a “quick response force” that responds to natural and man-made disasters. So it’s been interesting, and then that’s brought me here, as you mentioned, to UIC to be a faculty member in the patient safety leadership program at UIC, and then also I work with organizations in the startup field, so startups trying to impact health care and the direction health care is going in.

CJ: Yeah, well you’ve had an exciting journey. And you know it’s so interesting, none of us probably picture where we are today, you know, 20, 30 years ago, but you gotta let the journey take you. That’s what’s part of the fun, right?

George: It’s been interesting, yes it has. Fun most of the time, sometimes a little bit challenging, but overall it’s been fun. And like you say, it’s kept life interesting, it definitely has.

CJ: Well yeah, and that kind of brings up our first topic about change, and I know you teach about health care leadership, dealing with change. Maybe we just start there, because there’s a lot of change in health care. How do various health care leaders approach and deal with change just in general?

George: Yeah you know, CJ, I’ve seen a lot over the years. It used to be more of a “command and control” kind of model. You’d have the lead provider giving all the direction and everybody else would pretty much wait until they were told to do and they would try to execute on what they were told. But what I’ve seen over the years, and particularly for leaders that are successful, is that they engage the individuals that they work with and allow them to be more engaged as team members, allow them to do what they feel is appropriate, so I think communication has gotten a lot better. You know one of the challenges with health care education, for example, is you go and practice to be a great technician and you build some very good technical skills and know how to run an organization from a technical perspective, but you don’t get a whole lot on the people side or the business side and how to work with people, how to be a good team leader, how to communicate, what's the best way to communicate when it comes to decision-making, what’s the decision-making process going to look like, and quite often that leaves individuals wondering or just waiting to be told what to do. But as an effective leader comes up with their model or builds their toolkit, I think it’s very important to not only have those technical skills — which again, it’s very important — but also to be able to work with the individuals around you, be able to communicate with them, share how decisions will be made, if there’s a problem or challenge, be able to talk about how to address that in the best way.

CJ: And do you think those, what you just said about seeing this evolution a little bit going from a command center, “I’m in charge, do what I say,” to a little bit more collaborative, is that generational changes? I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that. Why is that happening?

George: I think it is. Part of it is, when I grew up it was, “Just do what you’re told to do. Listen and then execute on what you were told.” I think as our society, at least in the U.S., has evolved, it’s been more where people have options and they can choose to stay with an organization or work with a certain individual or group of individuals or not. So I think part of it is generational. I also think part of it is that individuals in the various fields are learning better and they’re having a better understanding of how to make decisions and execute on projects themselves. I think it’s a combination: part of it is generational, and I think part of it is realizing, you know when we talk about inclusion and bringing people together, getting their input — because some individuals may know about their specific area better than others, and then you still need that overall person to run the project, as I call it, or run the operation, but I think it’s a combination. So I think it’s better education allowing individuals to make better decisions, and it’s also generational, the way our society’s evolved.

CJ: Yeah. And when it comes to leadership, we’ve seen I think there’s different styles and I don't know what your thoughts are on if there is one style or one approach the way for everybody — it seems like sometimes personality of the leader has a difference and there’s these different leadership styles and approaches. Some are probably more effective, but what are your thoughts around that, especially as it relates to change in health care? Are certain leadership styles and approaches better than others?

George: You know, CJ, you touch on a very interesting point. So when I teach the leadership course over at the University of Illinois Chicago, patient safety leadership — when I teach the leadership course, we look at a bunch of different models. We look at steward leadership, command and control leadership, participated leadership, but what I tell the students in the end, it’s like we’ve looked at all of these different models and they have certain characteristics and impacts — what is important for you to learn while you’re in this program is what the tools are to build your own toolkit. So look at the tools you have for your toolkit, but even more important is to read the situation you're in and understand the situation and then use the right tools in that situation. There are times when you want to engage others and get more of their input. There’s times when you don’t have that luxury, when you just have to get things done. So I encourage everybody to study all the different leadership models, and there’s a lot of them, but from there, build your toolkit and then realize what tools you should use come into play by understanding the situation. Be able to read the situation, the individuals that are involved with you, the criticality of the situation. So you need to have an overall understanding, and once you have that understanding, then you’ve got a nice set of tools that you can pull out and use, whether it’s physical tools or mental tools, whatever it needs to be to get the process done.

CJ: Yeah, so what I’m hearing you say is even though some of us might have — and some leaders might have a preference, their overall general style, maybe I’m a collaborative leader or I’m more of a command leader — even though I might have certain preferences, it depends on the situation. As you mentioned, there may be something where there’s not enough time to do a full collaborative session and you just have to make the decision, and so what I’m hearing you say is it’s important to be able to adapt and maybe use a different style, depending on the situation.

George: Yes, exactly, CJ. They talk about, “Oh you should empower everybody.” Well the fact is some people don’t want to be empowered. That’s the challenges, so you need to be able to see if people are willing to jump in and be involved and get empowered, and if they’re not, you may need to give them a little bit of a nudge or lead them a little bit more. So yes, that’s exactly it.

CJ: Yeah. You know, one thing that I know you and I have talked about and communicated about before is just this concept of change. And some change is planned, and some is not planned. Like I don’t think any of us planned for the pandemic before it happened. That may be considered an unplanned change that we needed to make, but then others are — you may be doing a strategic initiative and you’re like, “OK, this is going to be a two-year thing,” and it’s planned. You are choosing to do it. You want it to go in a certain direction that’s going to require change. Do you have thoughts and comments on the difference between planned change versus unplanned change?

George: It’s a good point, and part of it sometimes is the pressure you’re under. So it’s always nice if you can plan for a change. If you see the opportunity, so if you have the time and the luxury of seeing what the opportunity may be — people always talk about, “How’s it going to be better, faster, cheaper?” So if you have the opportunity to look at it from a long-term perspective and create that vision and then share that vision with others — the stakeholders, basically, whether it’s other providers, whether it’s patients, whether it’s the community. So if you can build that vision and get people to engage in that, that helps. Other times, things happen. You used COVID as an example, and that forces change. If you look at how things have changed due to COVID, you know, telehealth booming for example, so what does that drive? So now that we’ve shifted to telehealth in some ways, what are the tools and technologies that can help us build better? So those are a lot of the things that come into play, and I’ll just use one example. In the course I teach at UIC, we use this example of children’s hospitals and clinics. You know, this is a forced change, and I use the example of Julie Moore, who we’ve actually interviewed as well, and there’s a — not to push another program — but if you look at some of the YouTube programs, if you look at Julie Moore  and some of the things she did at children’s hospitals and clinics in Minnesota — it’s a Harvard case study as well — there was a situation where change needed to happen. Fortunately the organization saw the right person. They brought her in, she had a well-defined model, she wanted to engage people, she changed the culture of the organization. So she said, “If we look at this organization, what we need to do is one: realize there’s a problem. Two: empower people so they can make a change. Three: not shoot the messenger. Reward them for bringing up their challenges. And then finally execute.” So that’s one example of where change is forced on you, or you don’t have the time and you have to react. And so that’s one example. Another one: we’ve had some other areas where we’ve looked at taking care of the caretaker. COVID has brought that up, and with that we’ve looked at models and how we’ve had to change, and so we’ve looked at those different areas. So again, we had Dr. Jo Shapiro to talk, we did a webinar with her, and the whole focus of that was taking care of the caretaker, and in times like COVID, where nobody had a well-designed model, it was, “Who do you go to for information?” There wasn’t always the expert source. People had different perspectives, different sources, so where do you go for information? How do you pull people together and then come up with what’s best? So again to your point, sometimes it’s forced, like when COVID happens, what do you do? That creates new things that come up like telehealth. Well telehealth has become popular, what do you need there? You need to create tools and capabilities to help facilitate that model, and then if you have the luxury of having planned change where you know that things are going to happen, where you know technologies are changing. I guess, for example, one of the things now is wearables, you know, where people can look at wearables. I look at this convergence of technologies coming together where you have the wearable, it transmits the data, you have algorithms that can analyze the data and then they can be predictors of what can happen. So again, there’s two areas: realizing which one you’re in, getting stakeholders engaged. If you have the time to bring them in, that’s very helpful. And then building your case or telling your story for why change needs to happen also comes into play.

CJ: Yeah. You know I’ve worked in, like you, a lot of different organizations, and I’ve seen different leadership styles at the highest levels, and some leaders are really good with kind of that crisis control and that crisis management, and they thrive on that. And others seem to be really exceptional from a visionary standpoint, where it’s like, ‘OK, where am I taking this organization over the next five years?” And I’ve seen people that specialize in crisis management, right, when an organization’s in a certain crisis, they bring in certain leadership types, right?

George: Yeah, and I think that’s very appropriate. The old model used to be you hire somebody and they stay with the organization for 20, 30 years of their whole career. That’s not necessarily the case as changes continue to happen, and whether it’s the kind of change that gives you the opportunity to plan or the kind where, you say, the crisis management, where you have to just get in and do something — that requires different personalities, and those circumstances change, and I think having the ability or flexibility to bring people in and out is OK. It’s not a bad thing for people to only come in for a couple of years to change an area here or there. So from my perspective, having the right person at the right time is the way to run an organization.

CJ: Yeah I’ve seen, working with other organizations in health care specifically, some people even refer to themselves as “turnaround agents,” like in revenue cycle or in finance. “I was brought in to turn this around,” and they were given three years or something, or, “I’m in operations or quality, and I was asked to be a turnaround agent,” and they do that, and then they move to the next organization, and they’re good at it.

George: Yeah, and I think that’s OK. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.

CJ: Right. You get people up and running and you get them at a maintenance mode, and then you may need other leaders for that maintenance mode. The one thing you mentioned that made me think about forced change — sometimes forced change can be good, and even though we don’t like it at the moment, if you look at it five years later and you look back, you’re like, “You know I probably wouldn’t have done that if I hadn’t been forced to, and now I see the benefits,” and I’ll give you an example. You mentioned telehealth and telemedicine. It was around before COVID, but I saw some hesitancy in some culture to use it, even though the tools were already there. It wasn't until they were forced to use it during COVID, and now some of the people that were hesitant have seen some of the advantages. I’m not saying it was all roses, but they might not have actually gone to the extent of using telehealth to the extent they did if they hadn’t been forced to. And then they saw, “Whoa, I didn’t realize it could do that. We’re going to keep that,” even as the pandemic hopefully will completely go away. They were like, “Oh, now look at these advantages,” and so that forced change can I think sometimes be good. In the moment you feel like, “Ugh, I don’t want to do it.” The other example that I think of — and you know I come from a clinical background in medicine — a lot of medical advances happened during war. You were in the military, and it’s because there are crises going on, and certain medical procedures that might  not have been tested in peaceful times have to be done in combat, those sorts of things. And you see some of these advances that are pushed by — and I’m not saying that I want crises to happen so that we can get advancements — but you can sometimes get a silver lining out of that cloud. Do you believe that?

George: I do actually, CJ. You know a lot of times it’s the circumstances you’re under, and the greater the pain, the greater the need for change. I’ve got to share one story. Early on in my career, I was involved in a consulting project where I went into an organization, and we were looking at making some changes. Now we had luxury here, because the organization said, “Well what should we do?” And they started out saying, “We should do a stakeholder analysis, so George, you and some of the other consultants go out and talk to the individuals about what changes they feel would most improve the organization and would give a better face to the patients they serve.” And I remember talking to one individual and I said, “So what do you think could be better or changed to make a difference?” and his comment back to me was, “George, I only have another eight years to retirement, so I don’t want to have to learn anything new, so I’d appreciate if you didn’t change anything.” I was just shocked by that. That still stands with me today, you know, 20 years later, this person saying, “I’ve only got another eight years to retirement, so I don’t want to learn anything new, so don't change anything.” It’s like,” No. No, eight years is a long time, you need to change things, you need to improve.” But I gotta tell you, there are some people out there that still have that perspective or that mentality, so the challenge for individuals that are leaders is, “How do you get someone like that, and how do you bring them onboard to help make change happen?” So those are where the challenges come in, and again it’s having a leader that can tell the story, can show the vision and show why it’s important for everyone to make change and make things better.

CJ: Yeah, and I saw that in electronic medical records as — once a physician finishes medical residency, maybe they’re in their mid- to late 20s for some of the earliest, you’ve got docs now practicing 40 and 50 years after that. Well those early docs are comfortable with the technology now, but those older docs, more experienced docs might not be, and I’ve heard people say, “Look, I’m going to retire in a couple years, I’m going to continue doing what I’ve done for 40 years.” That may be OK for an individual, but what, we’re supposed to wait until everyone retires before as an industry we advance the industry? Right? And so I’m curious, I don’t know if you have any thoughts on individual change versus organizational change or industry change or societal change and any of those impacts? I don’t know if you have thoughts.

George: Yeah, you know it’s a challenge, because again, the closer somebody gets to retiring or changing careers — I don’t know that people fully retire, but as they change from one lifestyle to another, I think it’s important to look at that, and to your point, even though new technologies come out that can make things better, faster, cheaper, is the motivation, is the energy, is the drive there to get individuals to change? So you need to build those bridges, and I guess the best way is to show individuals how technology can help and make a difference. One of the challenges, you know, health care organizations often bring in new technology, but I don’t know that they always spend enough time teaching their people how to use, or how to most effectively interact with that new technology. From my perspective, I’ve seen a lot of times where I think if more time was spent, not only, “Here is the new technology,” but showing people how it can help and how it can make things better. I think quite often that’s missing. As organizations create their budgets, they put in a budget for a new piece of equipment, but not necessarily for the training and the development that goes around it. That’s what I’ve seen as a challenge along the way. You know what, CJ, one other thing I’m thinking about is, I’ve helped build a couple of these innovation and tech hubs. One of the things that we’ve done that seems to be pretty effective is to create what we call “communities of practice,” and what these are is groups that either focus on a certain technology or certain practice area. You try to get somebody to lead it as a facilitator and then you try to create support by helping them find guest speakers and you have them meet once a month or whatever works well, whether it’s online or in-person, and they can learn about new things. And that provides a forum for people to ask questions, learn new things, get things going. I think quite often, as we become professionals and move on, it’s important to stay up to date on things, whether it’s informally, not necessarily formally taking or getting another degree, and I think this concept of communities of practice” can make a difference. I’ve seen some good work around it, and I think that’s an area that will continue to grow as well.

CJ: That’s a really great point. You know I just think of nearly 50 years ago, how did health care leaders learn from other people? If I was on the East Coast, maybe I had a local community, a hospital down the street or down the coastline that I could contact. But nowadays we have podcasts like this, right, so this information boom I guess it can have some negatives, you could overload it, but now people from around the world and country can hear an idea from George in Chicago, whereas if they lived in southern Florida 50 years ago, how would they have gotten that information unless you published a paper and I happened to actually read that one paper? So I just think there’s this boom, and I love what you talked about, these communities of learning and how that can promote change and acceptance of change, and using the change in a good way.

George: Yeah. CJ, I think a great example, I’ve known you for a while but I didn’t know you had the podcast here. So once I learned about it, I went out and saw some of the previous sessions, and it was very impressive. So I’m not kissing up to you, but you’ve got a nice set of reference podcasts out there, and I listened to some of them, and it’s like, there’s knowledge out there that I would’ve never known about or gained if I hadn’t known about it. So it’s not just that there’s more information. I think the challenge today is knowing how to find that information. So fortunately we got together and had this conversation, and then you say, “Yeah, I run this podcast,” and you gave me the information with Healthicity, so I went out there and I take a look, and it’s like, “Wow, there’s a lot of good information out here,” so I listened to about a dozen podcasts out there, and I feel I’ve learned a lot just listening to those.

CJ: Yeah. Yeah it’s fascinating, and my trouble is what you just said. It’s, “How do I filter through?” I just love getting all this information, but there’s not enough time in the day for me to learn everything I want to learn, so how do you whittle it down and get the most use out of it? And one of the things you mentioned — as we kind of pivot a little bit — before was about tools and using the right tools for the right setting or the right situation. I’m curious if you have any ideas on what tools might exist that help health care leaders plan and implement change?

George: You know, I think there’s going to be more and more online, so the capability to organize and find things. I think we’ll be able to build — they talk about personas, now, you know, what’s your persona? What’s your filter? — so instead of just being able to Google something, and Google knows probably more about us than we know about ourselves in some cases, but what are the areas of interest? They talk about the concept of smart tools or smart technologies, and as we go forward, you talk about typing, then, “Oh, don’t worry about typing, you’ll have speech recognition,” and we’re getting there, so speech recognition over the years has gotten a lot better. But think about it, so I’m actually still waiting — and actually I’ve seen some tests on mind recognition, I think out of MIT, they’ve even created the device that can — you know you have your self-talk, everybody has self-talk in their head, it can understand your self-talk. So think if you have that device, and that’s why I talk about this convergence. So if you have this device connected to your head while you’re thinking about a topic or trying to figure something out, you’ve got this tool going out to the internet or wherever pulling in relative information for you. So it already creates the filter. So I think part of this is imagine what can be, and as technologies change and improve, how can those pieces come together? And that’s why I talk about that concept of convergence. So as we have a device we can wear, a tool that can go out and search the internet, you know, they talk about predictive analytics and being able to pull that together. So I think we’re going to get to a point where you have artificial intelligence, then machine-learning is going to look at the past data and help us predict the future as well. And it’ll get to a point where it’s personalized, where we’ll have our own filters, so that even though there’s all of this stuff out there, it’ll help us narrow down what we’re specifically looking for, specifically interested in.

CJ: Yeah, absolutely. When you were talking, it made me think about, I’ve often heard this phrase of, “That person’s a natural-born leader.” I think there probably are some innate skills that people come with or maybe capabilities, but those still have to be refined. What are your thoughts about — because I know you teach health care leadership skills, so what if I’m not a, or I don’t consider myself, a natural-born leader? There must be some skills and some things I can be taught and things that I can practice and become better at it, right? You know my son, he’s a musician, and people think, “Oh, he’s so talented.” Well, I hear him practicing and practicing. He does have talent, but most of it is hard work and he’s practiced skills. So if I’m not born as this great leader but I want to improve my leadership skills, do I take your class? What other tools are out there to become a better leader?

George: Well I’d love for you to take my class and happy to do that. But you know, CJ, I think you bring up a good point. Some people just naturally tend to go one direction or another, and I think some of it is inherited. Some of it is our environment we grow up in and work in. But that said, I think we all have the ability to continue to develop. I know you won’t believe this, but I used to be on the quieter side, the shy side, but over the years, particularly after I finished my Ph.D., I said, “You know, what do I do next?” And I said, “You know, what the hell, I gotta do something different.” So I took some improv classes. Now if you ask anybody who knew me back in the day, they would say, “George taking improv classes? He’d never do that.” But you know, I forced myself because it was a different way to think, a different way to interact, and actually it opened things up. So I’m a big believer, if a person is willing to try something different and do something different, they can be different. So I just used my case in that example where I never thought I would’ve taken an improv class, but by having done that and actually spent a year doing it, it allowed me to open up. I think I interact better with individuals, and it’s made a difference. So I think individuals can learn, and again it’s just by being with people that encourage you. I think one of the challenges, one of the things I tell young people, is “Don’t let others limit your ability to grow.” I think too often individuals get into an environment where they’re limited by the people around them telling them, “You can’t, you shouldn’t, don’t,” and I think you need to get past that and be able to think “What can be?” versus “What are the limits?” So that’s just my thought, but yeah I definitely think people can grow and develop in many areas, yes.

CJ: Because I’ve seen people blossom as leaders when they were given the chance, though they weren’t an aggressive type of person who was seeking that. So there’s people who seek those leadership positions, and yeah, they have certain qualities, but I’ve seen some people blossom because they were put into a position. Maybe the person before them retired or was injured or died, unfortunately, or whatever, and the person that was serving as their deputy filled that role and they blossomed as a leader. They didn’t seek it, but they blossomed once they were in that position. Have you seen that?

George: Yes I have, actually. And that’s where I think it’s important to have that toolkit. You may not have the opportunity, but when that opportunity comes you better be ready to go. So yes I have, you know, quite often individuals just do the job that they’re asked to do and they’re steady performers. But when given that opportunity, they do very well. The challenge is, if you’re running an organization, how do you find those high-potential, or those individuals, and make sure they get the experience and preparation so that when the opportunity opens up, they’re ready to go? So yes I have. I think that’s a good example of an organization helping its individuals develop the right skills along the way so that from — whether a succession plan on purpose or by accident happens, they’re ready to go when the opportunity comes up.

CJ: Yeah, and I’ve seen that a lot in health care, where sometimes it’s the cutthroat people that are just aggressive who are the ones climbing the ladder the leadership, and I get why that happens. But there’s so many good ones that, if given the chance — and it’s just maybe not in their personality to push others aside to get that position, but once they have it, I’ve seen some people do really well and it’s fascinating.

George: CJ, yeah actually there’s an example of that. Those people that come in and squawk a lot, holler, try to make a difference, they actually refer to them as “seagulls.” And you say, “Why do they refer to them as seagulls?” Well they come in, squawk a lot and then leave a mess for everybody else to clean up. So yes I have seen it, but then somebody else gets in the role and they make a big difference, so definitely.

CJ: Yeah, interesting. George, our time is kind of coming to an end here, but I want to give you an opportunity to think about any last-minute comments about leadership, change, health care, other thoughts that you might have before we get closing up in the next minute or two?

George: Yeah, well thanks, CJ. I guess the key point here for anybody listening is again, to the point you mentioned: Don’t be limited by your past or where you are today. If you want to do something new, do something different, the ability is there. We live in the United States, which gives us a great opportunity a lot of other places don’t have. Having been in the military, I strongly believe that. I think there’s a lot of formal programs, like the program I teach in at UIC and the patient safety leadership, or informal. You look today, so much stuff on the internet where individuals can develop skills. And then this concept of communities of practice is another way. Find people that are where you want to be. How can you develop those skills that you want? Find the right people that are nurturing and want to help you get ahead. And I think, with that, individuals will have opportunity. So CJ, I want to thank you for the opportunity. I’ve enjoyed it. Boy, time does fly, but I’ve enjoyed this and thank you.

CJ: Thank you, George, and I appreciate your time, your expertise and your vast experience. And the one major takeaway that I’m taking away for me personally is this communities of practice and how I can grow in that area. I’ve heard a lot of these other things from you over the years, so those were not — this was a little bit, you probably said it for years, but this just struck me today, and so it’s going to be a takeaway for me.

George: Well there you go. See, you can never know somebody too well, so thank you, CJ.

CJ: That’s exactly right. When you take time and sit down to talk and listen, so thank you to our listeners for taking the time to listen. Hopefully you’re doing it while you’re doing your exercise or walking or maybe you’re stuck in traffic. But take time to listen, take time to talk, and appreciate George and his expertise, and appreciate all of you for listening to another episode of Compliance Conversations. Until next time, take care.