Darlene Stone took a part-time job at her small community hospital in high school, working admissions, medical records, and the business office alongside her mom and grandmother. When she went off to college to study accounting, she transferred into a hospital HR department and quickly realized she cared far more about the human side of the work than about tracking down the exact penny. She changed her major and never left.
Darlene is now the Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at Bayhealth, a not-for-profit health system in Delaware. In this episode, she explains why she never walks into the CFO's office asking for money without a plan to pay for it, how Bayhealth built on-site childcare open 365 days a year for its 12-hour shift workers, and why her first question about layoffs is always "How do we redeploy them?"
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Learn more about Bayhealth: https://www.bayhealth.org
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[00:00:00] Darlene Stone: Oftentimes we take technically competent people and overnight make them the leader of the team and give them nothing. And so we have to be able to evolve and train leaders how to be leaders and be able to help lead teams and inspire them to deliver on the mission that we have.
[00:00:15] Dave Travers: So what does it really take for your business to attract world-class talent today? I'm Dave Travers, President of ZipRecruiter. And on Talent All-Stars, we shine a light on the people and the day-to-day processes behind recruitment and retention at some of the world's most influential businesses
Today's Talent All-Star is Darlene Stone, Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at Bayhealth.
Her career in healthcare HR began all the way back in high school, and she's been in the industry ever since. On today's episode, she shares how Bay Health is building their own talent pipelines, what it takes to develop future leaders, and how she advocates for more resources to drive a more effective people strategy. Darlene Stone, welcome to Talent All-Stars.
[00:00:59] Darlene Stone: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here today.
[00:01:02] Dave Travers: Ah, so excited to have you. Okay. You have an incredible background of being a people leader in healthcare, and I wanna get into all of that. But I wanna go back to before you were big and fancy executive and some point along the way, this people thing, this HR thing, like, really became, like, a calling for you and a c- and a career and a, and a passion, not just, um, the thing you were doing between nine and five. How did that happen?
[00:01:30] Darlene Stone: Yeah. I actually started working in healthcare when I was in high school, and it was a part-time job I took. My mom worked there, my grandmother worked there, and it was a part-time job I did at admissions, medical records, business office. It was just our small community hospital. And when I went off to college to go start my bachelor's degree and, and work on that, I was able to transfer over into a hospital department's human resources department.
And when I got in there, I just realized I loved it because I was actually studying to be an accountant, believe it or not. But I realized I wasn't really fitting in in my accounting classes 'cause it was rounded off close enough is kind of my attitude, instead of finding the exact penny, and I just loved the human side of what we were doing in human resources and just found it fascinating.
And so I just stayed and changed my major to be human resources administration under a bachelor's degree in business administration and just continued to work there until I graduated. And then I was able to join a company that had an internship, an in-depth internship in human resources, and was able to get into that and just moved into leadership from there.
So it was something that I just had a passion for healthcare, had that passion kind of come up for human resources, and just decided to stay, and I've been doing this ever since.
[00:02:39] Dave Travers: I love it. And what was it about healthcare that drew you in?
[00:02:42] Darlene Stone: It was just something that came to me. I started working in healthcare very early on in my high school career; I have relatives that work in healthcare, and it just attracted me.
The ability to take care of people, make a difference in their lives, save their lives, really just was something that I loved. And even though initially my early jobs were admissions, medical records, business office, I was kind of the only one there at night taking care of people's needs. So whether I was checking out somebody from the emergency department that had just been in an accident or ordering food for somebody that was waiting on transportation, it was just a lot of fun, and I loved that.
So the piece of being able to connect to people when I moved to college level, I moved over into the human resources area. And just really came to love taking care of people, helping them accomplish their dreams, hiring them into positions, solving their problems so that they could take great care of our patients.
So it's just something that connected with me of making a difference. We're there with patients at the best of times and the worst of times, and being able to make a difference in their lives is something that just really connects for me.
[00:03:38] Dave Travers: There's something about healthcare in that way, that there are many great businesses that have great missions out there. Did you know right away, like, "I wanna be a leader"? Was that not a surprise to you?
[00:03:48] Darlene Stone: I did not. I know I wanted to work in human resources, but I was able to get into an internship with a company I was working for at the time that they offered a one-year intensive internship to develop new leaders for the future.
So they were seeking us college graduates to be able to do that. I entered that one-year intensive internship, where I worked right next to a chief HR executive that kind of showed me the ropes. I did rotations through every department in the hospital. I learned every aspect of HR, worked on projects, things like that, with the goal of being able to fill one of their leadership positions in HR across the nation.
So I had no idea where I'd end up, where I would live, but at the time I was single, and it was exciting for me to be able to do it, and was able to kind of move in. So I spent a large portion of my career on the for-profit side, and then I moved over to the not-for-profit side, which was a little bit different environment for me.
We really give back to the communities when you're in a not-for-profit environment. We really have a lot more in charity care that we do to take care of populations that may not have the ability to pay, and that's really where I felt that connection to healthcare that was a little bit different for me.
That really said, "Okay, now I've found my niche of the organizations that I want to work for and make a difference in the communities where I live."
[00:04:53] Dave Travers: Amazing. And so the leadership piece of it, did you feel like it was a natural for you when you started leading teams, or was it a challenge?
[00:05:01] Darlene Stone: Well, I think with any leader, you question whether or not you have the ability to do it.
It did in some ways come naturally, but there was also leadership development skills I had to work on. I was more of that harmonizer. I didn't want to cause conflict. I hated conflict. And in my role, there's a little bit of conflict that goes on. So being able to develop those skills over my career has been something that I've really valued and is something I use every single day.
So investment in leadership development started with that internship but continued throughout my career. Because as leaders, you can't ever stop growing, developing, and evolving and fine-tuning those skills that you have. And so even today, I go through executive coaching, and I have executive leadership programs we're doing, and help role model these skills for the rest of our executive team because it's so very important.
Oftentimes, we take technically competent people and overnight make them the leader of the team and give them nothing. And so we have to be able to evolve and train leaders how to be leaders and be able to help lead teams and inspire them to deliver on the mission that we have, and that's the fun part of what I do.
[00:06:04] Dave Travers: It is really fun, but I think you're dead on about something, which is the natural impulse when looking for a new leader is to say, "Who's the most competent individual contributor, and let's promote them." And it's a whole different world. But at the same time, if you are the most competent individual contributor, and you want to be tapped on the shoulder, maybe there's not an intensive one-year internship that grooms you for this.
If you need to do some self-starting, what advice do you give someone in that frame of mind where they're like, "I want to make it into leadership. I know I'm good at my day job as an individual contributor." How do you give advice to someone who wants to make that leap?
[00:06:41] Darlene Stone: You know, if that's what you aspire to do, there's so many different ways you can do it.
I was granted the opportunity of a one-year internship that got me there. But we offer emerging leader programs, people that wanna be a leader, and so we start training them very early in our organization in those skills and those tactics and techniques. Just advancement of your own education, whether it be certifications or education, advanced degrees.
Learning and reading. Now there's so much more on the internet. I hate to say it, but when I went through school, we didn't have all of the resources of the internet and things like that. But being able to go out and just research your own, read articles, be your own best learner. You can never stop learning in the work that we do, and as a leader, we have to always continuously learn.
You've got TED Talks and YouTube videos, and just all kinds of things out there, books to read. Just find those things. Find a good mentor to help you, is the other option that you also have to be able to do this work.
[00:07:33] Dave Travers: I think mentorship is so important, and it's hard because if you haven't done that before, it's putting yourself out there.
It's like dating or, like, applying for a job or something. And so it can be nerve-wracking. If I'm coming to you, like, I wanna, I wanna develop some mentorship in my, in my network, how do I get started? What's your advice there?
[00:07:53] Darlene Stone: So, looking for a mentor, you know, find somebody you admire. Find somebody that you look up to that leads in a way that is meaningful to you.
'Cause even after my internship, that's what I did. I had an incredible chief operating officer that was so great at having really tough conversations, and that was something I struggled with. So I would watch and observe. I would sit in. I would shadow, things like that. I would bounce off of, "How do I have this tough conversation?
Can you kinda help me?" That's where the mentor kinda plays in, because they're not judging you. They're helping to support you. And the best thing as a leader you can have is feedback, being able to share the blind spots that you might have, things that maybe didn't go well, and be able to get advice and guidance on how to maybe handle that better or different in the future.
And that feedback is a critical piece of that. So once you have a mentor kinda lined up, that can really help open those doors for you and help navigate the paths that you wanna accomplish. And I think being open to other ways to get into leadership. Because, like I said, I couldn't probably retrace the steps that I took to get back to where I am today.
But I had people that believed in me, that supported me, that helped identify this internship and other things, and it was just being, asking people, saying, "This is what I wanna do. How do I get there, and what do I do to make that happen in my life?"
[00:09:04] Dave Travers: Okay, so now here you are. You're at Bayhealth. How do you navigate the level of change around you, and how do you help and build teams to navigate?
Like, where do you even begin in this world where it feels like everything's changing so fast? How do you lead teams through that?
[00:09:21] Darlene Stone: Yes, and especially over my career, it seemed like it started slower, and now the pace has just picked up astronomically. It is a tough situation to be in, and as a leader, you have to be very organized.
You have to be very well-read. You have to stay current on things. You can't become a dinosaur by not staying current in technology and things. You know, it'd be easy for me to bury my head in the sand saying, "I'm not gonna understand this AI Piece, but going out there and finding those tools to help support you to learn about it so that you can understand how it can impact the work environment.
While I'm over HR, I am also an executive for this organization, so I need to understand how the business operates. I need to understand the terminology they're using, the service lines we have, the different roles we have. I spent a lot of my time and my career shadowing, walking in people's shoes, spending time in our emergency department to understand their world.
But, you know, as we got to tougher times, like COVID, where everything was changing so rapidly because our own government struggled with what was happening and what we needed to do, and the advice and guidance was changing on a daily basis, it really came down to communication and having solid communication that went out on a regular basis to our leaders, our team members, and designing it in a way that they understood the pace of change and the why behind what we were doing.
And being face to face wherever you possibly could so that you are connected to the teams that are doing the work to make sure that that message is sinking in. And it's not necessarily easy because there's so many priorities on any given day that you can't just focus on the fires of the day, but you also have to focus on long-term plans and strategies and process improvement and outcomes, and that can be overwhelming at times.
But I spend a lot of time organizing my time, being efficient with my time, multitasking when it makes sense. You know, I go to meetings with my laptop because if I need information, I can send a quick zip message or text to someone and get a response back to save time. And following through on the items you have.
As a leader, you have to follow through on the things that you have and have a good organizational skill. My early days of Franklin Covey training of organization and prioritization really has played out today, but being able to have those skills to tap into and find new and better ways to be more efficient, and AI is one of those, quite frankly.
The technology that exists, it used to take me, you know, weeks to research some employment law stuff. Now I can do it in minutes on the computer with AI. Being able to draft summary memos and board reports and all the other technical responsibility you have that takes up time, you can now do it more efficiently with some of the AI tools that you have.
[00:11:48] Dave Travers: Yeah. And so what are the implications then for in amidst all that change you just described and the incredible level of organization and constant learning that's involved, what does that imply for the talent you need to build your team? If you're thinking about what does a people team need more of three years from now than they have today, or three months from now than you have today, what does that imply given all, all that backdrop you just gave? Oh, yeah.
[00:12:14] Darlene Stone: It is the pace of change, and it is helping to educate the whole team because you will have some members of your team that are very early adopters. They want that technology now. They want it right now. They want to put it into use. But as a healthcare system, we have risk with that. You can't just go out and use AI across the board and jeopardize patient privacy and HIPAA and other things like that, so you've got to have structure around that level of change as well.
But also being open to where it can be utilized to make the teams more efficient and to make their lives and their jobs easier for them so that they can handle the pace of change that we're going through and handle the demands we put on them. It's interesting to kind of see how those teams navigate it, but it is absolutely important work that we're doing and ways that we can do things differently.
[00:12:56] Dave Travers: Totally. And then when it comes to the healthcare professionals themselves on the front lines, healthcare is such a competitive space. How do you design a system to compete for amazing talent in that incredibly competitive environment that is healthcare?
[00:13:13] Darlene Stone: Yeah, I think it comes down to the environment. We have to focus on the environment. So, at Bayhealth, our Bayhealth 2030 strategy is focused on five key areas that we have, and it starts with people. So the people environment, our goals and strategies are, there is to have the highest level of engagement of our team members, to have the highest level of retention of our team members, and to focus on offering competitive pay and benefits along with that work environment.
And so we are really focused on leadership development, as I mentioned, and being able to train our leaders to be the strongest leaders they possibly can be, because even though if I offer all the great things, if they don't have the right leader leading the team that inspires them to do the best work possible, we could lose members from our team or lose that engagement.
So it starts with that pieces, but then also being able to be realistic. We can't just always cut expenses. We can't just always cut here and cut there. We have to be able to sometimes invest in our teams to be able to deliver for what we need to deliver for our patients and our communities. And sometimes that means creating a workforce pipeline, which we've done.
And so not just waiting for that hot applicant to apply for a job, but we are actually growing our own and creating programs and partnerships with other schools and programs and high schools to get students in here while they're still in school so that they've got that opportunity to earn some money, work, know our environment, and then when they graduate, stay in the workforce.
So creative ways like that. On-site childcare is another one. We heard loud and clear that our workforce did not have childcare that met the needs of a 12-hour shift worker because they are not open when they start work, and they close before they get off of work, and they're not open on weekends, and they're not open on holidays, and our organization said, "We're gonna solve that."
So we have two on-site childcare centers located at both of our hospital locations that are open three hundred and sixty-five days a year to accommodate the 12-hour day shift worker. And so if you are still taking care of patients late in the afternoon or evening and you are supposed to get off to go pick up your kids, it's okay.
We're taking care of your kids until you're freed up from that patient care. And just alleviating that stress for the working parent can make all the difference in the world. And giving those children a safe, high-quality learning environment so that they are fully prepared for kindergarten and parents aren't having to worry about that as well.
So it is looking at the needs of your workforce, and the needs of the workforce are very different. You've got everything from younger generations to boomers in the workforce, and everybody wants something different, but we do have to make sure we're meeting the needs of all of those generations in the workforce and helping them accomplish what they want to accomplish here at Bayhealth
[00:15:45] Dave Travers: Give advice to someone who's like, "Hey, I see a clear area to invest that's clearly gonna positively impact the business in many ways," whether it's retention or engagement or what- all those things you talked about.
How do you make a business case? How do you go in the, in the... We've all lived through the, you know, we need to cut some costs thing. How do you go and say, "Hey, this is a place where we actually need to invest, and here's why"?
[00:16:06] Darlene Stone: You put on your business hat with that. So I do have a bachelor's and a master's degree in business administration.
We also have to be owners of this business. And so I recognize I can't just walk out with, you know, my hand out for the CFO saying, "Hey, I need money." I look at ways of how I can pay for it by either redeploying programs that are not working, bidding out some of my vendors to have some savings to offset, having a good strong ROI.
If you think about a basic business plan, yes, it's gonna cost money, but here's what I'm gonna deliver on the other side. So that we can pay for these ideas and programs in a way that doesn't impact us financially and cause us to be in a hole, but can still deliver on those results, and then deliver on the promises you make.
I'm gonna make this a trial. We're gonna test it. We're gonna see how it goes. We're gonna evaluate the results, and if we need to pivot, we need to redeploy. If we need to stop it, sometimes we'll do trial programs to see if it works. But as a leader, not trying anything is not an option, so we have to figure out ways to do it.
But I do recognize in the healthcare system that often the HR team is the last one to receive capital dollars or the last one to receive budget increases or FTE increases. So we do have to think smarter and wiser of how we are spending our money. So we have found programs that were not as effective as we had hoped, and we discontinued those programs and then redeployed those dollars to other things to be able to get along the way.
I'm also, as a not-for-profit healthcare system at Bayhealth, I don't mind going out and asking people, "I need a childcare center. Can you help me fund this?" Because it is important for healthcare workers, and people that have had great experiences at our organization, sometimes will help us fund ideas that are outside the realm of what we can do as a not-for-profit healthcare system.
So those are important ways that sometimes people can come up with plans to be able to accomplish their goals for the healthcare system and then deliver on those results, and that's when you gain the confidence of your teams to be able to say, "Hey, when she brings ideas to us, she means it, and her team can accomplish it."
[00:17:55] Dave Travers: Darlene, I think there's a whole master class there on how to go in and advocate for resources. But the one just to call out that I love is the tone of the conversation with the CFO and with the finance team and the protectors of the resources is so different when they see you as a person who's cutting the things that aren't working, when they know you have a track record of not just asking, but also giving back.
That's a partner in protecting the resources rather than someone that requires the defensive shields to go up to protect the dollars. Um, so I can't emphasize enough, as a recovering CFO myself, what a difference that makes as a business partner.
[00:18:33] Darlene Stone: Well, and it's not just the CFO's responsibility for financial. It is all of us. Just like it's not my responsibility for people. And I think back many years ago to we were doing goal setting, and the finance team wanted finance goals on all of the executive scorecards, but they weren't gonna have the turnover and engagement on all of the scorecards. And I said, "It's gotta go both ways."
Because otherwise I would argue, I only have to be responsible for turnover and engagement. I'm gonna throw as much money as that as possible to solve that problem because that's my goal to accomplish. So we have to work together, and we have to recognize as executives and as leaders, the business has to survive.
And so you have to look at all areas, and you have to be well-versed in all areas to be able to do our part and own all of the pieces of the business, not just the ones you oversee.
[00:19:16] Dave Travers: Yeah. Amen to that. Okay, so once you have all these talented people who are retained and engaged, one of the things that creates in a dynamic healthcare setting is a talent pool that you can then develop and grow and get into, move into different roles or across to a different opportunity.
How do you think about that talent pool that you have today and how you cultivate them? How do you approach that?
[00:19:39] Darlene Stone: You know, one, it takes leadership to help us with this. So we actually in some of our most recent leadership and organizational development programs that we've done, we call it our LDI, our Leadership Development Institute.
We have rolled out various models for them to be able to have individual development plans on their team members to understand where they are and where they wanna go. So, understanding what the needs of your workforce is "I strive to be a nurse someday, and maybe I'm in housekeeping," and how do we help them accomplish those goals?
All the way through helping to develop these pipelines, as I mentioned, and be able to look at ways that we can do things differently inside of healthcare, but we as leaders have to be listening to our team and also understanding gaps. Oftentimes, organizations will just go out and lay off teams. I always say, "How do we redeploy them?"
So if AI is gonna be technology that's going to eliminate potential jobs inside your business, I would hope you're looking proactively at those teams that are being impacted by that, identifying a gap you still have in your workforce, and identifying ways you can train that team to redeploy them into another space in your organization.
That's a creative, outside-the-box way of thinking about how do I do things differently in my workforce and help people hit the goals that they wanna achieve. Not everybody wants to be a leader; not everybody wants to be a nurse or a doctor. But when we do look at what they do want to accomplish, how do we help them accomplish those and align those with the goals of the organization to make a difference for the health system as well?
[00:20:58] Dave Travers: I love it. Okay. We always end these episodes with the rapid-fire round. So I want you to think about, you know, you're getting in the elevator at, at headquarters, and all of a sudden the CEO walks into the elevator at the same time, and you have the head of Bayhealth has cornered you for 30 seconds, and so you, you have to come up with a quick answer, and says, "Hey, Darlene, speaking of, you know, what we just talked about, I've been thinking about, how should we measure the people team over the coming, you know, year or two?
What's the right way I should be thinking about that?" What's your answer?
[00:21:33] Darlene Stone: You know, it depends on what the goals are for that particular year. So this past year we focused very heavily on physician recruitment. In fact, our HR team just took over physician recruitment back in October, and the year prior we had recruited 25 physicians.
Just in about nine months of us having it, we recruited 42, and this year we're three months into the fiscal year, we're up to 48. Just three months in. So it's constantly kind of raising that bar for our team of we understood that there are access issues of patients can't get in to see physicians, and there's delays.
And so we needed to really focus on driving the recruitment of new physicians and clinicians to our organization so we can open up access for our health system to the patients in our communities. At the same time, my operations team at Bayhealth is working on online self-scheduling and being able to pull up, so that if a patient goes to our MyChart as a guest or to our webpage, they can go in and schedule an appointment as early as probably even tomorrow to be able to get in.
So that is the partnerships we're having with our operations team to be able to drive it. So, being able to look at what those gaps are in your health system and deliver solutions for your organization.
[00:22:37] Dave Travers: I love that answer, and what I love about it is you led with the actual numbers. Like, this wasn't a theoretical, you know, like, "How, how should we measure it?" Like, here are the measures, like 48 doctors.
[00:22:49] Darlene Stone: Yes. And oftentimes doctors want to recruit doctors, and I get that, and that is an important part of our recruitment process. But as HR and talent people, we are really good at going out and sourcing and finding and selling what Bayhealth has to offer. We can apply that to physicians, too, and I'm not a clinician, but I'm gonna know enough about what we're doing here to be able to tell it, but then I'm gonna leave you as the physician to have those physician conversations with that physician.
And that is making all the difference for our health system. So we love to be competitive here in HR at Bayhealth, and we love to say, "We haven't gotten an applicant for two years. I'm gonna prove you wrong, and I'm gonna show 'em and find you one." And I will leave that as our life's mission, and I commend our talent acquisition team and our HR team here at Bayhealth.
They have done incredible work to make that happen for our health system. So I'm quite proud of them.
[00:23:33] Dave Travers: Darlene Stone, it is so clear why you're a Talent All-Star. Thank you so much for taking the time with us today.
[00:23:39] Darlene Stone: Dave, thank you so much. I appreciate your time.
[00:23:44] Dave Travers: That's Darlene Stone. She's the Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at Bayhealth. We'll put her LinkedIn profile in the notes below. And just a reminder, we put the video versions of these conversations on YouTube as well, on the official ZipRecruiter channel. If you have feedback for us or ideas for future episodes, send us an email to talentallstars@ziprecruiter.com.
I'm Dave Travers. Thanks for listening to Talent All-Stars. See you next time.