Connecting to People as People

But was there anything that you’ve faced that even with all that preparedness training you had, maybe didn’t turn out so well or did everything work just perfectly?

Yeah, this was no bed of roses, I assure you. Well, as a corporation, it was really cool the way that as a globe, we had set three priorities. It was first, take care of employees, second, take care of the business. And third, step up and see how you can help. You know, what is it that we bring to bear that would be helpful in the moment?
So imagine our Siemens Healthineers colleagues mobilizing first with testing capability and then obviously stepping up to build new hospital facilities, etc. It was really cool to see what people did in the moment to respond. But the other thing that we put on in the US as a, call it a fourth priority, is look across the horizon and try to imagine how this disruption will affect the market.
We had already done an exercise that we called Siemens USA 2030. And so we said, “Let’s have a look at those 2030 images that we had created for ourselves. And now let’s ask how does the pandemic change what we think might happen? And how do we need to adjust our own actions so that we are better prepared to respond to the national need?”
Well, it turns out what we were hearing everywhere was that digitalization is speeding up. The electrification of everything is speeding up. And so as an organization, what are the things we control? Well, we’re bringing our know-how to address the pandemic and now also get the nation ready for the digital disruption, the renewable energy transformation that’s going on. It actually presented itself as a brilliant business opportunity as well.
And what I found—it was my CFO who said this most clearly, Marsha Smith and I were talking one day and she said, “Ah, you know, it’s just so frustrating. I want to be useful.” And so what we realized is, you know, this is it. Everyone just wants to be able to contribute in some way.
So the number one job of leaders was to connect with people as people and get them involved in projects, you know, whether it was bringing PPE to the community or whether it was working on one of these longer term initiatives to just get their brains out of panic mode and into constructive performance mode. It turned out to be a huge blessing.