Using Thought Leadership to Influence Human Service Policy | Nicole Truhe

Peter Winick

Thought Leadership and Looking Forward in Healthcare Trends

An interview with Nicole Truhe about using thought leadership at United Health to better health care practices.

Today’s guest is Nicole Truhe, Director of Thought Leadership at United Health Care Community and State. Nicole sits down with Peter to discuss how she uses her position to educate the space about emerging health and human services policy. We discuss the different effects of internal vs. external thought leadership. Why her position isn’t part of the marketing team and why the number of followers isn’t as important as who your followers are.

Three Key Takeaways from the Interview:

How you can use thought leadership to influence policy in your space.
Why building a network of thought leadership is important for your own message.
What stats are truly important to the growth of your thought leadership on social media.

If you enjoyed this podcast on organizational thought leadership and are interested in connecting with others in the industry, check out OrgTL.com and join the LinkedIn group and the discussion. If you need help with any aspect of your thought leadership, contact Thought Leadership Leverage.

Transcript

Peter Winick Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. This is one of our episodes where we’re talking to organizational thought leaders. So a little bit different than what we normally do. But these are folks inside of large companies that are tasked with developing, deploying or curating thought leadership for their companies. Today, my guest is Nicole Truhe. She’s the director of thought leadership at United Health Care Community and State. They serve over 6.45 million Medicaid members in 30 states plus D.C.. Nicole leads the development and management of thought leadership strategies for the organization, specifically focusing on emerging Health and Human services policy and practice trends and business growth. Prior to joining UnitedHealthcare, Nicole served as government affairs director for America Forward, where she led policy strategy and advocacy efforts relative related to pay for success, evidence based policy, workforce development, career and technical education, higher education and social innovation. She has a B.A. from Rhodes College in Memphis and a master’s in public administration. So I’m excited to talk to you today. Nicole, how are you?

Nicole Truhe I’m doing great, Peter. How about yourself?

Peter Winick Good. You know, all things considered. So let’s start with. Definition. So everybody throws around the Tom the term thought leadership. How do you define it? And you know and I’m assuming it’s aligned with how united health care divides, but how would you define what leadership is?

Nicole Truhe Sure appreciate that. And I have to be honest, I think it’s a term that does get used and overused in some instances and certainly has a variety of meanings based on how one’s utilizing it. So we UnitedHealthcare, community and state think about thought leadership in a couple of ways. One of it and the way we define it and operationalize it in a couple of ways. One is about being able to look around the corner about what’s coming for the space and in our case, what’s coming in terms of health care trends. And that’s a it’s a very internal thought leadership mechanism, but it’s about sort of, again, that looking forward, looking long term, looking around the corner. The second piece of it in the way we define it is more of the external and probably the more traditional way people can conceive of thought. Leadership is how are we deploying? Our experts are subject matter experts to both educate the space about policy issues relevant to particularly the Medicaid and Medicare spaces, and how are we helping to then identify the way in which we are as an organization being responsive to or responding to those policy issues and trends? And that’s usually through our clinical application activities, our partnerships, our collaborations, etc.. But they very much work hand in hand because the things that we are thinking about as being around the corner, sort of the next wave, next phase of the trends in health care are where we tend to deploy our thought leadership leaders. We do obviously look at the bread and butter components and have folks who are experts at sort of the at the primary parts of health care. But it’s also about how are we how are we showcasing ourselves as being those individuals who are thinking forward and looking ahead and being part of leaning into where health care, particularly in Medicaid, Medicare.

Peter Winick So it sounds like there’s a in fact, you’ve already sort of summarized that there’s an influence element and then there’s an educational element. Is that a fair assessment? Yeah, absolutely. So two very different constituents at least. Right. So, you know, on the one hand, who are you trying to influence from a policy perspective to show your stake in the ground, etc.? So there’s probably more governmental agencies, funding sources, etc.. Right. And then the educational piece could be lots of different constituents in your system from medical providers to end users, etc.. Right. So given there’s a different need, I mean, those are very, very different groups. How do you wrestle with sort of the various mediums and distribution and, you know, to get something to a, you know, a new mother is different than getting to send a message to a hospital administrator. The ideas thread that needle.

Nicole Truhe Good question. And actually, just to kind of, I think a caveat to how you just sort of framed it as the influencing. I think it’s not just external. It’s also internal, because a lot of times from an internal perspective, we can get myopically not to use that word negatively focused on the sort of day to day and what we know to be sort of traditional activities, What my role and what my team is focused on is, okay, we need to be able to stretch and think beyond sort of what we feel comfortable and sort of know is sort of traditional. And then on the external side, you’re right that it’s sort of those more kind of traditional health care professionals, providers, practitioners. But a lot of the trends in health care are around the integration of health care and housing and social services. So it’s also a bright, a wider, wider birth of individuals that we’re looking to educate as well as the educated by. In terms of the medium, that’s actually what I spend a lot of time, particularly with our communications and marketing team’s thinking about. And that’s a, I think, unique element to the role I play at United Health Care Community and State as I sit on the policy and strategy team, not on the comms and marketing side of the organization. And so I spend a lot of time with them thinking about how do we package and what platforms do we utilize. So internally, it’s one it’s one thing. How do you distill the information down for folks like our CEOs and our VP who are being inundated with lots of content? How do you distilling this information down to an absorbable amount and in a way that gets across the implications, risks, opportunities, challenges, why they should be focusing on this in addition to everything else. And that’s both how you formats and how you disseminate. On the external side, there’s obviously much more, I guess, flexibility in creating. Sure. So it’s like how do you use social media channels? How do you use multimedia channels? How do you use various platforms, both owned and earned platforms? And also how do you utilize others to be a part of the messaging and or disseminate the messaging for. You so that it you almost have like an honest broker validator element. Right. It helps to, I think, put a little bit of a moniker of, okay, this isn’t just us sort of talking in our own.

Peter Winick Name, telling our stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Nicole Truhe Exactly. So who are those partners that we bring in close enough or that want to be in close enough to help either a good partner and or carry the message in a variety of format for us.

Peter Winick Got it. So sort of reactions to what you said. A lot of great stuff in there. What is this myopic piece? So myopic tends to have a negative element to it. But you know, when we actually think about it, most organizations part of the problem is maybe silos are nicer word or something. But particularly when you have domain experts, you know, they’re deep in what they do and they mean well and they’re tasked with doing their thing and they don’t really know about the other thing. Right? So engineers don’t talk to, you know, customer service people and salespeople don’t talk to marketing people. And it’s not because of any ill will. But there is a tendency organizationally to reward people for what they do and keep people surrounded by people like them. So the myopic piece comes in. So it’s interesting. That is the second part of my thought here, that you sit in policy and strategy, right? So most people and the thought leadership on the organizational side are typically in product marketing. There’s a little bit of policy, but I would say the bulk, probably 70, 80% is sort of in that product marketing piece, and therefore you’re subject to analysis by typical marketing standards. The fact that your policy and strategy, I would assume, gives you a broader view across the system. Is that I mean, is that by design? Because that seems like a really interesting place to put you where your function. Yeah.

Nicole Truhe Sure. And I mean, for I guess to be candid or to just put it into perspective, this is a one role within side of a very large organization. There aren’t others of me and other parts of organization, and it is a brainchild of my boss. And I think what’s critical about where it sits and I think may be unique to our sector, though maybe not, is health care is incredibly influenced, if not wholly influenced by policy shifts at state and federal level. And so a lot of our ability to be flexible and creative is in fact informed by and sometimes hindered by where the policy levers are or not in order. So in one way you look at it, that’s really the thought leadership would only come potentially in a health care environment from the ability to influence and utilize policy in unique and different ways and to be able to have somebody who sits and has a background, as I do in policy. And to be able to make that translation is sort of critical to this, not just being a typical marketing type of a role, but then to your point and if again, not unique to health care, but. Health care in particular, and the access to health care and being provided for health care. Yes, we know that it’s so interconnected that, you know, your access dictates your the care you provide and the care that you provide is dictated by the provider network available. And so there’s interconnectivity to it that, again, sitting where I do, like you said, I think is helpful in order to be able to because, again, it’s not just about policy teams, the strategy team. And so we are embedded in all of our states. We are working across all of our business units in order to help support the strategy associated with our continued growth and development, which again, takes multiple, multiple sectors and multiple layers.

Peter Winick And I would imagine that there are times or situations where the thought leadership is reactive to a change in policy. And there’s another time where it’s proactive trying to influence that outcome, just depending on the cadence of things.

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Peter Winick I wanted to ask about, you know, even if it’s not embedded in a marketing function, right. Your thought leadership function at some level. Like every organization they have to look at and say, how might we measure success? Right? How do we know what good is? Right, whether it’s KPIs or whatever. So what are the things that I don’t see that you’re judged against? But how do we know it’s working? How do you have confidence that it’s working? And you know, it’s because it’s such a new field. You know, sometimes you have to make the case internally. It sounds like you’ve got some really evolved leadership that actually created this role and a little bit of a, say, a moat for you to be protected from marketing. But ultimately you still have to be able to say, okay, at the end of this year, here’s some stuff I did and it worked and it didn’t. How would you how does that work?

Nicole Truhe And it’s a great question. And to be honest, a lot of our papers are more what you would say of traditional marketing or communications KPIs, because other KPIs, for lack of a better word or phrase, is are a little bit more tangible. And they’re you can’t easily wrap your arms around it. So being able to say that we influence a policy which is obviously an ultimate goal. Sure. You could make the argument that lots of people were doing that or, you know, what part of your thought leadership was actually part of actually making.

Peter Winick So it’s a contributing factor. It’s not a it’s not a it’s not binary. You might say. Yes, we had some role in the contributing factor of that policy change, but it’s hard to say. Was that 5% or 32%. Right. It’s squishy.

Nicole Truhe It’s not it’s not as clean as the other KPIs, which, to your point, are much more, as I noted, much more marketing communications related. How many clicks, how many regions.

Peter Winick Yeah.

Nicole Truhe How many more followers. But even with the followers point, it’s not just ten more. 20 more. Who are those people? Are they influencers? Are they advocates themselves, the policy leaders? So that layer would not be a component that say if this were just a traditional sort of marketing lens or communication plan, we would be wrap wrapped around it. But it’s important for those KPIs, though they’re not necessarily, again, sort of at the policy strategy level, they are critically important because they help to make the case that this is working, this meeting, utilizing this platform or utilizing these resources or utilizing these mechanisms are working and are getting up driving people up. And so by having those KPIs and being able to show that those data points, we continue to get the short support from leadership and the resources and essentially the go ahead, the approval to continue, say, blogging or live tweeting or putting together these graphics or making videos, which all which all take company resources company time that could potentially be diverted elsewhere if in fact it wasn’t getting the clicks the like the hits from individuals. And then I guess from an extension of that, Peter, to which we haven’t talked about, is when then are we getting invites to say, write articles in journals or speak at events like those then are sort of the cascading markers that we look for. How are we then getting asked to participate in other people’s venues again, whether it’s journal writing or blogging or so.

Peter Winick So let’s so let’s touch on that for a minute. So there’s a piece where it’s sort of inside of the universe that you have control over, right? That would be logical. But what you’re saying is an interesting point. How often does another entity, another organization, another whatever, come to you and say, wow, the thing that you wrote about that thing, would you mind writing for our people? Because we have a constituency that that whatever its disease prevention or whatever it might be, that’s a that’s a wonderful validation that it’s thought leadership and it’s not marketing, right? Because another group is not going to come to you and say, can you take over our space of our website or newspaper or whatever and use that for marketing purposes? Right? So there has to be respect. You said something earlier that I want you to open up a little bit. Is that you even though you know you’re director of thought leadership, it doesn’t mean that all the ideas have to be yours. There’s a big curation piece, so you have lots and lots and lots of incredibly brilliant people inside of the organization. So I would imagine one of your challenges is identifying who they are, what they have to say, developing the relationships, and then a little bit of convincing them like, hey, on top of the 72 other things you need to do, would you please? So how do you sort of extract thought leadership from inside the organization? And some of you curated a bit.

Nicole Truhe Yeah, No, it’s a really good question. I mean, I like to think of this a lot of my role is relationship building and acting, and I tend to. Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Tipping Point, he notes people are connected to one of the categories Connectors. And I think that’s critical to my role is to be able to build relationships and to connect the pieces for people as to why, on top of all the other things that you’re doing, what are the dots that lead us to this being helpful for to you in your job or helpful to and most importantly, our members and sort of providing them with the best type of health care that they can provide. So I spend a lot of my time just doing it, particularly when I first got here a couple of years ago. 30 minute conversations. What do you do? How do you do it? What is this role? Explaining what I did, explaining the relevancy, making those connections for people. And so, I mean, it’s a simple response, but, you know, kind of critical is just is and also, I think showing the efficacy of the work. So sort of building some products and seeing the impact that it’s had that the blog has resonated in this environment that it’s got to. The activity.

Peter Winick So that was my next question is. So now you’re developing rapport and relationships with folks that have these domain expertise that you’re sort of quarterbacking the utilization. And this would be great here. What I mean, sounds hard, but what do they get? Is it the intrinsic like, wow, I felt good writing this piece and then I gave it to Nicole and she got it out there because I have the, if you like. How did they benefit from it? You know, the individual contributor.

Nicole Truhe Sure. It depends on who it is, right? Sure. I mean, our chief medical officer has 20 plus years in the medical field, worked at Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He’s written and an author authored pieces. He doesn’t you know, this is not him looking to, you know, necessarily need my support in order to do that. So for him, it’s more about supporting ultimately getting his perspective out there to help the broader health care system. So for him, it’s a much larger. How is he helping to influence and provide and push the health care system for other people who are making sure coming up within the organization? It certainly is a way for them to sort of build their own sort of thought leadership, subject matter, expertise. And then there’s everybody in between, Right? So I think I think a variety of people have for a variety of benefit, whether it’s personal for them, professional for the organization or a combination of both, as well as I know that from a lot of the activities we’ve engaged in, you know, it’s sort of like a waterfall effect, right? You go, you do, you write one blog, it gets you one role at that conference. You meet 3 or 4 people and that they invite.

Peter Winick Right.

Nicole Truhe Right. May invite. But also, more importantly, they might be relevant for some other project unrelated to what you are there talking about. That then helps another part of the business advance something so that there’s a lot of synergy associated with the work and ultimately health being willing. I mean, I think that’s important that, you know, health care, community and state was willing to put resources into thought leadership because it’s not just about sort of pushing out our perspective at our content. It’s what do you then get for the organization by being willing to be out there in that way and in those spaces and having those conversations? How do you then meet the people or learn about new ideas that are brought back in that ultimately help us and help our members be better, be more efficient?

Peter Winick So as we were running out of time here so let me let me just wrap with if you were to advise someone new to a role that is similar to yours or could be similar to yours and sort of agnostic to the industry, Right? It could be anything. What would you say are the things they should be thinking about, looking out for, etc. maybe there to in order to set the right foundation to build on over their first six months or so?

Nicole Truhe Sure a few things. One is, don’t be afraid to ask lots of questions. I think it’s important, too, particularly in a role like this, because again, the way my role is envisioned, it is meant to look across and look above and sort of stay on top and be that big picture perspective. So you’ve got to be able to be willing and not be afraid to ask the questions so that you can start to make those connections in your mind and then help make the connections for other people. I think, too, as I said earlier, is whether it comes naturally or not to you be willing to put those 30 minute coffees or conversations like a coffee is not necessarily virtual coffees in this environment, but do those relationships and take the time to actually sit down and learn from the others in your organization who will ultimately serve as your subject matter experts or your go to say it doesn’t fit in to marketing that own the platforms by which you put this this content on. And I think three whether or not it’s actually given to you in this way or not and it was given to me in this way is consider the work as a tabula rasa, like a blank slate. No one had done this before. How would you structure what would be your short, medium, long-term goals and say them for yourself, but also say to others so that you can start to build allies in helping you and ultimately the organization to reach those? I what seemed like pie in the sky activity. Well, I think.

Peter Winick That’s a critical point because unlike any other function, you know, if you come in and you’re the new CFO, you’re not going to go in and say, how do we account for receivable? Like you would have improved systems and processes and you might have a different culture, but you’re definitely not starting with a blank slate, right, of your supply chain or but it is a function that that does allow you to start with a blank slate because very few organizations have it fossilized yet, right? It’s such a new and organic and dynamic and growing field. So I appreciate your time and sharing your journey. It’s a fascinating one and I wish you continued success. Thank you so much.

Nicole Truhe Thanks, Peter. Have a good one.

Peter Winick If you enjoyed this episode and I do hope that you did, please join our new LinkedIn group, which is exclusively focused on the organizational thought leader, the person in the corporate world that is using thought leadership as part of their job, whether that’s developing thought leadership, whether that’s deploying thought leadership, whether that’s helping others do so. Please take a look and check out our LinkedIn group. We think you’ll get a lot of benefit from that. Thank you.