Wharton@Work

October 2024 | 

Vet to Visionary: A Leader’s Journey in the GMP

Vet to Visionary: A Leader’s Journey in the General Management Program

Brady Beale was chief medical communications officer and serving on the dean's pandemic strategic response team at Penn Vet’s Ryan Hospital at the University of Pennsylvania when she was tapped to become hospital director in 2021. Her new role put the veterinary ophthalmologist in charge of a multimillion-dollar budget and hundreds of employees who handle more than 33,200 patient visits a year.

“I had owned and operated veterinary consulting practices, but that does not compare to running a hospital of Ryan Hospital’s size,” says Beale. In addition to the change in scale and complexity, she was also dealing with the effects of the pandemic, including a medical staffing shortage and supply chain challenges.

“When I accepted the position, I wanted to augment my medical and communication background with education on finance, leadership, big data, and strategy. Wharton Executive Education’s General Management Program [GMP] allowed me to curate a learning journey targeted to my specific needs — and it was literally right across the street,” she explains. “For someone at my career stage, finding the time to obtain an MBA can prove challenging. The GMP allows you to select business courses that perfectly align with the needs of your career, your organization, and your team.”

The GMP includes a series of six individually chosen programs taken over two years, plus a 360-degree evaluation and executive coaching. Beale calls the coaching “one of the most important aspects of the program. With my coach I was not only able to recognize my leadership strengths, but also identify areas for growth, and then tactically work on those things within the context of a team. It was absolutely invaluable.”

Creating a Curated Learning Journey

Beale started with one marketing program, which gave her a “first taste of how valuable the GMP could be for my career. I loved the fact that you could do a deep immersion into a topic and then see results when you apply the new material to real-life work situations. Strategic Marketing for Competitive Advantage was my proof of concept that the GMP was going to be worthwhile.”

From there, she worked with the Executive Education team to select five more individual programs catered to her move from functional operator to a leader who could strategically guide her organization to innovate and adapt to meet complex challenges. “What I loved about the GMP,” she explains, “was that I didn't have to set the entire journey from the very beginning. Instead, I was able to select additional programs to fit the needs of the organization at the time.”

Practical Wisdom and Key Insights

Finance and Accounting for the Non-Financial Manager and Wharton Finance for Executives “played a significant role in empowering me to thoughtfully help the hospital increase revenue to meet the demands of growing expenses over the last three years.” Beale says the programs give you the language required to “sit at the table with your financial team and have a productive conversation that helps to inform your decisions.”

Beale and her team have also put a renewed focus on the concept of customer lifetime value. “It’s complex because we have three missions as a hospital affiliated with a world-renowned university: clinical service, teaching, and research. That means our ‘customers’ include patients, pet owners, referring vets, employees, and students. Our team is now more deliberate and innovative about how we work to strengthen those relationships — and our efforts are paying off,” Beale says.

Lessons from multiple programs helped Beale and her team rebuild hospital staff after experiencing a severe shortage during the pandemic. “The Great Resignation was particularly acute across the country in veterinary medicine,” she says. “Many people responded to the isolation of the pandemic by adopting pets, which increased the demands on the veterinary workforce. As essential workers, our veterinarians, our veterinary nurses, and all of our support staff had to come into work when many others were able to stay home, so we faced the high levels of burnout that were felt across the medical field and many other industries.”

“We hired an internal Ryan Hospital nursing recruiter who then worked with Penn HR in a wonderfully symbiotic way. And we formed a coalition of multi-specialty hospitals in the Philadelphia area, where we shared best practices and supported each other. The lessons I learned in change management and crisis leadership were essential to leading the field in recovery like we did,” says Beale.

But one of her greatest takeaways from the GMP came during a session in the Effective Decision Making: Thinking Critically and Rationally program. “Professor Cade Massey teaches about biases and how to address catastrophic thinking by anchoring it in data. It is a natural human tendency to feel that a negative incident ‘happens all the time,’ for example, when in fact when we analyze the data, it occurs infrequently,” Beale says. “Recognizing that bias and going directly to data was a huge area of growth for me as a leader, and it has made a tremendous difference in how our team makes decisions and manages processes.” With Massey’s blessing, she has presented the concepts from his session not only at Ryan but also at a meeting of national veterinary leaders.

“There's no doubt that the GMP played a critical role in my ability to lead a distressed hospital in a time of worldwide turmoil,” says Beale. “It shaped my thinking about strategy and innovation, empowered me with many tools to grow our business financially, and it helped me to bring in innovative ideas that I may not have thought of on my own.” She also credits the GMP with a role in her recent promotion: Beale now serves as associate dean of clinical enterprise at Ryan Hospital. “The position helps me continue to serve our missions at Penn Vet while also contributing to wider conversations across the University.”