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Recently, a colleague asked Adam Mayer if he was nervous about turning forty. The current associate system chief financial officer at the Medical University of South Carolina Health System (MUSC Health) and chief financial officer for its community physician practice was indeed approaching a milestone birthday, but he was only turning thirty.
Mayer is used to people assuming he’s older than he is. He served as one of the youngest business directors at MUSC Health at twenty-four and the youngest service line/practice administrator hired at twenty-seven at Colorado West Healthcare System. It’s uncommon to see a high-level leader of a $6 billion health system to be appointed in his twenties.
As for how Mayer rose so quickly in his career, he says he owes a lot of his early success to Dr. Thomas Crawford (current MUSC Health system COO) and Lisa Goodlett (current Duke University Health system CFO), “who both took serious chances on me.” He adds internal and external networking opportunities, such as those he developed through his organization’s membership in The Health Management Academy, have also aided in his rapid career growth.
Mayer believes “effective leaders lead with confidence. Confidence is built with knowledge. Knowledge is typically gained through experience. And experience typically is grown through time.” He adds, “And in my case, not having the luxury of time at a young age, I was advised very early on how to utilize data and effectively communicate with leaders and teams from different backgrounds. That helped me quickly grow my fund of knowledge to build confidence in becoming an effective leader.”
Mayer says that knowing the data facts and translating to actionable tasks has allowed him to lead effective change within his roles with confidence. He also invested time in learning how to communicate those visions and strategies to other leaders across his organization. Mayer realizes he may not have decades of experience, but has built a fund of knowledge, has empathy, and has developed teams with the intellectual capacity to grow at an extraordinary rate.
The dual ACFO-CFO says that his passions lie as a “strategic and operational CFO.” A traditional CFO of years past focused heavily on the transactional accounting, tax/treasury, payor contracts, and audit functions within finance. And while that still may be the background of many CFOs, Mayer believes the role is shifting toward strategy and operational performance.
“How do you identify opportunity, drive change, improve margins, and enhance your overall impact and growth for an organization? That’s what being a strategic CFO is about,” Mayer explains. “How do you capitalize on strategic partnerships and build financially beneficial affiliations? How do you successfully grow your margin portfolio and book of business in a fiscally responsible and sustainable way?”
Those strategic partnerships and revenue diversification strategies are key to survival, Mayer says. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and margins tanked, organizations that didn’t have diverse revenue streams and strong expense management were hit hardest. Sadly, some businesses and healthcare institutions closed down completely. Mayer says if your health system is 100 percent supported by single-thread programs to drive margins, you’re begging for trouble when the unexpected hits.
A Good Teacher Goes a Long Way
Adam Mayer is grateful for the leaders who took chances on allowing him to make a difference in his various career positions held. But there’s another person who needs mentioning: Mayer’s fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Stacy Ottman from Riverdale School District, who helped him apply for college and scholarships and inspired him to pursue secondary education.
The teacher not only helped Mayer work through the process but also went above the call of duty to accompany him to college orientation more than a thousand miles away from their hometown in Wisconsin. Mayer created a scholarship at his high school for students like himself and an award for teachers who guide students through the process.
Over the last six years, MUSC has grown exponentially. Mayer says he fully intends to nurture that growth while also ensuring continuity of high-level quality care. The leader wants to build new foundations to ensure that future growth is both sustainable and impactful to the communities they serve.
“MUSC Health and our board of trustees recently communicated aspirational goals to become a top twenty academic health system in the nation,” Mayer says, “making the state of South Carolina top twenty in the nation for health outcomes within the next twenty years. That’s a tall task for us, but it sure has me excited for the future of our organization.”
Mayer says one of his favorite parts of his job is finding new ways to be more efficient in his organization’s care delivery. In the broader healthcare industry, that means focusing more on quality-based delivery programs and finding innovative ways “to do more with less.”
On the workforce development side, Mayer says his organization developed ways to employ top-talent workers administratively in forty-nine of fifty states. It’s an incredible shift, considering that before MUSC Health’s rapid expansion across the state, there were maybe a few dozen employees who worked outside Charleston, South Carolina.
“We have to be innovative in our approaches with a turbulent workforce environment. Over the last four years, I have worked hard to develop self-sufficient, highly effective teams by partnering with our internal and external HR colleagues to attract top talent to our organization. After all, our human capital is our biggest asset,” he says.
Mayer is still learning. He says that it wasn’t until recently that he realized he didn’t have to know every answer under the sun to be an effective leader. It’s a lesson most of us have to learn, but not as executives before the age of thirty.
“I try to connect diverse learnings and build teams that help support and sustain my strengths—but also complement and address my weaknesses,” Mayer says. “I’ve had the opportunity to build out a top-tier team since coming back to MUSC Health as a team of one. I’ve managed to surround myself with like-minded people who also have diverse backgrounds to help find the best solutions to address opportunities for improvement.”
At thirty, Mayer is just getting started and encourages all executives to embrace servant leadership as we develop the next generation of healthcare leaders. “Because you just never know the impact you could have on someone’s life,” Mayer says with a smile.
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