Getting to Know
Douglas Cowieson,
Chief Operating Officer at IMC Health
As far as you can, as much as you can … The extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food, it’s a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.”
After talking to Douglas Cowieson, Chief Operating Officer at IMC Health, about his life and leadership style, one can honestly say he is the Anthony Bourdain of our organization. Douglas is effortlessly engaging. His experience, appreciation for the unknown and passion for change, make him one of those leaders who speaks from the heart. Douglas believes in assuming the responsibility of the outcome by agreeing on a general direction or goal and letting his team take risks in making their own decisions about how to get there. His focus is on “Finding his 20 dancers” (the people who will move the organization and bring others with them) at IMC Health, and he feels we are getting closer “It is important to have the group of people that you feel will move the company forward. To do that, they need to be more than just capable themselves, they need to be inspiring behavior and challenges in others around them.”
Douglas believes change and progress start with every single associate at IMC Health, “I am sitting here in an office making decisions, but in reality it is the receptionist at the center, it is the medical assistant, it is the activities coordinator, all of those people that interact with the patients day in and day out who will make a bigger impact than I can, the only thing I can do is to free them up to be as impactful with as many people as possible.”
Douglas was born in Edinburgh, Scotland “more years ago than I would like to remember” as he described it. He originally started his career in sports as a professional coach. He coached basketball, swimming, and rugby amongst other sports. After his wife taught him to ski, he immediately fell in love with the sport and decided to start his own ski business. With this new goal in mind and due to the lack of capital, he took a job at a hospital in Saudi Arabia coaching sports in order to use his hard-earned, tax-free money to invest it in his new venture. He started the ski business right around the time climate started to change enough to affect snowfall in his native Scotland.
While working at the hospital in Saudi Arabia, Douglas realized he really enjoyed his role and his place in the business and was eventually asked by Upper Management to get more involved in different projects. Right after getting his MBA, Douglas began working for European health insurer AXA, where he oversaw contract negotiation and operations. He then moved to Hong Kong to work for Cigna where he managed the Asia Pacific region which included countries such as New Zealand, Japan and India. His knowledge of contract negotiation, center and health plan operations is vast thanks to his exposure to managing international markets. One would think this was his biggest accomplishment, but in his eyes, Douglas’s biggest success in Healthcare was running the European service center for Cigna, where he and his team won the Best Service Company Award in Britain beating companies like Disney and Avis. Douglas is happily married to his wife Val of 36 years, with whom they have 2 boys Alastair and Ross. After his non-stop international traveling phase, the whole family moved to the States 22 years ago, when the boys were 4 and 11 years old. By then, his oldest son had lived in 5 different countries and 11 different houses and “was not a big fan of what I was doing”. Douglas added “it is all about perspective”, when they were moving from country to country, they hated the change. However, now that they are older, they think of those years as some of the best of their lives.
With this experience, it is his personal perspective on things and his adventurous spirit which have taught him to bring people who have a different approach than his into his team. His understanding of diversity does not relate to race, sexual preference or color, but diversity of thought. Douglas has learned it is imperative to have people who think differently as part of his teams and put them in the same room, he added “they disagree about stuff, but the ideas that come out become best practices with every conversation” and this is how an organization like IMC Health achieves and will continue to achieve great change and great things.
Icebreaker Questions
