Haddad Allegedly Ignored Warnings
By Liz Kowalczyk and Christopher Rowland
Boston Globe
May 28, 2006
http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/2006/05/28/ousted_chief_didnt_listen/
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Haddad (above), speaking through a spokeswoman recently, said many workers were energized by changes he initiated, but some may have felt their ideas were not represented. Photo by Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff |
When Dr. Robert Haddad was president of Caritas St. Elizabeth's Medical Center a few years ago, he would routinely kiss and hug female employees as he breezed into meetings and social gatherings, said a former manager who was present on many occasions. Finally, she decided to speak up.
"Bob, it makes me really uncomfortable to have the president of the medical center kiss women who are employees. It's inappropriate," she recalls saying.
He smiled and said people "tell me that all the time," she recalled, but the hugs and kisses continued.
"He didn't listen," said the former manager, who remembers speaking to Haddad about the behavior on two occasions.
Looking back last week, after sexual harassment complaints led to Haddad's forced resignation as chief executive of Caritas Christi Health Care System, former executives said Haddad often ignored the counsel of others, even those who worked closely with him and wanted to be helpful.
This tendency to bulldoze ahead despite the objections or discomfort of colleagues was evident not just in Haddad's dismissive response to warnings that he stop kissing and hugging women, but also complicated his efforts to turn around the Boston Catholic Church's six-hospital system, which was in turmoil when he took over in 2004 as the third president in just a few months.
Interviews with a dozen former employees painted Haddad as a leader who accomplished much during his three years as president of St. Elizabeth's and two years as chief executive of Caritas Christi, including most recently bringing the system its first substantial profit in five years. He centralized administrative functions and began to standardize the care provided by the six hospitals and to establish St. Elizabeth's as a referral center for the five outlying community hospitals.
But those interviews also revealed deep discomfort among some with Haddad's management style, which sometimes involved bruising public battles in which he yelled at managers and physicians across conference tables. He seemed more intense after he took over Caritas Christi, leaving subordinates afraid to disagree with him and prompting others to leave the organization.
In written comments made through a spokeswoman Friday, Haddad said that many other employees were excited and energized by the changes and that "it is no surprise that among 12,000 employees, some expressed their displeasure with the new era and may have felt their ideas were not represented."
While Caritas is clearly in better financial shape than when Haddad found it, it is also a place again stunned by a chaotic turn of events. The accusations of sexual harassment have angered many employees and left them profoundly embarrassed for an organization they care about deeply.
"We're just trying to start healing," said one current manager who did not want to comment further because, she said, she wanted to move past this chapter in the system's history. Most current and former employees interviewed by the Globe did not wish to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue.
In the accusations that led to his departure, four women said that Haddad hugged them and kissed them on the cheek and mouth and, in some cases, called them at home and asked questions about their personal lives. More women have since come forward with similar complaints.
Helen G. Drinan, the Caritas senior vice president who oversaw the initial internal investigation of the complaints, said last week that Haddad received warnings from two hospital officials about similar inappropriate behavior when he was president of St. Elizabeth's, the largest hospital in the Caritas system, and unofficial cautions from two additional Caritas employees when he headed the Brighton hospital.
Haddad himself said publicly at a staff meeting during that time that he had been cautioned about his behavior by the hospital's human resources director, recalled the former manager who said she had spoken to him twice.
She said that a small group of female executives sometimes talked about his behavior among themselves, but no one felt comfortable lodging a formal complaint with the archdiocese, believing they could lose their job or be branded a troublemaker because Haddad was in a position of power.
Women whom Haddad hugged or kissed had varying reactions, she said: Some did not seem particularly bothered, others made jokes, while still others were deeply troubled by it. Sometimes if he did not kiss a woman when entering a room, she would wonder to others whether he was mad at her about some issue.
Haddad's spokeswoman, Nancy Sterling, said yesterday that he would not comment on specific allegations of sexual harassment or any discussions he had with Caritas employees. "Dr. Haddad has already publicly expressed his sincere regret for any actions that may have been perceived by anyone as inappropriate and for any discomfort anyone may have felt," she said.
Yesterday, she also produced letters of support for Haddad from 11 Caritas employees, including nine women.
Fallout from the accusations probably will linger, however. Caritas plans to hire an outside human resource organization to help conduct group meetings, so employees can openly discuss their feelings and concerns. If any further complaints are received, officials said, they will be vigorously investigated.
Furthermore, the Board of Registration in Medicine, which licenses doctors, almost certainly will get involved. Executive director Nancy Achin Audesse said she cannot comment on ongoing investigations.
But, she said, "we are, of course, aware of the issues involving Dr. Haddad and the complaints against him. It has been the practice of the board to open an investigation when we become aware of such matters."
Haddad, who came to lead St. Elizabeth's in 2001 from a job as senior vice president of clinical practice and business strategy at Geisinger Health System in Danville, Pa., was in the right place at the right time when the Archdiocese of Boston promoted him to head Caritas Christi, the second-largest healthcare system in Massachusetts. In April 2004, Dr. Michael Collins, the system's longtime president, was ousted by Cardinal Sean P. O'Malley, then the archbishop, for reasons he never fully explained. O'Malley immediately replaced Collins with interim president Emmett C. Murphy, a healthcare consultant whom O'Malley had hired to evaluate the system and who was advocating changes.
But Murphy stepped down soon afterward, after Globe reporters asked him to explain several discrepancies in his official biography.
The archdiocese was coping with a crisis, and it needed to act fast to stabilize the system. Officials did not feel they had time to conduct a national search, said one former Caritas executive, and selected Haddad within hours of Murphy's departure.
Officials at the archdiocese said they did not know about Haddad's hugging and kissing of women at St. Elizabeth's and the discussions about it among hospital employees. The officials said last week that the sexual harassment complaints filed earlier this year are the first that any allegations regarding improper conduct by Haddad had been received by either O'Malley or the Caritas board of governors.
As Caritas chief , Haddad immediately set about trying to improve the system's weak financial picture. He fired at least 148 employees as part of an effort to remove redundant administrative work from the hospitals and centralize authority in the system's headquarters in Brighton. He moved to make physicians more accountable by tying their pay to the number of patient visits they log and to make the six Caritas hospitals work in harmony. The efforts began to pay off in 2005, when the hospital system produced a $22.6 million operating profit.
In his statement, Haddad said his greatest accomplishments "were establishing Caritas Christi as a regional integrated delivery system, building an outstanding executive leadership team who understood the critical nature of performance and outcome, and eliminating years of substantial deficits."
"If you're looking for a legacy, there was increased accountability," said Pamela S. Federbusch, an analyst at Moody's Investors Service who rates debt at Boston's nonprofit healthcare institutions. "Financially, they were very focused under his leadership. People are always going to be unhappy if things are cut. If you want the organization to be viable, you have to make difficult decisions."
At the same time, Haddad seemed to lack the political skills to build consensus in difficult situations, and employees said they often felt afraid to disagree with him. "It was kind of like he had won a battle when he became head of Caritas; that played out in the post-Collins regime," said the former manager who had spoken to him about his behavior with women. "He took an imperial approach to management."
Doctors, for example, chafed under a demand that Caritas administrators reserve the right to decide when doctors take vacations and viewed skeptically provisions in their contracts that gave the administration the ability to deny bonuses to doctors.
"Clinicians felt they were being sold out for the ambitions or the advancement of the personal agendas at the top," said Dr. Robert McIntyre, a primary care physician and former trustee at St. Elizabeth's who left the Caritas system to form a solo practice in Waltham. "A lot of physicians felt abandoned and out on a limb."
As deadlines for signing contracts came and went, the administration threatened to fire doctors who banded together in individual departments and collectively threatened to leave en masse, leading to an uncomfortable standoff. Some doctors have left to open their own practices or to work at other institutions.
As a result, the number of patients seeking care in the system has declined, causing charitable donations to suffer as wealthy patients moved on to new hospitals or grew uncertain about Caritas's future.
Patient volume at St. Elizabeth's declined by 6.4 percent in the first quarter of 2006, compared with the first quarter of 2005. Luring back patients will be a major challenge for the interim president, Dr. John B. Chessare, and for Haddad's permanent replacement. Chessare would not comment on his plans.
"The Catholic hospitals are very fragile right now, competing with the teaching hospitals and others," said Jack Connors Jr., a former advertising executive who is overseeing the overhaul of archdiocesan schools and is chairman of Caritas competitor Partners HealthCare. "And they really need to be sure that they provide the very best leadership they can find and allow that leadership to have the proper resources to compete, without any hands tied behind his or her back."
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