By Britt Benston and Carolyn Gray Anderson
“To be a good leader, it should extend beyond your lifetime,” says Tiffany Cantrell (FEMBA ’16), one of four recipients of the 2015 John Wooden Global Leadership Fellowship. “You can rally people for one game, but are you helping them reach their full potential for the rest of their lives? You can be a leader today, and you can get hit by a bus tomorrow.”
Cantrell is director of program development at Dignity Health St. Mary Medical Center in Long Beach, where she designs clinical and community health programs to augment services in seven existing clinics, and seeks opportunities for the medical center to partner with internal and external constituents like local government and nonprofits. She admires Coach John Wooden because he “wanted to grow his people,” and he enabled others to “see their success in terms of how you carry yourself, how you live your life.” She adds, “There’s so much I learn from my own staff: how to speak to grant makers, how to speak to leaders, how to speak to different audiences to find out what’s happening on the ground.”
She started life in Corpus Christi, Texas, and grew up in Monterey and Santa Cruz, California. When she graduates in 2016, she’ll be a double Bruin, having earned her UCLA bachelor’s degree in international development studies. Committed to working for populations most in need of health care access, Cantrell looks at community health and hospital internal data and engages interdisciplinary teams to design preventive care programs that help people on the outside, rather than only once they come inside. She has written grants to fund a trauma recovery center for victims of violent crimes, and to establish WHO Baby Friendly Hospital status for St. Mary.
At Anderson, Cantrell departed from the familiarity of a nonprofit environment and began learning how to address “business-minded” professionals whose interest could be crucial to furthering her community health programs. “UCLA Anderson has taught me how to share success in what I’ll call many different ‘languages,’” she says. “I had been surrounded in my work with many like-minded persons all doing nonprofit work. It seemed obvious that we were all working toward the same thing, helping as many people as possible, having lasting impact — and not making a lot of money for our organizations along the way. Anderson shifted that paradigm for me. I feel I have the ability to speak to an audience of for-profit investors, or my CFO, and get their buy-in and financial support. And now that I speak that language, I can communicate to a larger audience of people from different academic backgrounds, and people with different career goals, and in doing so rally more people to drive change.”
The Anderson experience cemented a number of life and career goals for Cantrell. “The best takeaway from business school is how to be more efficient and maximize impact, quality of life…. Some people maximize profit. I’d like to maximize good, to give people a better quality of life. And be in the black.”
Cantrell, along with three other Anderson students, will be awarded her $25,000 fellowship on October 6, when Anderson also honors Xerox chairman and CEO Ursula Burns with the 2015 John Wooden Global Leadership Award.
Tiffany is an emergent leader at Dignity Health St. Mary Medical Center, where she inspires us by using her great intellect and sensitivity.
Posted by: St. Mary | 09/16/2015 at 01:34 PM