February 22, 2023
After a decade in academia, Alexandra Hill’s transition to Danaher gave her an opportunity to see health care from a new perspective—and to apply her background in process improvement to a new role after her MBA. Below, Alexandra shares her experience in Danaher’s General Manager Development Program, including her first role as a Danaher Business System Leader, and explains how she’s making an impact at the corporate level through her involvement in the Black + Friends Associate Resource Group.
I’m a Danaher Business System Leader for Quality and Regulatory Affairs at Beckman Coulter Life Sciences, one of Danaher’s operating companies. DBS is a set of tools and processes that we use to do our work—it’s essentially the shared culture of Danaher. A lot of my work is inspired by one of Danaher’s leadership anchors, “leads through DBS.” I lead workshops, kaizens—hands-ons opportunities for associates to learn new DBS tools—and other efforts aimed at continuous improvement. We’re looking for ways to be more efficient, ways to be better leaders—anything that will help us grow.
Of course, that means we have to prioritize what we’re going to focus on from day to day. In part, we draw from the metrics we track, which can help alert us when there’s something we need to take a deeper dive into. But when I’m working on a bigger-picture strategy like our annual DBS plan, I’m often considering a lot of other inputs, as well, including feedback from and conversations with the team.
My first experience with process improvement was as an undergraduate student at Johns Hopkins University; I had a long-term internship in quality, patient safety, and risk management. We implemented several programs in anesthesiology and critical care, and in one case, our work actually led to a national recall of a drug. Each vial was supposed to have multiple warning labels to prevent mix-ups—different drugs often look very similar—and one was missing, which could have been very dangerous.
After graduation, I started my career in clinical research at Johns Hopkins, and eventually, I decided to get my MBA in health care management and finance. At that point, I’d spent a decade on the academic side of the industry, and I wanted to see how things worked beyond that—my only experience with a company like Beckman was through using their instruments in the lab.
Then I attended the National Black MBA conference and met Nicole Wormley, who was the Global Director of University Recruitment at the time, and the rest is history! I applied for the General Manager Development Program, Danaher’s program for early-career leaders, and it was honestly the best interview experience I’d ever had.
There were around 30 of us, but everything felt so personal and individualized. I was accepted, and I started in the DBSL role at Beckman in 2019.
So much! Where I am today is definitely not where I started out.
One thing I’ve learned is to always remember we’re working with people; you don’t fix processes in a vacuum. And even though change is the only constant in life—we certainly saw that in 2020—most people resist it, at least at first.
For example, I started a cross-functional initiative when I first joined the company, to improve our communication around product quality. Ideally, the Sales and Service teams get feedback from customers and share it with product managers, who use it to inform which research and development projects they prioritize, and then the product managers share their decisions back to Sales and Service. But we didn’t always complete that loop.
So I got some key stakeholders together and proposed changes, but they weren’t that well-received, in part because the changes were creating a lot of work for the product managers, who are already very busy—and they weren’t really bought-in on the benefit of the additional work. So we decided to try again, this time streamlining the process and trystorming with one small group, so we could get feedback before rolling it out more broadly. And within a few months, our communication materials improved exponentially.
A lot of what I’ve learned came from my counterparts on other teams, especially because before I joined, Quality and Regulatory Affairs had never had a DBSL before. I had the opportunity to participate and co-facilitate kaizens to gain experience with some of the best DBSLs at Danaher and asked them for help working with new tools. And we’ve since built out a lot more standard work to help new DBSLs get up to speed.
When I first came to Beckman, there was no Black + Friends group for our local office here in Miami. I didn’t come in expecting to help start one, but it just kind of happened—some of the other Black associates and I became friends and would get together for lunch, and around the holidays, we started talking about what we might be able to do as a group. We started with potlucks, and then we raised donations for a local boarding school, which provided high-quality education to kids that wouldn’t otherwise have had the opportunity. That was close to my heart—although it was another associate’s good idea—because I went to boarding school myself when I came to America from Jamaica.
Then for last year’s Black History Month, we wanted to do something really impactful, so we asked one of Danaher’s leaders, Matt Turner—the president of Pall Aerospace—to speak to our team. We thought we might have 200 people, but the entire cafeteria was packed. People were standing outside in the hallways just to listen. And Matt was so thought-provoking in the way he talked about his experience as a Black man in America. It wasn’t an easy event, but I think it was really successful. There was a lot of learning going on.
Last year, I was asked to join the Steering Committee for the Black + Friends ARG across all of Danaher, as their communications lead. I help develop communications strategy and to provide engaging programming. We started the Connections series, where we connect associates with senior leaders on a wide range of topics, such as policy deployment, DBS, and leadership. It’s been exciting to be involved in something with such a large impact.
This year, I’m supporting Black History Month workstreams and leading a new workstream focused on talent acquisition and recruitment. We’re not sure yet exactly what the latter effort will look like, but we have a workshop scheduled—and I know I want to take the opportunity to increase representation and make sure people see Danaher as a diverse organization. There are a lot of people interested in volunteering to staff conferences and make university visits, even to mentor high school students. We’re also looking at partnering with new organizations to present Danaher to new audiences and attract diverse talent.
I’m also looking forward to my second role in the GMDP program—possibly exploring a product management or commercial role. That will be a new experience for me, and I know it’s fundamental to so much of what you need as a general manager; I understand quality and finance, but there’s so much more to learn about the products, the customers, the more strategic side. Being a DBSL has helped me start down that path, and I’m excited to grow more.