Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: Teledoc CEO Jason Gorevic

I recently interviewed Teledoc CEO Jason Gorevic on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam Mendler: Our guest today is the leader of America's largest telehealth company. Jason Gorvick is the CEO of Teledoc, where he leads a multibillion dollar company that has facilitated more than 50 million visits to medical providers, virtually. Jason, thank you for joining us.

Jason Gorevic: Adam, thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to the conversation.

Adam Mendler: I'm looking forward to. You've spent the majority of your life in New York. You're a huge Yankees fan. Not going to hold that against you, or at least I'm going to try not to hold that against you. And growing up, you painted houses, which can mean different things in New York. I think it might mean something a little bit different than in other parts of the country. But when you were a student in Penn, you literally painted houses. You started a house painting business.

Adam Mendler: Can you take listeners back to your early days? What experiences and lessons most significantly shaped your worldview and shaped the trajectory of your success?

Jason Gorevic: Well, now you're digging deep, Adam. I didn't expect that as your first question, but I appreciate it. So I did the early part of my growing up in the suburbs of New York but moved to Chicago when I was about ten and started at Penn. Coming from Chicago, somebody put a flyer under my door for something called college pro Painters, which was a franchise operation, and it was open all around the country for various franchise locations. And I got the one in my area of the Chicago suburbs. I did two summers of that. They helped you with things like marketing and with contracts with the paint companies and things like that. They taught you how to estimate a job, but it was up to you to hire your crew and go out and do the marketing and do the estimates and close the sale and then actually manage those crews, which was maybe the hardest I've ever worked in my life.

Jason Gorevic: The first summer, essentially, I broke even. I paid for all my equipment, I paid for my marketing expenses, but I felt like I hadn't really taken advantage of the opportunity and achieved what I wanted to. So I went back. I was a glutton for punishment. I went back the next summer, my sophomore summer, and I brought a friend with me to be my foreman. And we hired 40 kids, 40 college kids, some of whom were friends I went to high school with. Others were from local community colleges. We have 40 people running around with something like six or eight crews.

Jason Gorevic: And we had two vans who would deliver stuff to the homes every day. And it was absolutely brutal. But we accomplished a tremendous amount. And that summer, we did a quarter of a million dollars of house painting, literally going from one house to another through the neighborhoods.

Adam Mendler: And as you look back to that experience, as you look back to other experiences growing up, what were the key lessons that you took away that have shaped you, that you apply today as a leader of a multibillion-dollar business?

Jason Gorevic: Well, I think, number one, from that experience, I learned you can't ever ask somebody to do something that you wouldn't do yourself. And in that case, it may have been climbing up to the top of a 30-foot ladder and painting the top of a chimney. That was scary. But I knew that I couldn't really ask the other guys on the crew to do it if I wasn't willing to go up and do that myself. And so, fortunately, I'm not afraid of heights, but there were some precarious places that I put myself into, and I think you have to lead by example. So I've tried to bring that through my whole career. I think the second thing is being honest and having really high integrity. I remember this one experience where we had gone and I had sold a job to some homeowner, and there was a professional painter in the area who was coming behind me and saying he would do it for, I don't know, 5% less. And they decided that they were going to go with this other professional painter. And we ended up taking the guy to small claims court because he had a contract with us to do the work. And we had scheduled him into our schedule and told other people we couldn't do the work when we were scheduled to do his. Believe it or not, as a 19-year-old kid, I won in small claims court because we had all the documentation, and we were open and honest and very transparent about what we were going to do. So I think I've learned a lot of lessons that I've brought with me, and some of those then catapulted me into wanting to go into healthcare and how I ended up in healthcare.

Adam Mendler: Those are great lessons. Lead by example, the importance of honesty, integrity, morality, the importance of being organized. You had all the documents, you had all the receipts, and without that, you wouldn't have won your case, no matter how strong your case was.

Jason Gorevic: I think that's exactly right. And if I think about my early days at Teladoc, we ended up taking the Texas medical board to court because we thought that we were right in our reading of the law of something that could have really not just gotten away of the progress of the company, but really been life-threatening to the existing of the company. And so one of our values, even today, is standing up for what's right. And we have seven values as an organization. That's one of them. And we personify that today. We did back in 2011 when we first took on the Texas medical board. And if I think back to my house painting days, I did that then.

Adam Mendler: You just said, you have seven values. How do you ensure that those values aren't just words on a website, words on a wall? How are those values actually integrated into your company? How do you take those values and immerse them into your organization?

Jason Gorevic: I think it starts with having a mission-driven organization and a strong mission that everyone can rally around. So I think you have to have an organization that has core values as a foundation, but also a mission as a guiding principle. Once you have that core mission, then how do you live and how do you act every day is based in those core values. We have seven of them. I always encourage our team. You can't gravitate toward all seven at the same time and have every one of those seven be your favorites. I think every person in the organization probably has three or so of those values, maybe four of them, that really resonate with them. For me, I always say, every time I address our team, I talk about the fact that we keep our promises is one of my core values. I think about it relative to the clients we serve, the members we take care of, the employees we work with, and team members every day, as well as the shareholders who we serve and have a responsibility to. And so for me, I always come back to, we keep our promises. If you do that, then you can look yourself in the eye, and you can look your team members in the eye. Others. The fact that we're passionate about taking care of people really resonates, and that is clearly aligned with our mission of transforming the healthcare experience and improving people's health care and their health. And so I think it's important to acknowledge that there may be seven values across the organization, but be honest with people about the fact that they're going to gravitate toward three or four of them and really encourage them not just to live those values, but to talk about how they're living those values.

Adam Mendler: To what extent are employees measured by how they're following those values? Do you align compensation to values? Do you measure it quantitatively? How do you do it?

Jason Gorevic: We do. It's part of performance evaluation. Sometimes it's hard metrics and other time it's more subjective. And how we lead. We ask about them in our engagement surveys and about how we're doing relative to living those values, because I think the best measure of them is how our own team members think we're doing at living those values, and then we report that back. And part of performance measurement is at a leadership level. How do your teams think you're doing and we're doing in terms of living those values?

Adam Mendler: And a key theme in everything you're sharing is the power of feedback. Any advice for listeners on how to effectively give feedback as a leader and how to put yourself in a position where you can most effectively receive feedback?

Jason Gorevic: Yeah, Adam, this is an area I'm really passionate about. And to that end, we've embarked on a journey with a leader in mental health care and cognitive behavioral therapy, and dialectical behavioral therapy, in crafting our own leadership characteristics program and quite frankly, skills called connected leadership. At the core of connected leadership is developing a toolkit for how to effectively interact with others, manage stress, give feedback, receive feedback, validate someone else's position, and really be genuine and empathetic in working together. And I think that's really the foundation of having an organization where it can be a feedback-rich environment that is also healthy and constructive and collaborative without being combative.

Adam Mendler:

And a couple of the key words you shared, which are applicable to anyone leading in any context, genuine empathy. What do you believe are the key characteristics of the most successful leaders, and what can anyone do to become a better leader?

Jason Gorevic: Yeah. I have a strong belief that the archetype of the admiral on the prow of the ship leading with bearing the flag is a now defunct and ineffective archetype. I'm sure that there are certain environments where that's great. I think for the most part, that's no longer an effective methodology. I really do think leaders need to be vulnerable, need to be transparent, need to be communicative and present, and need to really listen. So I think giving feedback is one part of it, but receiving feedback and being willing to process it and act on it, even if it may require you having some self-reflection, that is maybe not so flattering. I think if we're not willing to take that feedback and adapt and acknowledge what our team members are going through, we can never be fully effective.

Adam Mendler: I thought it was interesting that you open by saying that the old style of leadership, the admiral leading on a ship, that's not relevant. We should discard that. And one of the earliest guests on my podcast Thirty Minute Mentors was Admiral Jim Stavridis and something he shared with me. When most people think of military leaders, the first person who they think of is Jack Nicholson from a few good men, and they associate military leadership with that style of leadership. Yelling, screaming, this is an order. Do this. But the reality is that isn't how the greatest military leaders lead. That isn't how Admiral Stavridis leads. I did an interview with a different admiral who told me that over the course of his entire military career, he can count on one hand the number of times anyone ever told him, this is an order. I did an interview with a general who told me that he can't recall a single time in the course of his career that he ever raised his voice. The greatest military leaders lead in the exact same way that the greatest CEOs, the greatest political leaders, the greatest leaders in sports, entertainment, any context. Leadership is leadership. If you want to be an effective leader, it's not by yelling and screaming. It's by inspiring. It's by getting those around you to become their best selves because you can inspire them to want to become their best selves.

Jason Gorevic: That completely resonates with me, and I think the opportunity to really galvanize a team is one of the greatest opportunities you can get. Bringing together a group of people who have disparate strengths and constructing them in a way so that their strengths are complementary and then facilitating an environment where they can flourish is really, really exciting and is a privilege.

Adam Mendler: You've spent the majority of your career leading Teladoc. It was a very small company when you joined, and you built it into what it's become today. You've had this incredible experience taking a relatively small business and growing and scaling it into a multi-billion dollar company. How did you do that? And what can anyone listening do to grow and scale their business?

Jason Gorevic: Well, that's a big, broad question. I mean, I think from a business perspective, you have to have a real value proposition. I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs who have a technology in search of a problem, or they have something that delivers a feature or a capability, but there's not really a market for it. Or they have something that's a business, but it doesn't have a revenue model around it and a willing customer who's willing to pay for it. So we're fortunate that we've always had that. I think from a scaling and growing perspective, a lot of it, as I'm sure comes as no surprise, comes down to the people and putting the people in the right places who can lead you forward. I learned very early in my career you can't do it by yourself and you pretty quickly run out of running room. And one person isn't scalable. So you need a team who you can rely on, who are going to deliver. I think in an entrepreneurial environment, they have to be comfortable with ambiguity because especially early on, but really forever, there's rarely a very clear right answer that's black and white. It's always some risk analysis and taking a calculated risk. The earlier you are, the less data you have for that calculation. And then I think also, I mentioned this before, but relying on people's strengths and putting them in positions that are really capitalizing on those strengths is sort of a key part of my own leadership philosophy. It's a little bit about like the Gallup method around identifying people's core strengths, playing to those strengths, and you need to obviously make sure there are no blind spots, but spending more time capitalizing on the strengths than trying to fix the weaknesses. And then lastly, for me is when you're in a high-growth environment and you're really focused on scaling, you have to always be hiring for tomorrow, not for today. For us, the faster you're growing, the further up on the curve you have to be hiring for. And so for us, we've been in environments where we've been growing more than 100% a year at times. And that means sometimes hiring a few years out into the future relative to what your needs are today.

Adam Mendler: What do you look for in the people who you hire?

Jason Gorevic: For me, cultural fit is critical. So somebody can be absolutely brilliant, but if they're not a cultural fit, it ends up being a problem. There is a mission orientation here that's absolutely critical. People don't fit if they don't really want to be here for the mission of the organization. And for me, that's great. Quite frankly, I don't really want people here if they're not aligned with the mission and care about it. It's an easy mission to get behind. Taking care of people is an easy mission to get behind. And so I look for people who are passionate about that. We're a very collaborative, collegial environment. And so we look for red flags around people with sharp edges who sometimes don't fit in this kind of an environment. But we also are demanding of ourselves. We have high expectations of ourselves. And so that makes for a great environment when you get the right people together. But it also makes somebody stick out like a sore thumb if they don't fit.

Adam Mendler: The ability to conduct business virtually is right at the core of your business. That's your company, that's what you do. In your experience, what are the keys to leading in today's landscape where virtual teams and hybrid teams, hybrid workforces, you have one, are more common than everyone physically showing up to the office every day. How can anyone listening best lead remote and hybrid teams and companies and position their companies to be leaders rather than laggards in this shift to remote and hybrid work?

Jason Gorevic: Well, I think it's very parallel to delivering health care virtually. I think it starts with acknowledging what can be done really well in a virtual environment. And when somebody needs to be seen in person, we're not doing remote surgery. And there is a lot that can be done remotely that is more efficient, more effective, more personalized and acknowledges the consumer where they are. Similarly, you have to provide the right tools for us. That may be a connected blood pressure cuff or blood glucose monitor or scale. All of those things apply exactly to the workforce and how you manage a team that's in a hybrid environment. Start with acknowledging what works really well remotely and what doesn't. Because truthfully, not everything does. Right. It's harder to build culture in a remote environment. It's harder to have speed of decision-making on big complex problems in a remote environment. And it's harder to get cross-functional sharing of things that are not so task-oriented in a remote environment. And also you can get greater productivity out of people, you can get a happier workforce. You can distribute the geography of your workforce in lower-cost environments, and you can pick up parts of the workforce you wouldn't be able to access if you were all in person. And so I don't think we're ever going to go back to an all-in-person environment. And I think it's critical for leaders to acknowledge what are the best of both worlds. And then lastly, just like with virtual care, how do you provide the tools for people to be successful? Sometimes those are the physical or technical tools. Other times they're the emotional and interpersonal tools that make up for some of what's lost from not being in person. That's where I go back to that connected leadership program that we've put together and the reason why we are investing in putting so many people through it, because it gives them the interpersonal tools, the emotional tools, the stress management tools, the connection tools, to be more effective, even when you're not necessarily sitting next to the person you're working with.

Adam Mendler: Any specific takeaways around how to build culture in a remote environment? You mentioned that as a challenge, which is a challenge that many leaders experience.

Jason Gorevic: So I think it starts with being really intentional about what your culture is. A lot of people think, or I've heard a lot of people talk about, well, I don't know exactly how to define our culture, but I know it when I see it or I feel it, and I think that's just not sufficient. So being intentional about labeling the words that you use to describe your culture, I think is really important. And then I think investing in things that may seem softer but are really worthwhile. We've gone to doing what we call neighborhoods where we may have people in a part of the country where we don't have an office, like, I don't know, South Florida or the Tampa St. Pete area or something like that. But we have 20 or 30 or 50 employees who live in that area. And we've created neighborhoods with opportunities for them to get together without having to come into an office so that they can get together locally, build a bond, build culture, and make sure that they are connected and feeling connected. Similarly, I was just in Chicago last week, and I pulled together 15 of our leaders for a dinner, and they were from all different parts of the company, and so they don't necessarily interact all the time together. But sitting around the table having dinner together, they were able to understand that there's a shared experience and there are shared challenges and opportunities and to hear what's going on in different parts of the company in ways that are less task-oriented than you would get in a typical meeting. And I think creating those opportunities and those forums is really important.

Adam Mendler: At Teladoc, you've had enormous ups and enormous downs. Over the course of a 14 month period, Teladoc's stock price more than tripled. And then over the next 14 months, Teladoc's stock price went down by almost 90%. How, as a leader, did you manage your people and your organization through the highs and lows of those times? And what advice do you have for leaders on how to effectively lead when things are going really well and when things aren't?

Jason Gorevic: So I think first is to acknowledge what people are feeling and not try to say that it's not an issue. Right. I think you have to acknowledge that people are seeing that and some are interpreting it as a scoreboard. And I think the next thing is to make sure that people understand that there are lots of exogenous variables that we can't control that go into what score is on that scoreboard. And so from my perspective, I've always been oriented around focusing our team on the things that we can control, which is how well we deliver, how well we execute, how well we keep our promises, how well we deliver value for our clients, how well we take care of people. And so if we can keep our people focused on that, then at least we're focused on the things that we can control. We have a set of internal OKRs that we manage the team to, and we try to keep everybody focused on those because those are our key objectives and the results that we use to measure how well we're achieving those objectives. And then the last thing is I have to keep the team-oriented around what those other variables are and how they affect us. Because if you just say, well, it's fully out of our control, then to some degree, you're not really acknowledging what all those other variables are and what you can do in order to control your own destiny and put up your own performance numbers.

Adam Mendler: Jason, a lot of key themes there that are applicable to listeners regardless of where and how and when they're leading. The importance of communication. You can never over-communicate. You can certainly under-communicate, but you can never over-communicate the importance of being honest, being honest with yourself, being honest with others, not living in denial, recognizing that everyone around you understands what's going on. So if you yourself aren't acknowledging it, you're not going to have any credibility with the people you're leading. Acknowledge it, accept it. And once you recognize that, and once you acknowledge that, you can then act on it. What can you control? What can't you control? Something else you shared, which I think is important, having very clear measurables, clear metrics, OKR. How do we measure success? How do we measure performance? Jason, you're a big Yankee fan. I'm a big Angels fan. I recently was on a panel on leadership and someone asked me, how do you measure performance as a leader? And I answered that it's complicated because, for example, in baseball, you could be a great manager, you could run a great clubhouse, you could get players to perform to the best of their abilities, play as hard as possible, have players fired up every single day, and the team still has a losing record, and you get fired because your team lost. How are you evaluated? Is it wins and losses? Is it other metrics? Having clarity around metrics is essential, and it's complicated. But the more clarity you could have around what actually matters in evaluating leaders, the more successful your leaders are going to be, the more successful your people are going to be, the more successful your teams are going to be.

Jason Gorevic: I think that's totally right. I think it would be easier to run a company if it were just wins and losses. That's a little easier than the many shades of ambiguity that comes with running a company and minute degrees of success and failure. But that's part of what makes it fun. And I think, to your point, being clear about the objectives and the key ways that you measure how you're doing against those objectives is what it's our job to do as leaders.

Adam Mendler: What do you think are the most important metrics that leaders should be evaluated on?

Jason Gorevic: I think it's different for every company. I think understanding what the key drivers of the value you deliver for whomever you're serving are. In our case, that's our clients. That may be employers or health plans, the individual consumers that we serve, and the impact that we have on those consumers. Some of that is experiential. How do they tell us we're doing relative to things like net promoter score? Some of them are about what are we doing and how well are we doing, and improving their health outcomes and measuring the impact that we're having on their health. There certainly have to be operational and efficiency measures to make sure how you're doing relative to the operational performance and the efficiency of those operations. And then, of course, there are financial metrics. And then finally, and maybe most importantly, in terms of galvanizing the team and aligning them around all of those goals is a measure of the health of your own employee base. What are the engagement rates, what are the satisfaction rates, what are the worries and concerns? And how can we be better as an organization in taking care of our own team members?

Adam Mendler: Jason, what can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?

Jason Gorevic: I think maybe the most important thing is knowing who you are and what makes you tick and what not just your goals are. I tell young leaders all the time, it's okay to manage your own career. You should never be apologetic or embarrassed about managing your own career, but be realistic about it. So if you have a goal, number one, does it align with your key strengths? And then number two, what are the skills, knowledge, and experience you need in order to be successful in that goal role. And I think if you're honest about yourself and where you are in terms of developing those skills, knowledge, and experience then you should be able to chart a course for how you develop them. And honestly, when we put together either a leadership team or a board, we create a matrix of skills, knowledge, and experience that we're looking for from that team. You can do that for yourself. I encourage young leaders to do that.

Adam Mendler: Jason thank you for all the great advice and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.

Jason Gorevic: Thanks Adam.


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

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