Recently as part of our Best Practices Interview Series, we had the privilege of interviewing Dorrie Dils, the CEO of Gift of Life Michigan, an organ procurement organization (OPO) based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We have known Dorrie for many years and have always appreciated her can-do attitude and her passionate commitment to saving lives through donation and transplantation, and we’ve been really excited to work with Dorrie and her team to find opportunities to build stronger relationships with their hospital partners, transplant partners and donor families!
Here are a few key takeaways from this interview:
Dorrie began her career as a nurse working with trauma patients, and that exposed her to the world of donation. Her concern for her patients and their families helped her transition into working for her local OPO. “I just found that field to be so interesting,” she says, “through the death, working with those donor families and seeing some of the hope that they received as a result of being offered the option of donation.”
Dorrie is not afraid to be aggressive, and she instills that in her team. Dorrie explains during the interview that being aggressive about following up on donation referrals is essential to her team’s success. In just four years since taking over as CEO, Dorrie and her team have doubled the number of tissue donors and dramatically increased the number of organ donors.
But that also required looking for options to adjust the organization to suit this new focus. Her staff is leaner now, and more focused on utilizing new tools to enhance their efficiency. “I’m also really proud of how we have taken on technology to add to that growth,” she says. “We’ve brought on a new databases to help us work more efficiently. We’re embracing electronic referrals, which is really proving to grow our opportunities for donation.”
“All of that was possible, because our staff were so willing to look at what we were doing what we had been doing, and consider what what we might do differently in order to get to that next level.”
One key aspect of providing great service is understanding exactly whom you’re hoping to serve and how they relate to you as a customer or stakeholder. Dorrie explains that much of her initial work upon becoming CEO was in working with her team to define who, exactly, Gift of Life Michigan’s customers truly are and which stakeholders were connected to those customer interactions.
The customer, she explains, is, “that person who uses the end product or service that you produce. And that, for us, is our transplant programs and our tissue processors. Then we identified stakeholders around those groups, including our donor hospitals, and our donor, families, community, and all those that we also support. But we really centered our work around if we’re really serving that customer.
“When we approach donation, making sure that we’re able to provide those organs and tissues in a way that they are transplantable, we need to do that on a basis of a really strong relationship.”
Proactive planning is very important for future-proofing an organization. Dorrie details two ways in which she and her team are looking at the future through workforce planning to ensure that Gift of Life Michigan has the appropriate staffing to handle its next levels of growth and also integrating various streams of data into the team’s information systems.
“If we can master those two things, I keep telling my team, we’re going to be in really good shape.”
The key to receiving a leadership role is to focus on being ready for opportunities that might come your way. Dorrie laughs when asked for advice on how those in the industry can follow in her footsteps. “I get asked this question a lot, actually, as a newer CEO, by people who aspire to be a CEO one day,” she says. “My response is a couple things.”
First, she says, when she was in the earlier stages of her career, she focused on adding to her toolbox, both by relying on her clinical background and by building an administrative skillset by earning her Master’s degree and attending additional classes.
The other thing, she says, “is always being willing to walk through those open doors” by keeping your skills sharp and your eyes open. “I feel very fortunate that I was in this field when it was growing and there were opportunities for me to move up, I had worked very hard to prepare for when those doors would open. Sometimes people start thinking ahead to that job they want, and they forget that they need to continue to do the job that they’re in and do it really, really well and be prepared for those opportunities that may come their way.”
We would like to than Dorrie Dils for participating in our interview series and for being willing to share her wisdom and insight with us. If you’d like to learn more about her organization, please visit https://www.giftoflifemichigan.org/.
Also, don’t miss our other interviews from this series and feel free to review our other Best Practices videos!