In this episode of the Healthcare Plus Podcast, host Dan Collard sits down with Mike Schafer, CEO of Spooner Health in Spooner, Wisconsin, for a conversation about what sustained high performance looks like over time.

Schafer has led Spooner Health since 1990. When he partnered with the Studer Group in 2009, his organization was at the 12th percentile for employee engagement. Within two years, they had hit the 94th. For the last three years, they have held at the 99th. This is an impressive turnaround story. But it’s also a staying-the-course story, and those are rarer and harder to tell.

Schafer brought that story to the inaugural Rewiring Healthcare: Foundation to Future conference in Atlanta earlier this year, where attendees called him one of the most humble and self-aware CEOs they had ever seen on a stage. This episode gives listeners who were not in the room a chance to hear it.

Listeners will learn:

• Why Spooner Health's five-year engagement plan happened in two years, and what made the difference
• How employee-written standards of excellence became the cultural backbone of the organization and still hold today
• Why transparency with data, including the uncomfortable numbers, builds more trust than protecting people from them
• What Schafer tells every new hire at orientation and why storytelling is now central to how he does it
• How the rewiring concept gave a high-performing organization a framework for continuing to improve without starting over
• Why investing in external development matters even when an organization is already at the top of its game

This is a conversation for any healthcare leader who wants to know what it looks like to build something that lasts.