Aya Healthcare is the nation’s largest provider of health care staffing services and software.
Its CEO, Alan Braynin, is the recipient of this year’s Top Workplaces leadership award in the large company category. This is the second time Braynin has won a leadership award in the survey. The first time was in 2016.
The company has nearly 50,000 health care professionals, such as clinicians, on assignment nationwide. During the first wave of the COVID-19 outbreak, Aya Healthcare dispatched about 3,000 intensive care unit nurses to hospitals in the New York and New Jersey areas.
With an expanding corporate headquarters in Sorrento Valley, the company boasts a staff of more than 5,000 employees in the U.S., which includes nearly 1,700 in the San Diego area.
A UC San Diego graduate, Braynin has led the company since its founding in 2001. This interview has been condensed for space and clarity.
Q: What is your leadership philosophy?
A: There are lots of companies out there focused on having 8 percent growth year-over-year and if they have a leader who can accomplish 8 percent growth, they say that person’s a superstar. But sometimes that person comes here and they may not be that good if they are fully responsible for a large part of an organization. I recently started calling it the 200 percent leader vs. the 8 percent leader.
Q: Why 200 percent? Where did you get that number?
A: I just arbitrarily made it up. I think people sit around and meet about having 8 percent growth and that’s a banner year. We don’t do that. We don’t have 8 percent growth meetings. The 200 percent number is arbitrary but it signifies that we’re always looking for a way to reinvent what we do and disrupt what worked the previous year. So we’re really competing against ourselves. I guess what we recognize is the kind of person that can be fully transformative is different than a pretty good leader in another organization.
Q: Does 200 percent imply that there are some different ways to measure growth; that it’s not just bottom-line growth?
A: We’ve never sat around planning growth rates. There’s never been a meeting that I’m aware of where we said, “Oh, we want to grow this by this much.” It’s more like we say, “We have this problem and what’s the best way to solve it?” And the growth happened by itself. There was no plan to grow by a specific number, it just happens. When you solve a problem, there’s an impact that solving the problem has.
In the pandemic, different problems emerged that needed novel solutions. Just because you had a solution that worked for Problem A, it doesn’t mean that the same solution worked for Problem B. And so as competitors tried to emulate what we were doing, we were already doing the next thing.
Q: As CEO, I guess a big part of your job is to identify those leaders, right?
A: Oftentimes, the way things are conveyed is that there is one big concept. And if you can accomplish that one big concept, you have achieved your goal. I don’t really see it that way. I see it as, you have to do 57 things right — again, 57 is an arbitrary number — and it’s only when you do all of those things right that you reach the sufficient point where you can accomplish your goal.
So yes, it’s being able to always identify talent, but also it’s also being able to maximize the results from the talent you have. It’s being able to add resources when necessary. It’s the ability to take risks when necessary and challenge your own status quo.
