A Conversation with Susan Sedory Holzer, MA, CAE, Executive Director of the Society of Interventional Radiology (SIR)

April 15th, 2015
Written by: TPO

Since 2002, the Society of Interventional Radiology (SIR) has outsourced its Human Resources function to TPO. Here is what SIR Executive Director, Sue Holzer, had to say about TPO’s work—and the outcomes for her organization.

What is SIR?

We’re a non-profit medical professional society representing over 5,600 practicing interventional radiology physicians, scientists and clinical associates. We work with our members to deliver patient-centered care via image-guided medicine. In a field like ours, staying innovative is critically important.

Business Priorities and Challenges

While SIR is one of the smaller medical specialty societies, our agenda is just as big and ambitious as that of larger organizations. As a result, in order to be innovative and flexible and fluid, we have to think hard and be extra vigilant about how to invest members’ money.

For example, a big external challenge is helping physicians prove the value of what they do—it’s absolutely essential and becoming more so each year due to how the healthcare industry is evolving. So we invest a lot of resources in helping our members build evidence around what they do —and in building up the quality of research. And that type of challenge directly impacts our people priorities; we cannot deliver without the right type of highly skilled personnel, expertise and interpersonal networks.

Our New Brand

And while we have this lofty external priority, we have another big initiative that spans our internal and external constituencies: a major rebranding of SIR and its foundation. This doesn’t mean just a new logo or letterhead—it is much more substantive. We are truly changing the way we work. The purpose of our rebranding is to better articulate the value of IR in the healthcare marketplace and SIR’s role in advancing that value. We identified five brand pillars and actually retooled our employee performance measurement system to align with those. It is critical that our people understand, embody and reflect our brand priorities, otherwise the rebranding is just lip service. We’re even rebuilding our workspace to reflect our new brand; the new workspace is designed to inspire more innovation and collaboration, with a more open footprint. 

The Impact of a New Brand on SIR Staff

Claire Burns is our TPO consultant, and she is instrumental in the process of translating our new brand—which includes attributes like agility, innovation and confidence—into the behaviors we want our staff to embody. And providing a way to measure their performance based on those behaviors. This gives us alignment between our new brand and our employee performance management system. Without that alignment our rebranding would be a superficial process; we’d be saying what SIR stands for but not reflecting it in every interaction with members—and each other.

TPO’s Role for SIR

TPO is our complete, outsourced HR management function. They’ve helped us in a number of areas, including—as I mentioned, performance management—compensation assessment, hiring, employee onboarding and updating our employee policies and handbook.

Outsourcing to TPO has been a great fit for us. There’s a unique aspect about the outsourced arrangement: I don’t expect (our consultant) Claire (Burns) to know every detail, but she helps give us perspective. It’s very helpful to have someone that’s one step removed from the day to day to help you think it through. While she’s clearly an HR expert, it is valuable that she is not connected to physicians who may be saying different things. Having Claire and TPO is a great way to counterbalance or countercheck what we’re doing. They’re independent but connected.

And Claire is just the tip of the spear, so to speak. I absolutely feel like there’s more depth at TPO behind her. I never worry about any gaps because of TPO’s collective expertise. I’m very sure we wouldn’t have the level of service if I had an HR person on staff. With TPO I can access the depth of knowledge when I need it vs. paying to have it all the time. To get expertise at such a high level is an incredible value.