So what happened?
Mayo Clinic for the last few decades has continuously degraded by mediocrity, preferential treatment, poor implementation, ghost riding, and lack of vision. Mayo has been riding on the ghosts of its accomplished past.
A career at Mayo Clinic is an enigmatic one. On one side of the coin you will be enthralled to work with able minded people who are not only skillful in the craft of science but who legitimately have passion for patient centered research and care. I have had the pleasure of seeing people with drive who have worked from the ground up from a simple technician to become an administrator or even Ph. D, as I am currently working on. The other side of the coin includes select consultants, senior/middle management, and even mid/low level scientists seem to think that once you get your “Golden Ticket” to Mayo you simply put your heart and mind into neutral and coast to maintain the status quo. There are many wallflowers that only care about the bottom line: their paycheck or personal status.
While Mayo Clinic fosters brilliant and effective minds, there are just as many if not more that are busy waiving their “Golden Tickets.” My time has been plagued with a few pampered consultants who verbally and psychologically abuse you, entitled management who are woefully under-equipped in wisdom/aptitude, and salaried/hourly technologists who get away with harassment or being paid for flat out not contributing. You may as well not report incidences like these, since at any rung of the aforementioned nothing will change. Rocking the boat puts you at risk for retaliation, ridicule, being overlooked for a promotion, etc.
The current status of Mayo Clinic would be as one of my colleagues put it, “…we have too many chiefs and not enough Indians.” When you answer to many people, some of who may be inept or incommunicado with their own contemporaries, avoidable mistakes are made, inefficiencies continue to build, decisions that may be completely dangerous to patient care are created, and the overall mission of Mayo Clinic, “…the needs of the patient come first,” continue to diminish. At the end of the day the blame is usually assigned to the easiest target or those too meek to defend themselves.
Mayo’s initial answer to the economic environment in 2008 was lethargic. Excessive spending on parties, other frivolity, and business as usual continued. Fast forward to 2013 and Mayo is virtually in a panic over cost control due to being overextended at the cost of morale of its employees and patients. Benefits large and small continue to shrink or have disappeared completely. Forward thinking and preparing for fiscal pumps in the road, not banking on changes in philanthropic donations, having MML be fiercely competitive with other health systems, ceasing kingdom building projects, etc. were not a part of the equation until lately.
Mayo is finally starting to take the punch bowl from its own party. The problem is that while Mayo has been partying for the last 20 years the competition has become a lot smarter and leaner, where Mayo has become slow due to its own convoluted bureaucracy and over indulgence. The withdrawals are very hard everyone especially for those that actually work very hard, since those perks were the things keeping the talent here.
In the years I have been here I have seen magnificent individuals of all levels of employment be crushed by the current of “Mother Mayo’s” will. When your lifestyle depends on who writes your paycheck, you always see the zombie like following of Mayo either too scared, too indoctrinated, or too burnt out to care to resist the crumbling paradigm that is the psyche of Mayo Clinic.
