HCA Healthcare

Heather Frommack

Patient Safety Steward

I’ve enjoyed a career that spans healthcare, education, nonprofit leadership, and manufacturing. Yet underpinning that variety runs a common thread: empowering people and organizations through learning.

My goal has been to create departments, Centers of Excellence, teams, and organizations that leave a legacy imp            act that outlives my own tenure. I believe this is achievable when leaders build their work upon three pillars: clarity, capability, and culture.

A Career Built Around Learning and Development

I started as a Registered Dietitian, where I witnessed the transformative impact of empowering people through learning about their health, nutrition, and fitness.

Then working in K–12 education as a leader and educator in the home education movement and community taught me instructional design, curriculum development and teaching a vast array of content to people of all ages. This experience profoundly impacted my philosophy of learning.

From there, I moved into nonprofit work where I built and led a team that cocreated a Multicultural Outreach Center of Excellence focused on empowering leaders in underrepresented communities. Watching that COE’s impact continue to scale beyond my involvement remains one of the most rewarding experiences of my career.

I then moved into manufacturing with Titan America, building a learning and talent development Center of Excellence from the ground up. My current role at HCA Healthcare brings me full circle, combining healthcare with leadership, organizational development, and learning.

Clarity: Leading Through Learning

Clarity is grounded in how we think, not just what we know. My philosophy has been shaped by both experience and academic study, particularly my master’s in educational psychology. I’m also a certification collector - of sorts. Each certification provides a deeper multidiagnostic perspective and sharper skillsets - as well as objective evidence of expertise.

Capability: Building Through Immersion

Capability and credibility accelerate when you get up close to the real work of the organizations we serve. When I joined Titan America, I knew nothing about cement manufacturing, so I bought the safety boots, donned the PPE, and immersed myself in its scale and complexity.

Now, in healthcare, I ‘bunny-up’ in scrubs to tour operating rooms and shadow emergency departments and then put the suit coat back on to listen to CEO’s as they explain their challenges and goals. This immersive learning sharpens both my credibility and capability to develop and drive relevant solutions.

Growing Into Roles

Building capability means we are willing to jump into roles we don’t yet feel qualified to lead. Growth can feel a lot wearing an outfit that’s still a bit too big. Yet, as we risk, fail, and succeed, we grow into it and become the professional who fits, contributes, and eventually outgrows the role. We can’t credibly teach others that failure is essential to growth unless we’re willing to risk that awkwardness ourselves. That philosophy has grounded many of my career decisions.

Culture: Where It All Comes Together

Culture is foundational to any development initiative. Neglecting to consider and create receptive cultures is like a farmer neglecting the soil. We can throw ‘seeds’ of programs, coaching, training, and change into organizations all day long, but if the culture doesn’t support it, it’s like throwing seeds onto parched ground. Nothing will meaningfully grow.

In our profession, we are culture curators. Therefore, it’s imperative that we invite voices from multidisciplinary and multicultural perspectives to help build the cultures needed to sustain solutions.

Advice For Emerging Leaders

My encouragement to leaders is to jump in and learn, learn, learn! Grow into and out of the roles you’re in and aspire to. Continually invest in your understanding of the business, the people you serve, and our field. Leadership is about enabling clarity, capability, and culture. If we embody that, we empower not just our organizations’ success, but our own.