FITTEST TEAM: DERMATOLOGY & SKIN CANCER CENTER
GLENN GOLDSTEIN, JOYCE GOLDSTEIN, MARK FLEISCHMAN, CHAD HOUSEWRIGHT
If you took all the books ever written about organizational effectiveness and distilled them down into just two words, they might be these: Peer pressure. It can be a powerful motivator, as Joyce Goldstein of the Dermatology & Skin Cancer Center will tell you. If peer pressure made so much as a difference of even a single point in the center’s team performance for the 2011–12 Fittest Execs and Fittest Companies Challenge, then it was the deciding factor.
That’s because the medical group’s average score of 141.5 was just a quarter-point ahead of the 141.25 posted by Team No. 1 from Stinson Morrison Hecker—the thinnest margin yet in this category through the Challenge’s three-year run. It gave the center the Fittest Team title for a second consecutive year.
“Peer pressure from the team,” Goldstein says, pinpointing the success factors at work for her team. “Unless one is an Olympic athlete, one can always improve his or her level of fitness.”
That, plus encouragement from team members—reminding one another of last year’s No. 1 finish in this same category—were keys to a repeat performance. As were the winning scores in individual categories posted by Joyce Goldstein [Fittest Woman Over 50] and teammate Mark Fleischman, whose perfect score of 150 earned him the title of Fittest Man Under 50.
“I think it’s a good example to our employees to show that we’re committed to fitness as the physicians and providers in the practice,” Fleischman said. “As a result, that encourages our staff through role modeling to pick up their own fitness goals. I have employees saying ‘I ran last night’ or ‘I went to gym yesterday, Dr. Fleischman,’ and they feel accountable because they know that we’re doing it and how important we feel it is that they take pride in improving their own fitness.”
The bare margin of victory came as no surprise to Fleischman: “From previous years, we know how extremely competitive this field has been, and that’s even more so this year,” he said. “We knew we had to put in extra efforts, because even a little extra effort can make a big difference in the end.”
As one of only six organizations to field full teams that finished each of the three Challenges today, the center’s competitors have demonstrated the power of fitness discipline applied over time. Anchored each year by Joyce Goldstein and her husband, Glenn, and Fleischman, the team scores turned in each year have risen from an average of 121 at the onset of the first Challenge to 130 at the end of it, to 138 at the end of Year Two, and now have broken the 141 mark.
Just as with effective practice management, success in a fitness program comes down to one thing, Fleischman said.
“I think this is an example of what happens when individuals or groups set a goal for themselves,” he said. “Everybody enjoys and feels better when they achieve their goals, whether they’re personal, professional or in this case, physical goals.
“If you can set a goal, it will give you something to strive and push yourself for, and a reason to get out of bed in the morning.”