Bringing a New Vision for Leadership to a Top Role in Healthcare
Though his title is the same as when he entered the LeBow Executive DBA program, Michael Cogliano, DBA ’26, knows he emerged from the program as a more impactful leader.
“The academic rigor of the program changes the way you think,” he says. “It’s data-driven, practical education that teaches the whole process from start to finish: going from identifying a business problem to analyzing it, and from collecting the data to putting your case together.
“It allowed me to take what I learned back to work right away.”
From his first days in LeBow’s DBA program, Cogliano received a solid foundation in statistics and data that immediately carried over to his role as a hospital president within WellSpan Health, a large and growing regional healthcare network.
“After the first residency, I was already questioning the decisions and deliberations around different projects,” he says. “I was asking what the data shows and looking whether what I was being told was supported or not.”
Among the hospital’s leadership team, he recalls, this new data-driven perspective “helped me to be more disciplined in asking better questions, so that we’re more thoroughly evaluating the challenges that we’re faced with.”
As he progressed through the program, Cogliano continued learning to solve complex business issues, identifying employee engagement as an area within healthcare that he wanted to study and advance at work. He collaborated with Lauren D’Innocenzo, PhD, professor of organizational behavior and Executive DBA academic director, on a study measuring engagement and how it affects individual and team performance.
Employee engagement, he says, “is very important in healthcare, because engaged employees provide better care, and it’s been shown that recognition is really important for worker satisfaction and engagement.
“I’ve been able to take that back and use it in many ways, educating my leadership team about factors behind employee engagement and how we can improve.”
While Cogliano’s dissertation draws from academic literature and research around employee engagement and tactics, he’s applying those findings in meetings and discussions throughout the WellSpan Health network, which employs 23,000 in central Pennsylvania.
“Along with other leaders, I’m taking part in retreats where we’re talking with hundreds of employees throughout the system about well-being, engagement and belonging,” he says. “When I tell them we need to improve certain measures, I share what I’ve learned, and that has helped us a lot.”
With a title that reflects his decades of experience in healthcare — and the leadership and oversight duties that come with it — Cogliano has become an “in-house expert” on engagement, recognition and opportunities for advancement.
He’s also extending the guidance he received from D’Innocenzo by serving as a mentor to current DBA students and as an adjunct professor at two local colleges.
Though he’s no longer making the commute to Philadelphia via Amtrak to gather with his cohort for on-campus residencies, Cogliano appreciates how his DBA experience helped to expand his connections to professionals from other fields and in other locations.
“I’ve spent my entire career in healthcare, so I appreciated the cohort style and the fact that I was able to learn with students from many other industries,” he says.
