A Year in the Chair

Board Chair Gordon Ashcombe, CEO of the Society of Rural Hospital Administrators, joins host Amara Obiledu one year into his term to talk about what the board chair's job actually involves beyond running meetings — committee assignments, the relationship with CEO Walter Abernathy, and what he'd tell his own first-year self.

• Gordon Ashcombe — Board Chair, NANA; CEO, Society of Rural Hospital Administrators. Board chair for the 2024–2025 term.

• 00:00 Intro

• 01:30 The January meeting that seated him as chair

• 07:15 What a board chair actually does between meetings

• 13:00 The relationship with Walter Abernathy

• 18:40 Committee assignments and where the real work happens

• 24:00 A decision Gordon would handle differently now

• 29:20 What he'd tell his own first-year self

Host: Gordon, you became NANA's board chair at the January meeting this year. What does that meeting actually look like, mechanically?

Gordon Ashcombe: The board elects its officers at the January meeting for two-year terms, and the process itself is quick — a nomination, a vote, and then you're standing up in front of eleven other directors who you were, a moment earlier, simply a peer among. What isn't quick is everything that comes after. Nobody hands you a manual for what a board chair does between meetings, and that's most of the job.

Host: So what does a board chair do between meetings, then?

Gordon Ashcombe: More than I expected going in. I'm the person Walter calls first when something needs board input outside the regular schedule — a sponsor issue, a staffing question, a policy position that needs board sign-off before the next quarter. I also spend real time one-on-one with directors, particularly newer ones, making sure they understand what's coming to the board and why, so meetings themselves can move faster instead of re-litigating context every time.

Host: Tell me about the relationship with Walter specifically. How do you divide the work?

Gordon Ashcombe: Walter runs the organization. I chair the body that holds him accountable for running it well. That distinction sounds simple and it's actually the hardest line to hold in practice, because a chair who gets too involved in operations undermines the CEO's authority, and a chair who's too hands-off leaves the board flying blind. Walter and I talk most weeks, not because I'm managing him, but because a surprised board is always a worse board than an informed one.

Host: Where does the real committee work happen, versus the full board meetings people picture?

Gordon Ashcombe: Almost entirely in committee. Dominic Ferrante chairs finance and audit, and that committee does the detailed work of reviewing Lorraine's budget assumptions long before the full board ever votes on them. Benjamin Oduya leads the bylaws review every three years — the last one wrapped in 2024 and added a past-chair seat and three-year director terms, which is actually the seat I'll occupy once my own term as chair ends. Full board meetings are where committees bring recommendations forward, not where the underlying analysis happens.

Host: Is there a decision from this first year you'd handle differently now?

Gordon Ashcombe: Yes, and I'll be specific about it. Early in the year I let a sponsor-relations question sit on the agenda for two meetings before we resolved it, because I wanted more information before bringing it to a vote. In hindsight, the delay cost us more goodwill with the sponsor than the extra information was worth. I've since become much quicker to bring a decision to committee immediately rather than let it sit unresolved on a board agenda, because ambiguity itself has a cost that's easy to underestimate.

Host: What's the part of the job that surprised you most?

Gordon Ashcombe: How much of it is listening rather than deciding. I run a hospital administrators' association myself, so I came in assuming the chair role would feel similar to running my own organization. It doesn't. My job here isn't to have the best answer in the room — it's to make sure the board reaches a good answer together, which sometimes means staying quiet longer than feels natural to me.

Host: What would you tell your own first-year self, looking back?

Gordon Ashcombe: Call Walter more in the first month than feels necessary. I underestimated, going in, how much context I needed from him just to understand the shape of issues the board would face over the year — the Summit's move to December was already being discussed before I took the chair, and I wish I'd been looped into that conversation earlier than I was. A new chair should assume they know less than they think they do about what's already in motion.

Host: Last question. You'll roll off as chair and, per the new bylaws, into the past-chair seat. What do you want that seat to actually do, given it's brand new?

Gordon Ashcombe: Institutional memory, mostly. A past-chair seat exists so the board doesn't lose everything a chair learned the moment their term ends. I want to use it to help the next chair avoid exactly the kind of delay I just described — not by making decisions for them, but by being someone they can call in the first month the way I wish I'd called Walter.

Host: Gordon, thank you for the honesty about a first year that wasn't entirely smooth.

Gordon Ashcombe: It's rarely entirely smooth for anyone. I'd rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise.

Host: Before we close, I want to ask about something you mentioned in passing — the past-chair seat being brand new. How did the board actually decide two-year officer terms and a three-year director term made sense together, structurally?

Gordon Ashcombe: That came out of the same 2024 bylaws review. The logic was that officer roles — chair, vice chair, treasurer, secretary — carry enough day-to-day intensity that two years is a reasonable commitment to ask of a volunteer, while a plain director seat, without those additional duties, can sustain a three-year term without burning someone out. Directors can also serve a maximum of two terms, so six years total, which keeps the board from calcifying around the same faces indefinitely without losing continuity entirely.

Host: Does the board ever debate whether six years is too long, or not long enough?

Gordon Ashcombe: It comes up periodically, usually from a newer director worried that six years feels like a long horizon to commit to upfront. I try to remind people that a term limit is a ceiling, not a requirement — a director who wants to roll off after one term is free to do so, and several have. The ceiling exists mainly to prevent the opposite failure, a board that never turns over at all.

Host: One final question, since you mentioned it briefly. You run your own association, the Society of Rural Hospital Administrators, at the same time as chairing this board. How do you keep those two roles from bleeding into each other?

Gordon Ashcombe: Deliberately, and with some effort. SRHA represents 1,450 members and 19 staff of my own, and it would be easy to bring my own organization's specific concerns into every NANA board conversation, since that's the lens I know best. I try to catch myself when I'm about to advocate for something that happens to benefit hospital administrators specifically rather than the sector broadly, and I ask a fellow director to call it out if I miss it. That check matters more for a chair than for any other board seat, because the chair's voice carries extra weight in the room whether they intend it to or not.

Host: Has that check ever actually been used on you, in a real meeting?

Gordon Ashcombe: Once, clearly. I pushed harder than I should have on a rural-specific point during a discussion that was really about the Summit's general session content, and Rashida Kimbrough said as much, directly, in the room. I appreciated it more than I resented it, which I think is the right way for a chair to receive that kind of correction. If directors stop feeling safe enough to say it to my face, the whole arrangement stops working.

Host: Gordon, thank you again.

Gordon Ashcombe: Thank you.