Cohere Health provides clinical intelligence solutions to streamline payer and provider collaboration
We connected with Margo Hendrickson, Chief People Officer at Cohere Health, to learn about her background, her responsibilities, what drew her to Cohere Health, and more.
In this video
Margo answers.
- Her Role and Responsibilities
- A typical day in the life
- Margo’s Background & what attracted her to Cohere Health
- What contributed to her success
- Margo’s proudest professional accomplishment
- Why people should be excited to join Cohere Health
Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Margo Hendrickson, Chief People Officer at Cohere Health.
Overall, my responsibilities surround talent and culture. At the highest level, my role is about getting and keeping the right people in the right seats to support Cohere’s mission and growth. I strive to build a high-performing culture not just in terms of what we achieve, but how we achieve it. I also serve as a strategic advisor to the executive team and work with our board members on human capital matters. I lead our People Team, which includes talent acquisition, people business partnerships (which involves performance management, employee relations, engagement, and employee development), compensation and benefits, HR systems and data, employee experience and communications, as well as our executive and administrative operations.
In our fast-paced environment, I would say that every day is different. The only thing that is a constant here at Cohere is change. I have my days planned out, but often unexpected things come up that require pivoting. Overall, I would say that I have lots of meetings. Some are with employees, some are with teams that I lead, and others are with leadership. I also have meetings with external folks, interviewing prospects and working with vendors such as executive search firms and consultants. I also try to reserve some time to focus on strategic initiatives and communications.
I started out in healthcare right out of college. I began as a researcher for an MD/PhD in psychiatry at MGH. In the process of doing that, I concluded that I really wanted to stay in healthcare in some capacity but not take the clinical route. I explored healthcare law, doing legal work for a corporate law firm. Then, one of my clients at the time was an emerging healthcare tech company called Athenahealth, and they recruited me to join their team to help build HR.
It was an amazing journey of 15-plus years in a high-growth organization, going from 30 employees when I joined up to about 4,400 employees and over a billion in revenue from the early startup phases to IPO and several years beyond. I had about four to five jobs all in one company there. In the process, I leveraged a lot of consultants. I was learning on the job, and one of the things that I realized is that there was a need in the marketplace for consulting services from someone who had sort of “been there, done that” in terms of building HR programs and then owning the implications and execution of those decisions in a growth environment. So, I started my own consulting business doing fractional Chief People Officer work, and over the course of eight-plus years, I worked with tech companies in the Series A through C spaces.
Cohere Health was actually one of my clients, and I was hired to come in and help with change management initiatives and some of the people programs, working closely with the existing team. The CEO asked if I’d be interested in a full-time role, and I took the Chief People Officer role over a year ago. Since then, I have not looked back.
I would say that there are three things that have contributed to my success. The first is that I’m hardworking. Early in my career, I put in long hours, sometimes 10 to 12 a day, but I really had fun doing it. I was learning, I was building, and the hours flew by. The second is that I was fortunate to get wonderful mentorship from some inspiring leaders who believed in me, and they gave me increasing responsibility and challenges. The third is that I had the opportunity to hire and work with amazing teams. I learned early on in my career that I could not do the work alone. It took collaboration with team members where we were dedicated together to company success and supporting each other in that success.
For me, it’s not one moment in particular. What I’m most proud of is working in healthcare tech growth environments to build and design HR programs from scratch to support talent and culture. I did not shy away from challenges, and I stuck it out in some trying times. I’m proud of taking what I learned, establishing and running my own independent consulting business for several years, and helping multiple companies to be successful.
There are a couple of things I’d like to say on why people should choose Cohere. The first reason is our mission within the changing landscape of healthcare and tech. This is a really unusual time in healthcare. Patients and providers are demanding more from health plans, and payers are having to respond. It’s been a wakeup call for the health insurance industry. And then we have this exciting point in technology with the emergence of AI. Cohere fits right into this evolving healthcare and tech landscape with our core mission that we’re proud to say has always been here with us since day one in 2019: to simplify healthcare, enabling patients, physicians, and health plans to efficiently collaborate on getting the right care at the right time, at the right place, and at the right value.
The second reason to choose Cohere is our company values. We have purpose. We seek to be on the cutting edge around healthcare and technology. We strive to be humble, understanding what our limitations are and where we can learn from each other and from our mistakes. And then there’s that all-important collaboration. Joining Cohere is a great opportunity to make a positive impact in healthcare, to build and innovate in tangible, visible ways with a community of dedicated colleagues, and to have fun in the process.
