Summary:

What do you do when your hospitals flood, 160 employees go missing, and you realize there’s no playbook? You rewrite the rules. Austin Maggard shares how Appalachian Regional turned two back-to-back disasters into a culture-defining transformation and why HR became the backbone of resilience.

Chapters:

00:00 – Generational workforce shifts at ARH

03:23 – What rural healthcare really looks like

06:52 – Why documenting culture became mission-critical

10:14 – Chick-fil-A vs. McDonald’s: A service consistency lesson

13:42 – How Disney influenced ARH’s culture strategy

17:00 – The 2022 flood: 160 employees unaccounted for

20:28 – Helicopters, horseback, and healthcare chaos

24:05 – The emotional toll and operational breakdown

27:32 – What the second flood exposed: A trust gap

31:03 – “This wasn’t a logistics failure. It was a leadership one.”

34:40 – Building a distribution system for disaster relief

37:56 – How HR became the heart of recovery

41:22 – Turning pain into process: Making resilience portable

45:00 – Aligning every decision to the culture statement

48:14 – Final reflections on leadership, humility, and legacy

Host Alexa Beavers: linkedin.com/in/alexabeaverspmp

Guest Austin Maggard: linkedin.com/in/amaggard

Executive Producer Jim Kanichirayil: linkedin.com/in/drjimk

Music Credit: "Lost in Dreams" by Kulakovka