MATTHEW BURNETTE, Staff Writer

Martha Henley currently serves a dual role as both the Chief Executive Officer of Unity Medical Center in Manchester and the Chief Operating Officer of Java Medical Group in Brentwood.

Her journey to becoming an executive in healthcare started in the small Noah community of Coffee County where she was raised, the oldest of six on a farm that’s been in her family for over 100 years.

“I think growing up in a small town, I became more aware of the importance of being healthy and the importance of serving your community,” said Henley. “I think that’s probably shaped me more than most things, and being the oldest of six, it was almost like I got to choose a child. When you have that many you kind of, I think, become a nurturer by trade.”

Henley joined a health occupations program at the county hospital when she was a young adult where she got to do a rotation through different facilities. That rotation led her to what she says was her “first love.”

“We went to extended care facilities, went through hospitals and was able to rotate through surgery, and I just loved it,” Henley explained. “I loved the fact that you could fix people. You got to see a different outcome. They came in and they were in pain, or something was bothering them and then you’d see them a week later and they’d be feeling better.”

She worked as a scrub tech before transitioning into a first assistant role and finally into the business administrative side after recognizing a way she could make an even bigger impact in her field.

“I always recognized that part of being able to deliver good healthcare was being able to change policies and to have a voice at the table when those policies were being discussed,” said Henley. “So that’s what led me to move from the clinical to the administrative side.”

It was during her time in marketing that Henley met who she considers to be her biggest influence in the healthcare industry, Vivian Henley, her future mother-in-law.

“I was doing marketing and working in surgery and had to report to the board of directors which if you can imagine as a twenty-year-old, I was very anxious,” she recalled. “I walked in, there was a room full of people and there was one woman. She was very poised, and she was in her all-white nursing uniform.”

Henley remembered being impressed by Vivian’s leadership of the room, despite being the only female at the table.

“The respect she held in the room when she asked a question in a way that was both inquisitive yet inviting left an impression,” she explained. “I was like ‘Oh wow! She just has a different class about her.’”

Vivian Henley graduated from St. Thomas School of Nursing as a Registered Nurse. In 1978, she created the Coffee County School System Nursing Program where she served as the only nurse travelling to all eight, at the time, schools before retiring in 1999. She passed away in 2021.

Her first female role model as a leader in healthcare, Henley recalled her mother-in-law explaining her motivations to her.

“She just said that she always wanted to care for people,” she explained. “She said she just always knew that was her calling, and she got a blessing out of doing the Lord’s work for other people.”

Now a leader herself in the healthcare industry, Henley, who earned her master’s degree in 2014 in Health Care Administration and Management from Vanderbilt, says that there is still an obvious lack of representation for women in leadership roles which she cited as a challenge for her moving up the executive ladder.

“If you look at statistics, the gender gap in healthcare leadership, there’s about 77% of healthcare employees that are women, but only about 25% hold leadership roles, and I think that was a couple of years ago in one of the articles from the American Heart Association,” she said. “There weren’t a lot of female mentors, so I think that was challenging.”

Henley also explained that an even bigger challenge was the way people perceive women in general.

“Women are typically known to be more sensitive, so you have to be careful not to lose sight and not to consider that sensitivity and empathy are a weakness, but they’re actually a strength,” she explained.

As far as overcoming those challenges, Henley noted one attribute that’s helped her in her career: consistency.

“I think the one thing that, if you were to speak to anyone that works with me, they would say I have proven to be consistent,” she said. “So for any leader, I would say just being consistent helps prove yourself and gives people a sense of fairness that I believe would be attributed to part of my success.”

Henley also emphasizes the importance for women trying to work their way into executive roles to find female mentors, as she did with her mother-in-law, get involved, and be true to themselves.

“You can be strong and empathetic, those are not two separate qualities which I believed for a long time,” she explained. “I was like ‘Oh, well I don’t know if they’re a good businessperson because they are sensitive.’ Well, that’s not true. You can be very empathetic and still make very good business decisions.”