March 5, 2023

Not all top leaders sit in the biggest office.

Or have the letters C-E-O on their business card.

Or show up in the flashiest car and drive home to the most grandiose house.

Sister Joan Reichelt didn’t check any of those boxes. But, at Avera Health, she filled the one that mattered most.

Reichelt, 84, died last week, about seven months after retiring from her decades-long role as chief culture officer at Avera.

“I try to bring, for one, calmness,” Reichelt told me when we spoke last summer as she retired. “I’m not a big talker. While I can talk, I didn’t give big lectures to people. But they say, ‘If Sister Joan is at a meeting, she may not say anything, but when she does, you best listen because it makes a lot of sense.’ So I guess I have some wisdom.”

I first interviewed her in 2016, when she memorably told me about an idea she had to bring a satirical piece from Reader’s Digest into an Avera leadership meeting and use it to illustrate a point she wanted to make about equitable pay and managing the budget.

“I like to tweak their conscience a bit,” she said. “Not that I don’t need mine tweaked sometimes.”

Then, she paused and grinned at me.

“It’s an advantage to be a sister.”

Sister Joan, as she was known throughout Avera, had a true calling to become Sister Joan. She entered Presentation Sisters’ convent in Aberdeen when she was 17 years old.

“You’ve heard of child brides,” she told me. “I was a baby nun.”

She also was a bright one. She earned a bachelor’s degree in medical technology from Northern State University and became a registered nurse. She saw patients at Avera St. Luke’s in Aberdeen before going into leadership, both within the Presentation Sisters and the Avera system.

At Avera Health, she held a dual role — one of six system members helping guide major board-level decisions, but also a top executive. For years, no woman held a higher role on the organizational chart.

“Sister Joan was always the greatest advocate for our people,” retired Avera CEO John Porter told me when she retired. “She is so peaceful and reflective. She doesn’t say a lot, but when she does, you’d better listen because a lot of thought has gone into it.”

And sometimes — I think she’d be OK with me sharing this — there wasn’t a choice.

Once, in a high-level meeting when she wasn’t pleased with how the dialogue was going among her team, “I stopped a big businessperson,” she told me. “It wasn’t his fault. It was our fault. I stopped the meeting. I just stood up and said, ‘This is not Avera.’ I said, ‘We’re going to keep silent for one minute, and I’m timing it now.’ Do you know how long a minute is? But the room got perfectly still. And in one minute I said, ‘We can go back to our meeting now and act how we’re supposed to act.’”

Afterward, the business leaders jokingly asked if she could come with them and play the same role in their organization.

“I don’t think so,” she told me. “But I’m proud I had the courage because it did take courage.”

That wasn’t the only time. It didn’t happen often, but at pivotal moments she was known to stop and call for prayer. On conference calls during the pandemic with hundreds of participants, she would pray for peace and strength, mercy and compassion.

There also was a terrific sense of fun about her. A loyal reader of our business news, she once called me out of the blue asking me to go knock on the door of a house that had always intrigued her and figure out the owners’ story. I’d already had the same idea — and hopefully this year will finally go out and do it.

At work, she could be a bit of a prankster, too, but mostly she was a calming presence. She’d arrive at the office by 6 a.m., work 10 hours or more and serve as an ever-present reminder that this was an organization rooted in a mission bigger than itself.

“I’m proud to be a part of Avera in any way shape or form, but I’m proud that I was in administration and I seemed to influence some people and decisions,” she said. “And I did speak up when I thought I needed to, and I don’t think you have to go around bossing people or speaking a lot. But I was a mission person. Sometimes, it’s just your presence that makes a difference.”

She likely would have thought it overkill for me to even write about her passing, but I think she would have acquiesced when I told her the point I really wanted to make.

Every organization needs a Sister Joan. Especially at the top. Every organization needs someone empowered in a role that exists to ensure a deep, constant connection to your “why.” At Avera, that role was treated as it should be — it was elevated to the table where the biggest decisions were made and handed to a leader with the right qualities to execute it. If you don’t know who that is in your organization, Sister Joan would probably gently advise you to work on it.

When we last talked, we spoke about her mother, who lived to be 101 living largely independently, and about the five bookcases of books she planned to tackle at Avera Prince of Peace, where she was enjoying “a very nice apartment in independent living … and I always stress the word independent,” she said.

“When I look back at my life, I’m happy with it.”

I know I join many who will miss her, but if I’m being honest, I also never saw her in a life of traditional retirement. I suspect she’s in a well-earned better place, looking down and already hard at work sending prayers to all of us.

Saluting Sister Joan: Avera leader retires after decades of service