Linda McDonald’s management style can be summed up by something her father always told her: “You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” With this adage in mind, McDonald motivated her histology team at Cleveland Clinic with empathy, knowledge—and at times, food.
“I always kept that in the back of my mind, and I always tried to remember that we’re all people. It doesn’t matter what position you have, you all have things that you have to go through in life—and that can impact your day-to-day and how outcomes are produced,” Linda explained. “I think there was a level of empathy that people saw, and they recognized that I treated people equally and I knew my stuff. I knew I wasn’t talking out the wazoo. When people came to me and had a question for me, they could pretty much count on that I knew what I was talking about 95 percent of the time.”
It is this style that helped Linda guide her team through difficult times, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic, when grace under fire was necessary in a workplace that had been thrown into chaos. From taking employees’ temperature when they arrived to work to navigating workloads when someone needed to be quarantined for ten days, Linda was tasked with keeping both work standards and morale high. This often involved reminding her team that the patient was the lab’s priority, as well as experimenting with strategies to become as efficient as possible.
“It’s about pulling up a chair and sitting down when you recognize that the workload is tough and you’re sitting in your office doing paperwork that maybe can wait, but the patient care blocks needed to be cut and sent out. That was helpful because then they saw me as a team player and that I was trying to get the work done too,” she said. “Also, I was oftentimes trying to figure out ways that things could be done easier. We had quite a bit of modification in the lab from the time I started with handwriting cassettes and we were fully automated by the end of my tenure there, which allowed for good patient care and elevated the level of work we were doing. We worked with several vendors on beta testing for units, and we were always looking for the next step to enhance our abilities and provide adequate patient care for diagnosis.”
And as team members enhanced their abilities despite the stress of COVID, in the spirit of catching more flies with honey, Linda didn’t hesitate to appeal to her employees’ taste buds to keep them motivated.
“Pizza and cookies went a long way because there were some days that we were just rocking it and it was hard. Saying, ‘Hey everybody, I’m going to grab lunch today’ or offering that level of, ‘Hey, you’re appreciated, even though it may not have seemed like that every day,’” she recalled. “Looking towards the positive, getting away from the negative, and reminding individuals that this specimen could be your mother, father, brother, or sister kind of helps people push through and know we have to get this job done regardless of what the situation is today.”
A Dedication That Transcends the Lab
After decades of navigating daily challenges in the lab, Linda retired in 2022, but her dedication to the histology profession, along with her mentorship, hasn’t taken a break. She remains active in the NSH community, and has been a judge for poster competitions and a presenter at organization events.
In addition, Linda is currently creating a theoretics course with Cleveland Clinic for people who don’t know anything about histotechnology in order to help attract people to the field and give them an understanding of the principals that guide the daily work histologists do.
Whether it’s in the classroom or the lab, being a histology professional has been an extremely gratifying experience for her, and Linda plans to continue helping advance the profession she loves as much as she can in the coming years.
“I love the world of histotechnology,” she said. “I think what we do in histotechnology is a really nice combination of art and science because if you have good tech, the slides are beautiful. I always really enjoyed it.”
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