Passion to Empower Women’s Professional Success
Liz Sillay, Senior Legal Counsel at hospital system, practices law with a heart for and focus on purpose and impact. Her passion extends to supporting women’s career growth, small businesses and the life science industry, along with assisting community organizations to grow their outreach and sustainability. Starting at the front desk of a US Senator’s office, Liz’s journey to supporting one of the nation’s largest hospital systems reflects a dedication to personal and professional development in herself and others.
This exclusive interview shares a glimpse into Liz’s journey, influences, and vision, offering valuable insights for women aspiring to balance demanding careers with fulfilling personal lives. Her experiences navigating the complexities of law and healthcare, along with community engagement and a busy family, provide wisdom that inspires future leaders—especially women—aiming to make a difference.
Can you share your journey to becoming the Senior Legal Counsel at hospital system?
My first job out of college was working in the late Senator Fred Thompson’s D.C. office, where I was on the first line of contact delivering constituent services. I developed a passion for legislative activity and using policy and public service to address day to day concerns from the electorate. Since then, I’ve been involved in similar public affairs which has carried forward and encompasses philanthropic efforts, in addition to supporting frontline workers who care for vulnerable individuals from all walks of life.
Immediately after law school, I was awarded a competitive Presidential Management Fellowship, working in regulatory affairs at the U.S. Department of State under General Colin Powell. Since then, I’ve been working as a regulatory attorney within transformative healthcare and life science organizations: Vanderbilt Medical Centre, Genentech, Waller, and now hospital system.
For over eight years, I’ve served as Senior Counsel at hospital system in Physician Services. Working at hospital system has been an honor and the highlight of my career – it’s been a privilege to support those on the front line of the services hospital system provides across the country. Every day I hear inspiring stories of care being provided to people in their time of need and I feel connected to the transformational healing that occurs at hospital system’s facilities.
Hospital system cares for both its patients and employees like family, along with emphasizing community involvement and service. The company has also provided a deeply supportive platform for my community engagement through structured Board Training and the hospital system foundation’s financial support, as well as facilitating events that contribute to communities across the country.
What inspired you to pursue a career in law, particularly in healthcare?
My mother – an author, educator, and minister – instilled in me a deep passion for public service. She also worked as a field director for two members of the U.S. Congress, further shaping my desire to serve others. My father and brother are both physicians, and for a long time, I aspired to follow in their footsteps. However, after visiting the Josephinum Museum of Medical History in Vienna, I realized that medicine wasn’t for me. My parents, who came from humble beginnings, dedicated their lives to compassionate care for their communities, teaching me that serving others is both a duty and a fulfilling vocation. I’ve always had an aptitude for reading, negotiating, and synthesizing information, so the natural choice was to go to law school. A law degree enables you to contribute to causes that uplift others while accessing unique opportunity for advocacy and influence. As a healthcare attorney, I’m able to use my skills and education to serve patients and the frontline workers who provide care.
How do you balance your professional responsibilities with your personal interests and community engagements?
The goal is to balance family, mental and physical wellness, community, and professional responsibilities, and minimize other distractions. Alas, this is the everlasting challenge, but there are some concrete factors that help with success. A critical foundation is having a supportive manager and company culture is also key. I also surround myself with and rely on a strong and encouraging network: family, friends, neighbors, childcare providers, school administrators, and colleagues, who help me manage both my daily tasks and long-term goals. Their support is invaluable; it starts with finding and cultivating those relationships, learning to ask for help and then delegating what you can – but you must get organized to leverage the assistance and help them be successful in their efforts. One challenge I face is limiting my natural tendency to get involved in too many things. My enthusiasm to participate sometimes makes it hard to find balance, but I continue to work on setting boundaries.
What motivates you?
I like to think my ethos is defined by enthusiasm in everything I do and I find great personal meaning in being actively and intentionally involved in my community, work, and family. In college, I posted announcements on my dorm door to encourage others to get involved in campus and local activities. It’s an innate drive to amplify good, described by a close friend as an “intrinsic thermal activity” that generates warmth around and draws attention to causes I care about.
I thrive on brainstorming ideas, building a vision, and collaborating with teams to bring that vision to life. As a self-proclaimed “nerd,” I also enjoy the process of shaping policies and providing a compliance-minded perspective to help ideas and programs grow and succeed. For me, pursuing meaningful goals creates its own energy, leading to fulfilment and balance.
What strategies do you use to maintain a healthy work-life harmony?
I love being active, but I’ve learned that true work-life harmony requires prioritizing rest and restorative activities – which for me requires a learned set of behaviours. A good friend recently helped me realize I needed to step back from less important commitments to focus on what truly matters. Doing so ultimately leads to more meaningful longevity.
I’ve also been following research that explains the negative effects of constantly being busy. Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, in his book The Organized Mind, explains that being constantly busy can permanently reduce our ability to think clearly, which is something I can’t afford. Therefore, science suggests balancing intense focus with periods of idleness to protect our brains, but in today’s fast-paced world where every spare moment involved checking our phones, constantly stimulating our brains to crave busyness, it’s easy to overlook this reset.
My job and personality often push me to pursue new information and experiences, but I recognize that information and activity overload drains my energy and creativity. Levitin stresses the importance of carving out time for rest to prevent burnout. Midlife is also a critical inflection point for adopting healthy habits, as we juggle demanding careers, caregiving responsibilities, and personal growth. Managing these competing demands and addressing them with pragmatic, easy-to-implement strategies is an ongoing challenge, but absolutely necessary.
Can you describe a typical day in your life at hospital system and your other professional and personal commitments?
As a natural night owl, early mornings can be difficult for me, but I am trying to reorder my circadian rhythm. I wake up around 6 a.m. to have breakfast with my kids before getting them off to school between 7:00 and 7:15 a.m. I try to avoid starting calls or checking emails too early, as it disrupts my workflow and reduces productivity. I aim to start calls after 8:30 a.m. and try hold off on emails until then, although its tough to forgo responding to a message when you check your phone 1st thing.
If I am not a large event luncheon or strategic lunch growing relationships, I typically eat at my desk, reviewing emails during an hour I try to protect from calls.
In the afternoon, I finish out open emails, sign documents, and schedule for the next day.
Lots of community events occur in the evening, so I am mindful to reserve the majority of the evenings in a week for family dinners – otherwise, board meetings, fundraises, advocacy meetings, etc can take over.
I also make a point to incorporate brief moments of fitness and personal connection throughout the day. I use a treadmill desk for less intensive tasks, take 10-minute walks when possible, and try to have one or two non-work-related conversations each day to stay connected with friends.
With a demanding job, active children, and community commitments, I’ve learned that not everything can fit into a single day. I remind myself that some interests can be pursued at a later time, and future phases of life will bring different priorities and opportunities.
What has been your most significant professional achievement to date?
It’s difficult to choose just one, as I have been very fortunate in my professional life.
Four specific roles are foremost in my mind as career highlights:
+ Helping life sciences companies bring break-through therapies to market.
+ Supporting hospital system’s employed intensive care physicians during the COVID-19 pandemic.
+ Being awarded the Presidential Management Fellowship after law school, which allowed me to work at the U.S. Department of State under General Colin Powell.
+ Earning an MBA while managing a demanding career and raising three children.
What are some of the biggest professional challenges you have faced, and how did you overcome them?
One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced was establishing a foothold professionally while moving to new cities with my spouse and young children. I had 5 moves in the first 10 years of marriage. Building a personal and professional network from scratch required creativity and stepping outside my comfort zone to find and generate new opportunities.
Taking time away from the formal workforce to raise children was another challenge. It meant finding alternative routes to maintain my professional engagement. I ultimately started my own legal practice focusing on life sciences and emerging companies. Compelling vignettes from that time feature taking my youngest daughter to meetings and interviews when caretakers were unavailable.
Navigating the early gig economy as an independent contractor presented tremendous opportunity for me, and I recommend this as one pathway as a way for women to maintain professional engagement while balancing family and/or other commitments.
Building trust with supervisors, hiring managers, and clients has been essential to my success in corporate life. To do this, I’ve embraced radical availability through approachability and responsiveness. Being willing to work at night can open up time during the day for family and events. This requires an approach that gives less down time, but in the end, the benefits for me have been useful.
Another challenge is the actual set of responsibilities that automatically comes with the nature of my work. As a compliance lawyer, my role often involves setting boundaries and articulating a “no,” which is not my natural instinct – so I strive to find ways to achieve a “yes” whenever possible. Further, legal often has to approve before deals move forward, which creates a lot of pressure and requires a seemingly never-ending queue of work.
Across the spectrum healthcare companies, I’ve been involved in advising start-ups, assisting with clinical trial contracting, mitigating compliance risks, optimizing costs, and improving efficiency, while helping organizations stay ahead of changes that define the complex and shifting regulatory frameworks and market dynamics in healthcare. For example, I have been a part of the industry shift towards more employed physicians within hospital systems, which has been transformational for the industry and my career, and has represented both a challenge and opportunity. This sort of change highlights the key point about how I approach challenges: they are always opportunities – to solidify and showcase your skills and to catalyse pathways forward that may not have been available otherwise.
How do you approach decision-making in your role, especially when dealing with complex legal and ethical issues?
My legal education taught me to approach any issue from multiple angles, and then seek common ground to achieve the best outcome. Thorough fact-gathering from multiple sources is essential for sound decision-making, and I place great value on gathering comprehensive information. This reality underscores the value of seeking input from diverse stakeholders. It’s important to understand the background of an issue and consider both the perspective of the person asking the question and the potential impact of the decision on those affected. This comes naturally to me as I crave finding information about context and content and then I hope to use this knowledge to make others feel comfortable, understand their perspectives, and create connections to reach a consensus.
How do you see your work impacting future generations, particularly in the healthcare and legal fields?
I enjoy using God-given skills in reading, negotiating, and summarizing information to contribute to causes that uplift and support individuals in our community, and hope these efforts do, in fact, impact the future. My legal experience has allowed me to support governance, policy development, and compliance in areas like fundraising, advocacy, and creating policy. Each project fuels my passion for the next, creating a cycle of meaningful impact.
The most rewarding part of my career is collaborating with communities and contributing to impactful causes that are meaningful to my values and vision. This extends into my family life, board service, and volunteer work. Moving forward, I’m passionate about helping women pursue similar opportunities by emphasizing career development, advancing professional identities, acquiring new skills, and expanding their career prospects. I also want to focus again on supporting life science companies to bring the next generation of novel therapeutics and devices to market.
What initiatives or projects are you most passionate about that aim to make a lasting impact on the community?
Supporting women’s professional development, particularly for those just entering or returning to the workforce, is another key area I’m excited about and to which I will devote substantial time in my next phase of life. I am in the process of writing a book and developing a platform to help women navigate career transitions, particularly in mid-life. Establishing and/or growing a professional identity is profoundly transformative for self-esteem, growing personal wealth, and other benefits that I am truly passionate about inspiring in women.
I am deeply passionate about supporting museums and arts programs that provide educational opportunities for children. A key focus of mine is helping museums expand to reach more children and diverse communities by ensuring sustainability and working to grow of these initiatives.
I’m also very interested in shifting the education system toward skill-based certificates for high school students, creating pathways for those who may not pursue college to build fulfilling careers.
Advice for aspiring leaders, especially women, looking to make their mark in the legal and healthcare industries?
Learn to delegate! Each day, take time to set both long-term and short-term goals and break them down into actionable steps. Review your schedule regularly, stay laser-focused on your priorities, and remove unnecessary distractions. I typically spend at least 25-30% of my day “calendaring” – that is, setting a vision with specific goals, mapping out activities that support those goals, finding out about new relevant programs, and cultivating strategic relationships around these themes, and then managing the logistics that enable the experience – often a complex exercise in prioritizing and detail-orientation.
Seek resources – support networks, professional associations, mentoring opportunities – that will help you achieve your goals while providing insight and new information.
Any tips for maintaining long-term professional growth and development?
One seemingly simple, but absolutely critical, area for growth: Improving communication. Active listening is a brilliant methodology for responding to input with accuracy and empathy – hone these skills for a richer connection to colleagues, family, and friends. Learning to adapt communication techniques to different audiences is crucial for success in any field. Practice speaking skills in the mirror and on camera. Accept invitations to speak in public. Developing stronger communication skills actually takes disciplined practice, but it’s a game-changer for fostering stronger professional opportunity and setting the stage for expansion of your vision and impact.
Building a strong community at work and also staying engaged with diverse interests outside of your job also helps refresh your perspective and brings energy to your professional life, which can help in avoiding burnout.
Continuous learning is essential—always seek out opportunities to grow your skills. I went back to school to earn an MBA as part of my ongoing development and so that I could be a better business partner to my clients. I always recommend finding a big idea that will shape your career path and identifying the steps to bring that vision to life. Pursue additional degrees or certifications that can amplify your professional impact. Stay engaged and actively pursue your goals. However, recognize that sometimes it’s okay to wait for the right phase life to take the next step in your career. In the meantime, continue networking, cultivating valuable contacts, and refining your vision for the future. Also, remember to slow down and take a few minutes each day to reset and connect with people important to you.
Liz Sillay’s unwavering dedication to both her professional success and her commitment to empowering others makes her a true inspiration. Through her leadership in healthcare and law, as well as her passion for community involvement, women’s development and start-ups, Liz continues to pave the way for future generations, proving that with purpose, planning, perseverance, and a heart for service, remarkable impact is not just possible—it’s inevitable.
