Chief Executive Officer
NYC Health & Hospitals/Harlem
New York, N.Y.
Eboné M. Carrington was chief quality officer at Interfaith Medical Center, a private hospital in Brooklyn, N.Y., when a search firm came calling with the position of deputy chief operating officer at Harlem Hospital in New York City’s public health system. “Taking the job meant a significant salary reduction,” Carrington recalls, “and I agonized over the career implications.”
Believing in her “gifts,” and that Harlem was “the safety net hospital” where she needed to be, she returned to “this great institution,” where she had interned 14 years earlier; where her father had chaired the Department of Dentistry and her mother had served as director of the Program for Women, Infants, and Children. “I stepped out on faith, and it turned out to be a wise choice,” she recounts.
At the age of 36 in 2016, five years after she was recruited, Carrington became Harlem Hospital’s youngest-ever CEO, managing more than 2,400 employees and a $440 million budget. “Sometimes following your instincts leads you to where you need to be, even when the entire outcome is unclear,” she states. She also serves as the hospital’s chief operating officer.
Carrington holds a bachelor’s in business management from Stony Brook University and a master’s in public administration from New York University. She was an Executive Leadership Fellow at The Advisory Board Co., a healthcare best-practices firm.
Married to a Stony Brook alum, she is the mother of a three-year-old son and organizes her workday to have dinner with him at home. “I have laser precision, our work must add value — no meeting for the sake of meeting. Our agendas are focused and deliverables clear,” she remarks.
She would love to set up the Black Leadership Academy to inspire children of color with lessons in leadership. She asserts, “Leadership is a modeled behavior. A mirror image speaks volumes.”
