Ingram's: Marshaun Butler Named to 2023 Class of Women Executives–Kansas City

Marshaun Butler, Chief Operating Officer at Saint Luke's Hospital of Kansas City, was recognized in Ingram's 2023 Class of Women Executives–Kansas City (WeKC), which honors and highlights women in leadership roles at high-profile regional companies. 

WeKC program is unique among Ingram’s suite of recognitions. Nearly 30 years ago, WeKC was an event in itself, drawing women from across business sectors together to reflect on the state of female leadership in corporate Kansas City. Not until 2002 did the leaders of that movement begin appearing on these pages as honorees, and since that time, 244 of them have been spotlighted.

Read Ingram's write-up on Marshaun Butler. 

Marshaun Butler, COO, Saint Luke’s Hospital

There are a lot of good reasons why corporate finance managers should think twice before whacking corporate internships to save a buck. Marshaun Butler is one of them. She didn’t grow up in the most affluent part of Kansas City, but she turned her parochial school education and a will to succeed into an internship offer from HCA Midwest Health through the INROADS program that focuses on underprivileged students. That occupied her summers for four years while she was earning her degree at Fisk University in Nashville. “I would come back home and work for Health Midwest and was exposed to many different areas of health-care administration, including accounting, pharmacy, radiology, medical administration, and my last summer was in strategic planning,” she says. The latter is right where she picked up straight out of school. The good fortune from that internship wasn’t the only career determinant, though. “My late grandmother had a health care issue and passed away right before I went to school,” Butler says, “and that sparked my interest because I saw the good care she had from a clinical perspective. I wanted to know how it all worked on the back end, how care was coordinated from a decision-making standpoint, and the operations process to make that care possible.” With that, she was off and running on a career that has taken her to leadership positions at Health Midwest, then Children’s Mercy, and finally to Saint Luke’s Health System, where just this year, she was named chief operating officer. She’s also an example of how women in leadership roles can advance the cause of more aspiring young women. Her mother’s encouragement to always do her best was a spark that would be kindled by two co-directors in her internship program, she says. That program “placed talented minority youth in business and industry and prepared them for corporate and community leadership. That was the mission statement, and 30 years later, I still remember it like it was yesterday,” Butler says. Healthcare, she acknowledges, has come to embrace women in leadership—her boss at the main hospital is Julie Quirin, and Melinda Estes has led the parent health system for a decade, “so I do think everybody has the opportunity to reach their goal. The lanes are wide open for women.” And yet … “There are still many challenges ahead,” she says. “One thing we know, women are lagging and still make up only about 25 percent of health-care leadership positions.” Some of that, she says, can be attributed to burnout, managing the balance of home and career life—and especially the added stress of working in the pandemic era. But, she says, “the future is bright for women in health-care because we are better at recognizing those challenges in front of us today, recognizing those gaps. There’s still more progress to come, but I believe we’ll continue to see women moving into those high positions of leadership.”