From housekeeper to vice president over nursing, Mike Hyde has just about done it all at St. Mary's Hospital.
The married father of three started his career at the hospital about 30 years ago, when he was just 20.
"I didn't really know what I wanted to do," Hyde said. "I was getting out of high school. I really didn't want to go to college."
He had no idea that down the road he'd end up with a master's degree.
He had a friend who pointed him toward janitorial service in the hospital.
Hyde began his career at the hospital as a housekeeper. After about a year, he was offered the chance to use on-the-job training to become a surgical technologist - the technician who scrubs in with surgeons during procedures and is responsible for maintaining the sterile area and handing instruments to surgeons.
Surgical technicians "coordinate all the instrumentation and flow during surgery," Hyde said.
Hyde grew up around building trades. His father was a construction worker.
"I saw all the tools and all the cool gadgets in the (emergency room)," he said. "That was appealing to a young man like me, who grew up around construction sites."
People surrounding Hyde took note of his work ethic and his ability to remember information.
They pushed him to look into nursing.
"I worked full time as a tech and went to nursing school," he said. "I obviously became a nurse. That was seven years into my career."
He earned an associate's degree at Lincoln University and took a nursing position in the operating room.
It wasn't long before his colleagues pushed Hyde to take on leadership roles.
"They kept encouraging me all along the way. That's kind of the story," Hyde said. "I'd only been a nurse for three years when I took my first leadership position - manager in the OR."
Within a year, the director of Surgical Services resigned and administrators asked Hyde to fill the role as interim director while they searched for a full-time director. He couldn't officially take the title because he didn't have required education - yet.
"I did end up going back to get my bachelor's degree," Hyde said. "I've been in so many different leadership roles along the way. I couldn't even tell you what they all were."
He built on his experiences and took leadership positions in numerous departments within the hospital - surgical services, interventional services (procedural departments) and others.
SSM Health, the St. Louis-based owner of St. Mary's Hospital, began preparing to build the new location, which opened in 2014 on Mission Drive off Missouri 179. Hyde became involved in plans to make the new hospital more patient-friendly than its predecessor.
"It was a multi-step process. The first thing we did before we even put any designs on paper was talk about what we wanted the patient experience to be like," Hyde said. "Then you go through the exercise of laying out the experience you want patients to have and see how departments sit next to each other."
Only then do planners begin looking at more details.
He has been in charge of the Emergency and the Behavioral Health departments in St. Mary's Hospital. Hyde was selected to be the chief nursing officer of the hospital last February.
"The broader you get, the more capable you'll be at the vice president level role that is responsible for all the nursing care in the hospital," he said. "I'm responsible for everything that has to do with nursing - safe care being No. 1."
The hospital tracks safe- and quality-of-care performance, he said.
Hyde is responsible for monitoring how nurses are doing. If they get off track, he helps find ways to improve.
"Nursing doesn't function independently," he said. "We obviously work with physicians and other departments. We have to figure out how we're all working together."
One project Hyde and staff are working on is improving how patients get out of the Emergency Department and into in-patient beds.
"We recognize that we have opportunities for improvement to make that a smoother process for patients," he said.