A day after GOP presidential candidates blasted the Department of Veterans Affairs, Secretary Bob McDonald was at Georgetown University to talk about what the agency could use to fix its woes.

The secret ingredient: positivity.

McDonald said, speaking at a Jan. 29 event on Value Based Leadership at Georgetown University, that the agency had previously lost sight of its values and purpose, two integral pieces needed for success.

"We're in the midst of a transformation in the VA right now," he said. "Our transformation is all about getting centered back on our customer."

To accomplish the mission, McDonald said he is focusing on not only rebuilding the veteran experience, but also the employee one, to re-imbue the agency with a sense of purpose and values.

"In 2014, when I got the job, we were in crisis, there was nobody defending the VA," he said. "As I went out — I've been to over 300 VA locations in a year and a half—I discovered that there were no advocates because we weren't embracing people. We weren't reaching out to them and involving them in what we were doing. There was so much goodwill in the country, that was a lost opportunity."

To capitalize on that opportunity, McDonald said he established the role of chief veteran experience officer to help design a VA that focuses on the veteran experience first, rather than the bureaucracy. He also presented his multi-step strategy of management, one that he used as CEO of Proctor and Gamble to define the company's purpose and values and is currently applying at the VA.

But there is a long memory of the past scandals that have rocked the agency, including the backlog of patient care in VA hospitals, the case of two Veterans Benefits Administration officials accused of misusing their positions, and the lingering disciplinary cases still awaiting resolutions.

It's a laundry list of bad perception that McDonald is trying to turn around. When asked about how society could better promote good ethical behavior in its institutions, citing the ongoing crisis of water safety in Flint, Mich., McDonald said we should be focusing more on people doing right than those doing wrong.

"We spend too much time managing by exception. We spend too much time on things that negatively happen," he said. "The way to motivate people is to focus on what's positive."

"We tend to have a media and we tend to have a government, where parts of that media and parts of that government feel the only way to get attention is to talk something down or discover something," he continued. "Who won a Pulitzer Prize for being the investigative reporter who identified the doctor that fought [to combat the impact of the] lead in the water? We need to change that."

McDonald said where managers and organizations often go wrong is by setting up unachievable goals and chastising their teams when they can't carry them out. Instead, he said he wants to provide the right kind of leadership to "catch people succeeding" and build out from there.

At the VA, that includes a broader focus on customer service and veteran engagement.

"If you don't invest in your employees, they are not going to take care of your customer," he said.

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