Get insight about leadership from a Mayo Clinic ER physician. In this episode of Transform Your Workplace, host Brandon Laws sits down with Dr. Richard Winters, physician and author of You’re the Leader: Now What?: Leadership Lessons from Mayo Clinic. Dr. Winters provides fresh takes on collaboration, recognizing blind spots, and taking risks for the sake of growth.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Dr. Richard Winters is an emergency physician, director of Leadership Development for the Mayo Clinic Care Network, and the author of You’re the Leader: Now What?: Leadership Lessons from Mayo Clinic.
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🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
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THE INSPIRATION
After graduating from his residency program, Richard Winters went straight into the Emergency Room. While caring for patients as an ER physician, Dr. Winters began to notice flaws in his own methodology. He realized, “This could get better — I think we can do a better job at this.” So he stepped up as a leader in meetings with hospital staff. Instead of writing suggestions for his colleagues, or “telling people what to do,” as he would do for his patients, he approached leadership with a whole new way of thinking.
To be effective, Dr. Winters went from “taking care of one patient at a time to actually creating processes to help take care of whole populations of patients,” and he did so by taking into account the varied perspectives of the leaders that worked alongside him. The knowledge that he gained was the impetus for his latest book, You’re the Leader: Now What?
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Staying Agile
“There are times that a leader just needs to decide — the leader just needs to make a decision based on their experience and what’s going on. And then there are times when a leader needs to step back and gain a shared perspective, bring a whole bunch of different perspectives together — all the different blind spots — and make decisions. Our best leaders can do both.”
Keeping a Clear Mind
“In most situations, things are complex, and we can have our experience and expertise, but all of our data, all this analysis that we’ve done, is coming together around our own blind spots. And so our best leaders understand that. They know what to do in the moment, but they quickly step back. And it’s really this transformation […] to being a facilitator and being a coach. And so our best leaders do that — they approach these complex issues as a facilitator, as a coach, with a mind that is clear and is trying to find the best way forward.”
Gaining Perspective
“One of the things at Mayo Clinic that I really like is this concept of triads, where we have a physician leader, a nursing leader, and an administrative leader, all with different perspectives of what’s going on. […] If we just move things forward from a single physician’s perspective, there are going to be a lot of errors there. […] You have a nurse, a physician, and an administrator coming together, and we’re able to see the problems around each other’s blind spots and move forward in ways that are much more effective than just behind the blind spots of one.”
Finding Freedom
“It can be freeing to not feel the weight of this decision on your shoulders. […] Each of us has our individual genius. […] And so your role as a leader is really to collect different perspectives, agreements, disagreements, fears, worries, all these different things before you start to think about the way forward. And there is no one correct answer. There are lots of possibilities, and so it can be freeing for a leader to realize that they don’t and should not have the answer in those moments.”
Planning Meetings
“It’s helpful to understand what kind of a decision that we’re making so that it doesn’t form the decision-making style. We tend to put these agendas together — like, alright, 10 minutes for this, 15 minutes for this, 10 minutes for this. For some of these things, we need expert opinions, for some of these things, we can all collectively come together, and for some of these things, it requires approaching things from a shared perspective. And so as we deliberately plan our meetings, we can plan for those sorts of decisions that can help keep us in line.”
Measuring Burnout
“An organization can measure burnout, measure quality, measure cost, measure revenue. And as we start to see burnout, we have to have an organizational approach to it. We need to own it at an organizational level. Is that happening? If not, then there are probably some things you need to do. When I walk into a room and take care of a patient, I’m not gonna make a diagnosis without a vital sign. Burnout is an organizational vital sign, and any leader needs to incorporate that into strategic decision making.”
Taking the Risk
“Oftentimes, we find ourselves in these situations where individuals are speaking for the best practice. They’re arguing for it. And again, we could just keep doing this, what we’ve always been doing, what’s always been working, but what happens if we do that? […] You see that the risk of doing nothing or not innovating or not moving forward is actually more risky.”
LEARN MORE
Get your copy of You’re the Leader: Now What?: Leadership Lessons from Mayo Clinic wherever books are sold, or connect with the author, Richard Winters, here.