WittKieffer Impactful Leaders Podcast

Finding Purpose in One's Past: Brenda Rodriguez

Long before she became a community health center CEO, Brenda Rodriguez knew from personal experience their critical importance to society. "I'm a patient," she says proudly. "More than half my life I was homeless or struggling in one way or another . . . but I always knew life can be better." For Rodriguez and her family, community health centers were a "stabilizing force" that provided high-quality, and culturally competent, care and services.
Those experiences guide her today as CEO of Lynn Community Health Center in Massachusetts. "I need to be more courageous, I need to be more bold," she says. "It's not often as a professional where there's this intersection between your personal journey . . .and your professional and career aspirations."
In this candid and colorful conversation with Julie Rosen, Principal and Leader of WittKieffer's Social Impact & Nonprofits Practice, Rodriguez recounts her own experiences with community health centers and how they have shaped her leadership style, combined with a background in business consulting that gives her an approach that is both analytical and inspirational. Whether working with her staff, leadership team, or community members, Rodriguez seeks to "activate their agency".
Near the end of the conversation, Rodriguez explains why "the fish rots from the head" is an unusual maxim that guides her work and that other leaders can heed as well.

Accelerating Physician Leader Impact: Andrew M. Ibrahim, M.D., MSc

As an accomplished surgeon, researcher, and architect, Andrew Ibrahim, M.D. has combined diverse passions into a career that is very much of his own design and making. And yet Dr. Ibrahim knows the critical role that mentors play in one's career and in developing physician leaders. As director of the University of Michigan's Center for Healthcare Outcomes & Policy (CHOP), he and colleagues have instituted formal mentoring programs – "Launch" teams for junior faculty and "Boost" teams for mid-career faculty – as part of efforts to normalize mentoring and, in fact, make it a leadership expectation. "That's been normalized in our culture," he tells WittKieffer's Michael Anderson, M.D. "You don't move into a role of influence or get control of resources until you have a track record of mentoring." 
Dr. Ibrahim admits to being "obsessed with unrealized potential" and thinks deeply and creatively about helping those around him to develop and grow. A core belief is to identify potential leaders early in their careers and to accelerate their attainment of vital skills and experience. Too often in academic medicine, he says, leaders move through formal channels of advancement which don't necessarily build the right skills at the right pace, or ultimately place individuals in their optimal roles.
In this latest episode of the Accelerating Physician Leader Impact series – part of WittKieffer's Impactful Leaders Podcast  – Drs. Ibrahim and Anderson explore the unique qualities of the leadership development program at Michigan's CHOP and their broad applicability. Such ideas can serve as a blueprint for other leaders and organizations to follow.

Secrets to Sustaining Leadership Success: Dr. Jean Ann Larson

Dr. Jean Ann Larson has a difficult job: helping already high-achieving people to be even better than they are. As Chief Leadership Development Officer at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Health System and Senior Associate Dean for Leadership Development at the UAB Heersink School of Medicine, Dr. Larson works daily with some of the institution's most accomplished leaders, from deans to chiefs to chairs to health system C-suite leaders. In lieu of "improving" or "fixing" these individuals, she sees her role as helping them understand that learning and growth should never really stop. "No matter where you are on your journey, you have to develop new skills," she says.
Dr. Larson's emphasis in her work is on sustaining leadership success, building upon leaders' past accomplishments to help them address new and unique challenges. In turn, this fosters sustained leadership excellence across an organization like UAB, excellence that persists even when individual leaders come and go. 
In this Impactful Leaders Podcast, Dr. Larson reflects with WittKieffer's Vinny Gossain upon how she arrived in her current role, the secret sauce to leadership development, and the lessons that can be applied within other organizations.

In Interim Leadership, "It's Not About Me": Jeff Shilling

Interim leadership is a career path many executives are taking, including those who have served as senior administrators in higher education. Jeff Shilling thought he would transition into full-time consulting work after he transitioned out of a full time role in advancement, but instead found an opportunity as an interim leader through WittKieffer. He then found that he enjoyed a new way to use his expertise to help organizations through leadership transitions. A good interim leader needs a few simple qualities, Shilling says: 
Being comfortable in your own skin, so you're not intimidated by a challenging new interim role; 
Humility and the maturity to know "It's not about me" in an interim role; 
Curiosity and being able to say, "Let me know how I can be helpful." 
 

Impact at Scale: Ned Olney

Soon after taking the reins of Crotched Mountain Foundation in 2019, CEO Ned Olney and the organization made the difficult decision to close the iconic New Hampshire school that had served kids with severe disabilities since the 1940s, but that was no longer financially viable. "If we don't have the school, then who are we, what's our identity?" Olney remembered thinking. "What are we moving to?"  
In this Impactful Leaders Podcast, Olney speaks with WittKieffer Consultant John Fazekas about Crotched Mountain and what other nonprofits can learn from its bold vision for change. Olney's experience with Crotched Mountain is inspiring, which is apropos: "Take every single opportunity to inspire the people you serve," he advises. "If you can't inspire them, you'll have a hard time leading." 

Academic Medicine Dean Insights: Said Ibrahim, M.D., MBA, MPH

Dr. Ibrahim's story is an inspiring one, starting as a boy on the border of Ethiopia and Somalia, coming to the U.S. as a college basketball recruit, and moving on to medical school and ascending into leadership roles through hard work and passion. It's important for aspiring physician leaders and deans to adopt a growth mindset, he maintains, especially in regard to grasping both the clinical and academic realms of medicine today.
 
His insights, shared with WittKieffer's Aaron Mitra, FACHE, and Clarence Braddock, M.D., are included in our Academic Medicine Dean Insights series (part of the Impactful Leaders podcast). Academic medicine today is a "team sport", Dr. Ibrahim believes. In this conversation, he explores his own formula for success and shares advice for others to find winning ways. 

All in This Together: Erik Decker

While admitting to being a bit scared by every new career opportunity, Erik Decker has nonetheless continued to put himself in challenging situations where success wasn't assured. His advice for other leaders: "Your capacity to achieve is way larger than you think it is."
In this Impactful Leaders episode with WittKieffer Consultant Zach Durst, Decker – currently Chief Information Security Officer with Intermountain Health – reflects upon his journey from a high schooler who just wanted to be a follower to an inquisitive cell biology major in college to someone who was nudged into leadership by others who saw superpowers he wasn't aware of.
Decker has come to understand that leadership is about "releasing your authority" and empowering team members to all be contributors and decision makers. His team-oriented approach translates to his activities in raising cybersecurity resilience for the healthcare industry. As chair of the Health Sector Coordinating Council's Cybersecurity Working Group, he has pushed for tougher standards by which each organization's protections against bad actors supports collective efforts. "Set the system up so you have to beat all of us to beat one of us," he urges.
Decker and Durst also explore how CISOs and their teams can prove value and return on investment as cybersecurity threats increase almost daily. It's a "dirty world," he admits, one that needs everyone – both leaders and followers – working together.

Accelerating Physician Leader Impact: Jennifer Baccon, M.D., Ph.D., MHCM

As a pathologist, Jennifer Baccon, M.D., Ph.D., MHCM learned early in her career to appreciate and understand colleagues across the organizations she worked in – clinicians and non-clinicians alike. These experiences translated well into a philosophy of leadership that prioritizes the input of others in decision-making. "Listen first and then speak," she says. "A lot of leaders want to be in charge and tell people what to do. To me that's completely backward . . . Seek first to understand and then to be understood." 
Dr. Baccon is Chair of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at Akron Children's. She is also the organization's Medical Director of Value Analysis in Supply Chain, which illustrates how she has challenged herself as a physician leader to step outside her clinical comfort zone to expand her career opportunities. 

Delivering Results and Finding Reward in Advancement Leadership: Julie Lucas

Julie Lucas, Vice President of Resource Development at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes these two objectives define her work in advancement for more than 25 years and should be guiding principles for anyone who works in the field. Results are critical, of course, for any philanthropic leader, but creating community, unity, and enthusiasm around an institution's mission and vision are also imperative.
In this conversation with WittKieffer Senior Partner and Advancement Practice Leader Greg Duyck, Lucas shares the story of becoming enamored with the potential of advancement and development to make a difference in society. Today, Lucas has overseen some of the largest and most successful campaigns in higher education, including MIT's current Campaign for a Better World. Her success can also be traced to an interdisciplinary approach to fundraising, much like the traditional interdisciplinary framework of universities. "Everybody is working together" to generate the capital to keep the institution's mission-critical activities going. Lucas uses weekly "huddles" to get leadership and advancement team members on the same page by:
Setting goals and priorities aligned with the organizational mission
Ensuring role clarity
Encouraging partnerships and collaboration within advancement and across the university
Lucas is still driven by the same things that led her to advancement in the first place – to make a "meaningful and tangible" difference in the lives of others. She states: "What drives so many of us in higher education is a deep connection to the people we're working with and a shared dedication to the mission."

Academic Medicine Dean Insights: Sandra Wong, M.D.

Dr. Sandra Wong has a decorated C.V. and vast experience but, she admits, nothing can truly prepare a person to assume an academic medicine dean role. Six months into her position as dean of the Emory School of Medicine, Dr. Wong reflects on what got her here, and what success now means, in this podcast discussion with WittKieffer's Joyce De Leo, Ph.D.
The traditional path to a deanship (division chief, chair, associate dean, dean) may no longer hold, but that's okay, says Dr. Wong. Leaders learn from the unique experiences and peer advice that force them to be "comfortable being uncomfortable."
Good leaders also help their teams through change and uncomfortable times, with an eye on the "why" and the end goal of change initiatives. “If people really feel like their cheese is being moved for no reason, that’s a very different equation,” she says. Dr. Wong also believes that good leaders are good team members, "leave their egos at the door", and realize that leadership is not about them but about others.
Ultimately, success as a dean is not about perfection (especially in an era of high pressure and razor-thin margins in academic medicine), but about embracing the moment, she believes. "None of us get away without having some failures," she says. "Embrace those failures . . . learn from them and move on." She adds: "Stay in the moment. Enjoy the work that's in front of you."