MSK CEO on Moving from the OR to the C-Suite

Now, as a great surgeon, sometimes you might say, I don't need to go be into administrative parts of hospitals, I just want to be a doctor, just do surgery. What prompted you to want to get out of just doing surgery to be an administrator and a hospital leader? Yeah, I think it was, again, watching others who did it well. I had a dean who recruited me from Birmingham, Alabama to Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is a big jump to convince me to move my family. But she did several things that showed me the power of a leader at a significant level to affect the career of other leaders. And after I'd helped build a growing department of surgery at the University of Minnesota, I thought I could serve in that role. In particular, I realized over time that my training as a surgeon brought a set of credible things to the table. One, if surgeons have a measure of emotional intelligence, much of our training reinforces that. It reinforces skill, not necessarily emotional intelligence. But if a surgeon has some self-awareness and emotional intelligence, what they bring to the table of leadership are three fundamental things. Number one, they do everything in teams. Their operations, their patients they see is all team-focused. Number two, they value process, but they hold themselves very much accountable to execution. They understand that it's good to explore a patient, but what really matters is did you take the tumor out? And then number three, they make difficult decisions on incomplete information. Those things I realized that I could bring to the table as a leader if I had a sort of a passion for working with people and had some sense of self-awareness.