What happens when transparency backfires? Dr. Richard Winters shares a leadership moment at Mayo Clinic where good intentions around openness created unexpected tension—and the lessons that reshaped how he thinks about trust, burnout, and adaptive leadership in healthcare.
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My guest for Episode #194 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Richard Winters, M.D., an emergency physician at the Mayo Clinic. And he’s the author of YOU’RE THE LEADER. NOW WHAT? Leadership Lessons from Mayo Clinic.
As director of Leadership Development for the Mayo Clinic Care Network and as an executive coach, Dr. Winters provides coaching for Mayo Clinic leaders.
Dr. Winters graduated from the Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine in 1994 and returned to Mayo Clinic in 2015.
Previously, Winters served as managing partner of a democratic physician group, department chair of an emergency department, and president of an 800-physician medical staff.
In this episode, Dr. Winters tells his favorite mistake story about being a little too transparent with physicians in a meeting at Mayo Clinic. Why did so many physicians get upset about this discussion about data around billing practices? Why did it help for him to admit the mistake? How did he adjust and what did he learn from this mistake?
We also talk about questions and topics, including:
- Was it a mistake to be so transparent?
- Breaking down hierarchy and hearing the perspectives of others
- Burnout in healthcare, not just doctors but nurses and others… bad before COVID, worse now?
- Psychological well-being — 6 dimensions
- What are key signs of burnout? How to recognize it and how to bring it up??
- Is burnout different than depression?
- A mistake to blame the person who is burned out? Resiliency training?
- Fix the person or fix the environment?
- Your book — the “now what?” Implies being thrown into a leadership role… is there enough formal leadership education, development, and mentoring in healthcare?
- How are physicians taught about leading — and being parts of care teams — during medical school and residency? Formal education or seeing the behavior modeled by others?
- Ronald Heifitz – technical vs adaptive challenges
- Key differences in the leadership style at Mayo Clinic?
- Responding to clinical mistakes… medical error, patient harm?
- To you, what are the ideal leader behaviors?
- There’s normally so much hierarchy in HC… what was the “democratic physician group” that you were a part of, what does that mean?
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!["It's very important for leaders, especially within these sort of formal organizations... [to ask] how do we open it up so that we can hear the voices, the perspectives of others [who aren't formal leaders]?" Dr. Richard Winters](https://www.markgraban.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Richard-Winters-MD-My-Favorite-Mistake-Quotes-1.jpg)
!["[We need] ways of getting around those blind spots and means hearing from many different perspectives. And so you can still have a leader who's actually making the final decision, but if they're making that decision based on multiple different perspectives, jumping outside of themself, it's gonna be a lot more effective." - Dr. Richard Winters](https://www.markgraban.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Richard-Winters-MD-My-Favorite-Mistake-Quotes-4.jpg)
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Automated Transcript (Likely Contains Mistakes)
Here is the cleaned-up transcript. I have removed the advertisements, corrected the spelling of names (Mark Graban, Ron Heifetz) and technical terms (eudaimonic), and smoothed out the conversation by removing filler words and stutters.
Mark Graban: Hey, it's Mark Graban. If you've ever felt like you had to be perfect at work or you're worried about making mistakes, check out my audiobook, The Mistakes That Make Us. I share stories about how owning and learning from mistakes actually leads to better results, stronger teams, and real innovation. It's available on Audible, Amazon, Apple Books, or just head over to mistakesbook.com. I hope you'll give it a listen.
Mark Graban: I am Mark Graban. This is My Favorite Mistake. In this podcast, you'll hear business leaders and other really interesting people talking about their favorite mistakes, because we all make mistakes. But what matters is learning from our mistakes instead of repeating them over and over again. So this is the place for honest reflection and conversation, personal growth, and professional success. Visit our website at myfavoritemistakepodcast.com to learn more about Dr. Winters, his book, and more. Look for links in the show notes, or go to markgraban.com/mistake194. As always, thanks for listening.
Well, hi everybody. Welcome back to My Favorite Mistake, and joining us today is Dr. Richard Winters. He is an emergency physician at the Mayo Clinic. He's the author of the book, You’re the Leader. Now What? Leadership Lessons from Mayo Clinic. He is the Director of Leadership Development for the Mayo Clinic Care Network. He is an executive coach and he provides coaching for Mayo Clinic leaders. So it'd be good to talk about that today. He graduated from the Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine in 1994, returning to the Mayo Clinic in 2015. Previously he had roles including being a managing partner of a democratic physician group, department chair of an emergency department, and president of an 800-physician medical staff. You can learn more about Dr. Winters, his work, and his book at richardwinters.com/book. So with that, Dr. Winters, thanks for joining us here today. How are you?
Dr. Richard Winters: Yeah, doing great. Thanks for having me.
Mark Graban: So there's a lot to talk about. Mayo Clinic, of course, is a world-famous, clinically excellent organization. There have been other books published about leadership at Mayo Clinic, so it'll be really exciting to explore what you've learned and what you're teaching. I think there will be a lot that is transferable for people working in other industries. I hope you would agree with that opportunity for learning. People don't have to hit stop if they're not a doctor or not a healthcare leader, right?
Dr. Richard Winters: Exactly. Totally. The nice thing is that all the problems we see in healthcare, I think we can apply across the board. So I think everyone will find something helpful.
Mark Graban: Well, good. We will get back to that, but as we always do, I think it's a good opportunity to explore the fact that we're all human, including doctors. We all make mistakes. I want to hear from your career and the different things you've done. What would you say is your favorite mistake?
Dr. Richard Winters: My favorite mistake. So as you said, I went to medical school at Mayo in the early nineties, and then I practiced for 20 years in this private practice setting where I was a managing partner, I was the president of the medical staff, and I was a CEO of this startup accountable care organization. When I returned to Mayo in 2015, I was really excited to come back to an organization aligned with values, doing a really good job.
When I got here, as a mid-career physician with an MBA, I had this different sort of talent that was not common for the group at the time. They were wondering what to do with me. So the chair of my department said, “Hey, why don't you become the finance chair?” And I said, “Sure, I'll become the finance chair.”
During the first meeting as finance chair, I had an opportunity. It's kind of weird in medicine the way that we bill based on how the doctor documents the care. I can take care of a patient with a heart attack, I can take care of patients who've had trauma, but if I'm missing one element of a physical exam—that may not have even been important for the care of the patient—or one element of a history, then our billing would get hurt. In my past life before Mayo, I knew how to connect physicians with this documentation, which at times seemed kind of dumb.
I had heard that people wanted their data. So I distributed this data to all the people within the meeting. If you were there, Mark, you could see how you compared to me and how you compared with your other colleagues. People were really excited as I stepped up to the room, but I noticed that as I handed out this piece of paper that had their information transparently on it, the room went from smiles to anger. I saw some tears. I saw a vein in the forehead popping up in some of the individuals. What I thought was my baby turned out to be a really dirty diaper. I did not approach this in the right way.
Mark Graban: Yeah.
Dr. Richard Winters: And it was very painful. As I came to Mayo, one of the weird things is that you don't sign a contract. It's a handshake. I had just brought my kids from California to Minnesota and I saw my life flash before my eyes in that moment.
Mark Graban: Gosh. It is an interesting scenario. It sounds like part of the origin of this whole situation is what you might describe as mistakes in the charting—inadvertent, like “I left something out”—or it could be a lack of knowledge. I'd be curious to hear a little bit more about that situation. How much of it is not knowing versus “oops, I didn't do the thing I knew I should do because we're human” when it comes to that charting and the impact on billing?
Dr. Richard Winters: The insurance companies and the government have tried to figure out how we pay for medical care. People have gotten together in a room and started to put together a recipe, like checkboxes. It just so happens those checkboxes don't necessarily always correlate with good care. So you have a group of physicians who are documenting good care and they may miss a checkbox, which really may not be that pertinent in the moment for the care of the patient. There may have been mistakes made on the side of the individuals as we're documenting and seeing patient after patient, but in this scenario, the big mistake was me and the way I approached this room of colleagues based on what I incorrectly thought was wanted.
Mark Graban: So the data you had was correct. Was the mistake to be so transparent? Was it a mistake to show the data to everybody at the same time instead of doing it individually?
Dr. Richard Winters: Where I had been before, it was about transparency. Everyone could see everything. Open book. There are positives about that because you can see what your data is. There are negatives about that because as people see data, sometimes they interpret it incorrectly and make decisions in ways that aren't so informed. I like the transparency. As I came into Mayo, people are very transparent about the care of the patient.
In terms of the finance stuff, though, what I found after I processed this was there was this worry that by presenting this finance-oriented data, it was going to reduce the doctors to commodities. That they were documentation machines, or that we were in some way going to use this data to actually increase the billing on patients unnecessarily. That this was going to hurt the care of the patient overall. Some were concerned like, “Okay, now you're showing us the numbers. How about research? We do all this research here. Let's see the numbers for that. Or how about teaching? Maybe I'm not documenting at such a high level as others because I'm teaching more.” There's a whole layer of things that I had not considered in going into the room.
Mark Graban: You described the body language. It sounds like you read the room really quickly, but what happened right in that moment? And were there any follow-up discussions from the department chair or feedback? Like a scolding?
Dr. Richard Winters: So what do you do? As I work with leaders, I think there are a couple of common things that people do. One is you sit down and pretend it didn't happen and hope that it goes away. I didn't do that. Another common thing is something I call the “cognitive headlock,” where I say, “Okay, I understand your concern, but I've already thought about your concerns and you're incorrect because of this.” Thankfully, I didn't do either of those things.
Basically, in the moment, as I saw my life flash before my eyes, I just asked, “So what's going on here? I noticed that this is upsetting you.” Some people were happy; ironically, those people had done very well in comparison to colleagues. But for those that were concerned, I just tried to understand what was going on and gain these perspectives. I understood in the moment that I made a mistake here. So what we ended up doing was taking it aside and then working on this process with an understanding more of the shared perspective. No decisions were made at that time.
I gotta say, I think a lot of leaders experience this. It was actually very painful for me. Like I said, I'd uprooted my family. That evening, it was like a montage in a bad movie where it was raining outside and I'm going for a walk listening to a sad song. It was very difficult for me. But even more difficult was that I could see that I had really put my colleagues into distress over something that I thought was going to be really helpful. It was all based on my approach.
Mark Graban: I can think of at least one other guest in a totally different context where their favorite mistake story was having the right information—from a purely logical perspective, the facts were the facts—but how we show it matters. It would be a mistake to say, “Well, don't get emotional.” We're humans. We're complex. Would you agree with the general phrase common in leadership coaching: “praise publicly, criticize privately”? If that data felt like criticism to those who were maybe in the bottom of the scale, do you give that kind of advice?
Dr. Richard Winters: I think in this situation it would've been better for me to work with the group about: “How would you like to see this information?” And then go with what the group decided. How could I have presented the data? Certainly transparently showing everything, just opening up the books. Another thing I could have done is give an individual their score and then blind all the other names so they could see how they sat, but no one else would see that. Or we could just discuss it, maybe do some teaching, and then show scores. Lots of different ways of approaching it. I think certainly now I would be asking the group, “So what's going to be most helpful here?”
Mark Graban: I appreciate you sharing that reflection. It sounds like in the meeting you didn't get defensive. I appreciate asking questions like, “Help me understand.” I've learned being around people in healthcare that can be a really helpful, if not disarming, phrase. Secondly, it sounds like you made a pretty direct admission here of, “I made a mistake.” To acknowledge that can be helpful. What are your thoughts on that for this situation or generally speaking if you're coaching somebody who's made a leadership mistake?
Dr. Richard Winters: I think that's it. “Mistake” is one way of saying it, but I've discovered some part of this really complex situation that I hadn't seen before. Acknowledging that is really important. As an emergency physician, I take a history, do an exam, and then I write an order. I take care of patients in moments and I know what needs to be done. You'd think that would be kind of command and control. But even in those sorts of situations, having to be open to the fact that as I walk out of the room, the nurse has a very different perspective. The paramedics have a very different perspective. Some other family member comes in, some new bit of information comes in. How to just be open to that complexity in those times to be able to work through it is important.
Mark Graban: There's a lot of hierarchy in healthcare. You have residents and attendings, hierarchy within a physician group, and then you have a clinical hierarchy—physicians, nurses. What are some things from a leadership perspective to create more of a team environment where, like you said, this command and control order might appropriately be questioned by a nurse? What are your thoughts on not letting the hierarchy cause problems?
Dr. Richard Winters: It's funny, I'm in Minnesota now, and so there's “Minnesota Nice.” Minnesota Nice is where you can be talking about something with someone and they can seem like they're agreeing—smiling, they don't want to offend, they want things to go well—and then it ends up actually they didn't agree with you at all. Now put on top of that a role where you're a supervisor or you have control of resources. You can certainly be in meetings where individuals may agree at the front of it, but actually disagree on the other side.
It's very important for leaders, especially within formal organizations, to ask: How do we open it up so that we can hear the voices and perspectives of others? Another thing that comes up is diversity and inclusion. We can bring lots of really interesting individuals with different backgrounds into our groups, but are we hearing them? Do they feel safe in speaking up? If I had not been at my best and had been defensive in that sort of situation… some leaders can just push through this stuff, but it really can hurt the culture. It can hurt the individuals involved. And honestly, I don't think it's the best way of leading. You get things done maybe in the moment, but on the back end, it does not work out so well.
Mark Graban: One other general issue you write about is challenges related to burnout in healthcare. It seems like generally speaking that this was a problem before COVID, but in some ways, COVID and what we're still going through now has made it worse. Would you agree with that statement? What's your assessment of the state of burnout?
Dr. Richard Winters: Yeah, I think you're right. Burnout has always been there. The nice thing now is that we have words to put behind it, so now we can talk about it and we can measure it. But COVID is one of these situations that is very intense. There's lots of change, things are unpredictable, and I think that does heighten this sense of burnout.
As I think through burnout, there's something called eudaimonic wellbeing. This is what goes through my head as I'm thinking about burnout. There's hedonic wellbeing, which is “I feel good in the moment.” I'm gonna go out, have a drink, be with friends. Maybe I don't feel so good the next day, but in that moment it felt great. As we're talking about burnout, we're not talking about the lack of that. What we're talking about is this thing called eudaimonic or psychological wellbeing. There are six components of that:
- Purpose: Being aligned with the purpose and values of the organization.
- Autonomy: The sense that you are being heard, that you're having an effect on decisions.
- Personal growth: That I'm going to be better today than I was yesterday and I'm learning new things.
- Environmental mastery: A sense that you have the resources you need to get things done.
- Positive relations: Relations with colleagues.
- Self-acceptance: Being able to accept that, for example, I made this really bad mistake with these new colleagues.
You put COVID in there and you can see how, as organizations are responding: Are we really working in alignment with our purpose and our values? I certainly don't have the resources I need, so environmental mastery may not be there. Am I sleeping well, eating well? I'm working so hard personal growth may be put to the side. You can see how burnout can start to be intensified.
Mark Graban: It sounds like the lack of those six factors might be contributors or causes of burnout. When it comes to symptoms, if you were looking to a colleague and you want to try to be helpful—they don't seem themselves—is there a way to bring this up in a way that's not criticizing?
Dr. Richard Winters: First, how do you recognize burnout? The definition of burnout is a combination of three things.
One is that you're emotionally exhausted. If you notice that I'm no longer my joyful self, I just seem to have that emotional exhaustion, that may be a sign. We can all have moments of that, but burnout is persistent.
Then there's cynicism. There used to be a cartoon I would watch, The Adventures of Gulliver, where they'd go on these adventures. There was this guy named Glum part of the group. They were like, “Oh, yay, let's go on this adventure.” And Glum was always like, “We'll never make it.” His friends were like, “Come on, Glum, be positive.” And Glum was like, “I'm positive we'll never make it.” You may see a colleague or friend all of a sudden becoming cynical about things—”This is never gonna work.” If they seem to be going to that dark, sarcastic side, and you pair that up with emotional exhaustion, you start to think maybe this person's burned out.
The third thing is that you're just not as effective. You're emotionally exhausted, you're cynical, so your effectiveness goes down.
I think as you start noticing that in friends, it is fair to bring that up. You're friends with them. “Like, how are things going? You seem kind of down. Are you feeling burned out?” Naming that and having a conversation can be quite helpful.
Mark Graban: How similar or are there differences between burnout and depression?
Dr. Richard Winters: Different things. Depression has its own clinical diagnostic criteria, like flat negative affect. There are similarities, and certainly people who are burned out can be depressed, but the two may not coexist.
Mark Graban: I guess if in doubt, going to a clinician to help sort that out is a good idea.
Dr. Richard Winters: Yeah, especially from a depression perspective. From a burnout perspective, you can go online and look up a burnout questionnaire.
Mark Graban: When it comes to burnout, I've heard people complain that they feel blamed. They say, “Well, they're sending us to resiliency training.” There's this question of: Do I need to be better at dealing with stuff, or can we fix the environment that's contributing?
Dr. Richard Winters: “Mark, you're burned out because you're not resilient enough. You don't have enough grit.” Those are the sorts of things that an individual might hear. I think it's important to think about burnout from multiple different levels.
Yes, if I have not slept well, if I'm not eating well, if I'm not exercising, I am crusty and the world is a crusty place. Am I more likely to be cynical? Yes. So are there things I can do? Certainly. But if I wake up the next day and the organization still isn't aligned with my values, I don't have the things I need to get stuff done, my email box is full, and people are being mean to me… there's a part of me, but there's also a part of the rest of the world.
From an organizational perspective, the organization needs to identify that this is our responsibility. That means the board and senior leaders need to say this is a systemic organizational issue. Just as we're measuring the cost of producing our product or customer satisfaction, we need to be understanding the wellbeing of those working with us. If you're an “evil CEO” and you don't care about your minions, you're going to have a bigger turnover, it's going to be more costly, and your quality is going to go down.
Mark Graban: Right. We don't want a “maniacal CEO” to say, “We're going to have a meeting about mistakes,” and then fire everybody who admitted making a mistake.
Dr. Richard Winters: Exactly. So organizational level is one thing. Then there's the interpersonal—the way that we're meeting together. That was where my mistake was. I heard a problem—people wanted to be better at documenting—and I put my expertise together. But I wasn't hearing what they were saying ahead of time. I didn't know what they wanted. There was a sense of autonomy regarding how I wanted to receive my information, their sense of control, their sense of alignment with values. Are you including different perspectives? Are you jumping to conclusions? Those sorts of things have a big impact.
And then finally, you get back down to the individual. Are you eating well? But also, how am I making sense of this? I see a lot of individuals who feel like they get into this space where they're a victim and they're blaming the world. Yes, the world has a place there. But on the other hand, how are you keeping yourself in this spot where you are burned out?
Mark Graban: What I hear you saying is it is a mistake to only blame external factors and to not think about what you can do. It might not be sufficient, but it might be necessary and helpful.
Dr. Richard Winters: Yeah. You don't want a colleague to be burned out. You don't want a colleague to be trapped. And you don't want to be a victim where you have no power. I think there's very few situations where a person has no power. If you're living a life of being burned out, let's say the rest of the world is just wrong and they're not gonna change. Given that, now what? What are you gonna do?
Mark Graban: With the “Now What?”—back to the title of your book—that makes me think of situations where you're a great individual contributor and you're put into a leadership role. Is there enough formal leadership education? Are there expectations being set? Or do we kind of throw people into the deep end?
Dr. Richard Winters: I think it's both. A strong organization is identifying those individuals who are working well with others and driving results. When those individuals become leaders, they're facing a whole bunch of different sorts of problems where their expertise—the thing that got them there—won't get them to the next level. No longer is it your analysis and expertise getting things done; it's now you facilitating and coaching and trying to get the best out of others.
I think there is certainly training that people can take, but a lot of it is also while you're in that position. You start to face situations similar to the one I faced. Having that “just in time” learning—how do I make sense of this? How do I become more authentic?
Mark Graban: So back to your situation. Did you have a coach to go to? Was there an informal mentor?
Dr. Richard Winters: It's a combination of all this. One of the nice things is I have graduate training in executive coaching. There's a framework I go through. Applying that to myself was very helpful. How do I step away from myself and help myself think through this?
And I had a coach. Having them help me say, “Okay, Winters, on the one hand I hear you say this, on the other hand I hear you saying that. How do you put these things together?” They have no agenda; their agenda is just to help me think through that. Also colleagues, mentorship, reading—all those sorts of things come together.
Mark Graban: How much, if anything, in terms of leadership skills is part of formal education through medical school versus absorbed in the workplace?
Dr. Richard Winters: Ron Heifetz wrote a great book where he talks about technical versus adaptive challenges. That's a great framework. Technical challenges are those things where I can learn how to put an IV in a patient, read a spreadsheet, or learn human anatomy. I've learned something that allows me to move forward. Those things are known. You have the recipe.
Sometimes, though, you have the recipe and things aren't coming out right. There are other elements here that are adaptive—how you're putting things together, making sense of the environment, and making sense of your place in the world. It's almost like getting a new app on your phone—that's a new skill. But then the phone's operating system gets upgraded and the phone can do things in lots of different ways. That's what technical versus adaptive is.
COVID is this tremendously difficult adaptive challenge. It pressures us to make sense of these really complex, thorny issues in new ways. It really is wisdom—the ability to take in other perspectives, separate yourself out from the situation, and model the situation as a whole. Good leaders will face these situations, work through them, and come out wiser.
Mark Graban: Because it seems like you can teach principles, but you can't train somebody for all of the different possible situations you're going to face as a leader. It seems like there's some element of learning by doing.
Dr. Richard Winters: Yeah, and a lot of the skill stuff tends to be binary: yes/no, multiple choice. The other stuff is really the essay. It's the space in between. It is helpful to have some frameworks that guide you into that space where you're not thinking so binary, but you're able to start making sense of things in ways that are a little less clear. Two things that seem so opposed may actually both be correct and incorrect at the same moment. How do you help teams and yourself navigate through that?
Mark Graban: You mentioned Ron Heifetz. I'll put a link in the show notes. Leadership on the Line is a really helpful book. Coming into Mayo with experience in other organizations, what are some of the key leadership differences?
Dr. Richard Winters: Mayo is physician-led, but the way decisions are made here is very much from the perspective of what we call dyads or triads. It's always a physician paired with a nurse, paired with an administrator. The three of them come together. You can imagine the power of that in terms of looking around each other's blind spots.
In many organizations, chairs are chosen by identifying candidates and then the higher-ups blessing it. The way chairs are chosen here is by a multidisciplinary group—physicians, nurses, administrators—on a personnel committee. They will seek candidates from within the departments who are aligned with Mayo Clinic values and who show they can bring colleagues together. The power source comes from the organization choosing what's best for the organization, rather than “Let's get Winters because he fights for emergency medicine.” As you take that element out of it, it's a much more collaborative situation.
Mark Graban: Before we wrap up, what would be ideal leadership behaviors when there's a clinical mistake or a medical error?
Dr. Richard Winters: The first thing is being able to identify it. Measuring rates or capturing a single incidence. The second thing is going back to self-acceptance. Why are we coming around this? Is it to blame and assign who is responsible? That individual level is not so helpful because we're a part of a group of people.
We look at this from the perspective of the system, the interpersonal, and the individual. You bring individuals together and get different perspectives of what happened. This isn't for the purpose of calling someone out. It's for the purpose of saying, “This was my experience.” You get situations where the nurse said the doctor said this, and the doctor said actually the opposite. That's what happens. We're all receiving information from our different perspectives. You take all that together and then ask: How can we change the system? What can we do to support the individual? It's really quite similar to what any good leader would do in the face of a challenge.
Mark Graban: It sounds like shifting away from blame to understanding and problem-solving.
Dr. Richard Winters: Yeah. There are leaders who lead through command and control—”This is what I say and this is what you do.” Those organizations do not tend to be so healthy or adaptive long term. Command and control could work very well in static environments where things aren't changing. When the dynamics start to change, then the blind spots of a leader get amplified throughout the organization. What you want are ways of getting around those blind spots, which involves as many different perspectives as possible. You can still have a leader who's making the final decision, but if they're making that decision based on multiple different perspectives, it's going to be a lot more effective.
Mark Graban: That gives a good transition into the last question. You mentioned previously being part of a “democratic physician group.” I assume that's “small d” democratic. I'm curious what that meant in terms of decision making.
Dr. Richard Winters: To us, it meant the books were open. We could all see what was going on. We knew how much the leaders were making. There was really a vote to have decisions. Certainly, there were some day-to-day things left to the chair, but in general, things are brought back to the group as a whole. You're sitting around a table deciding the direction we want to take.
The challenge is, if you don't have a diverse group of individuals, one blind spot can be just as big as the blind spot of a group of people. So in that sort of democratic group, you want again as many different perspectives because it's just going to help you be better and evolve.
There was another wrinkle within medicine: there are a lot of groups that are owned by large funds and public companies. There can be a sense within those groups of “how are we aligned with the incentives of the leadership?” For the democratic groups, there really is a sense up and down of how decisions are being made and how they're a part of it.
Mark Graban: Well, lots of great thoughts on leadership here today. I encourage people to check out the book, You’re the Leader. Now What? Leadership Lessons from Mayo Clinic. You can learn more about Dr. Richard Winters at his website, richardwinters.com. Thank you for being here and for telling your story and helping us think through some of these really important issues.
Dr. Richard Winters: Thanks for having me, Mark.
Mark Graban: Thank you. Again, thanks to Dr. Richard Winters for being our guest today. Look for links in the show notes, or go to markgraban.com/mistake194. As always, I want to thank you for listening. I hope this podcast inspires you to reflect on your own mistakes, how you can learn from them, or turn them into a positive. If you have feedback or a story to share, you can email me at myfavoritemistakepodcast@gmail.com. And again, our website is myfavoritemistakepodcast.com.
This episode explores leadership transparency in healthcare and the risks of sharing billing data with physicians. Dr. Richard Winters explains how learning from mistakes can improve trust, reduce burnout, and strengthen medical leadership.