Dr. Matt Sherrer (Host 1): Welcome to the Fresh Flow Podcast. We are pleased to be here today and excited about our guest. But first, as always, it's me and Mitchell. Mitch, you are how old?

Dr. Mitchell Tsai (Host 2): Fifty-three.

Host 1: Fifty-three and you were on call last night, and you're doing this post call, which shows, I think, tremendous dedication to our listening audience. However, when are you going to realize that call is a young man's game? You have not figured that out yet. When's that going to hit you?

Host 2: So, in our department, you have to be 25 years out from boarding before you can step down from call. I actually still enjoy it. You still learn. I haven't seen everything yet. And just to clarify, I'm not post-call. It's actually worse. I'm post post call. Because when I was a young resident, you know, when you're a resident, you took 24-hour call and then you did whatever the next day, because you're just running on adrenaline. Every decade of life, it takes you an extra day to recover from that overnight call.

Host 1: Oh. So, you've recovered for a day.

Host 2: No, I'm on the post post-call day. This is the worst day where you don't sign any official documents or agree to anything that's going to entail time of your future work.

Host 1: Okay. All right. Well, good deal. Well, you look good and you sound sharp. And this is going to be fun. So, with that, let me introduce our guest. Today, I'm really excited to welcome Dr. Leon Moores to the Fresh Flow Podcast. Dr. Moores is a practicing neurosurgeon and a leadership educator. His career spans everything from serving in the military, US Army 82nd Airborne Division, leading health systems, pediatric neurosurgeon, as I mentioned. And also, kind of the way I came across him was his book and his platform, which is All Physicians Lead. And this book, this platform challenges the idea that leadership is only for people with titles, arguing that every physician influences culture and performance every single day. So, Dr. Moores, pleasure to have you with us.

Leon Moores, MD: Both of you, welcome to my basement where I get to hang out and talk to folks like you on a regular basis. Really, really appreciate the invitation. And you do a lot of exciting stuff. So glad to be part of it. Thank you.

Host 1: Man, thank you. So, we're in the Moores Bunker right now, basically, right? Well, Leon, just tell us, how in the world did this journey come about? Tell us kind of before we dig deeper and go back, what do you spend your days now doing? You get to be a surgeon, but you also have a lot of other hats that you wear. So, just tell us about a day in the life of Leon Moores today.

Leon Moores, MD: So about four years ago now, I ended up getting off of the senior executive train and going back to 100% clinical surgeon. And I tell folks, talk about restoring your joy in medicine. The hardest thing for me wasn't doing the brain surgery, but finding time in my schedule to fit that surgery in when a kid comes in with a brain tumor. Trauma's kind of easy, you just drop everything. But the urgent non-trauma, non-elective stuff, you got to figure out, "Okay, when in my full executive calendar can I do this?" And after a couple decades of doing that, I said, "All right, I need to choose. I either need to be full-time executive work or full-time clinical work."

And when I looked at the two, I appreciate and absolutely respect and have really good friends who are doing a lot of executive work with clinical work as well, where I enjoyed spending my time was in clinic, seeing consults in the OR, teaching. So, there was a lot of reward on the executive side, but the day-to-day, moment-to-moment enjoyment, I got out of that.

So, the day in the life where my employer is paying me now is seeing kids and taking care of them. And then, that opened up some discretionary time to write the book, talk to folks, consult with organizations, spend time with folks like you that get a chance to explore the concept that all physicians are leaders and, as you mentioned, not just restricted to those who have titles.

Host 2: I think it's amazing. You know, we talk about top-down and bottoms-up organizations, and we've mentioned it on this podcast before. But what would it look like if physician leaders and physician executives actually return back to the trenches every now and then? Walk the walk. I think Southwest Airlines does a really good job from an organizational perspective where the pilots are expected to know how to do baggage, how to do the ticketing, just so that they can help the whole system move. But kudos to you that you still enjoy clinical work. I still enjoy what I do as an anesthesiologist and I'm blessed.

Leon Moores, MD: Yeah, and interesting that you bring that up because there were several senior leadership positions that I was in, as senior vice president in a big healthcare system, that some of the feedback I would get was, "He needs to stop being a neurosurgeon," because he's not available a hundred percent of the time to do this executive work.

And as you said, I always felt like I needed to continue doing clinical work for two reasons. One, senior executives who aren't on the electronic medical record, but touting how great it is, who aren't getting reimbursed based on RVUs, but are telling you to do so. And when you walk around in a suit with a bunch of suits, you get a very different perspective on what's going on in the organization than when I put on scrubs and go into the OR. People talk to you differently. They tell you different things.

And so, having that ear literally in the trenches was, I thought, super important as a senior exec. I realized after years of just adding more and more things to the rucksack, as we would say in the army, that it got to be too much. And I am sympathetic to the senior executives who say, "Look, I just can't practice medicine anymore with all of the other demands on my time. I can't keep up. I can't stay technically proficient. And therefore, if I'm going to lead at some of the highest levels in medicine, it's not fair to the patients for me to do so." So, it's a tough decision. It's a personal decision. We self-regulate a lot in healthcare, whether that's clinical performance, when to retire, or how many hats do I wear and can still keep all these plates spinning.

Host 1: Yeah. So, you mentioned your military journey there talking about rucksacks, and I personally love delving into the leadership literature from the military, Stanley McChrystal Team of Teams, Jocko Willink, Extreme Ownership. I use this a lot. How did your military journey shape your view of leadership?

Leon Moores, MD: Well, you realize starting, you know, moment one—I was going to say day one as a new entrant at West Point—that leadership followership and all that entails is going to be something you eat, sleep, breathe every waking moment. And so, that in and of itself really shaped the journey that I'm on now in that it is part of the culture. You know that you're going to be evaluated at West Point on your classroom work. But you're also constantly being evaluated on how you lead.

When I was in the 82nd Airborne Division as an infantry platoon leader, yes, at the end of an exercise, you're going to be evaluated on whether you hit the objective, whether you stayed on the prescribed route, how your weapons worked, et cetera, and you're going to be evaluated on how you led. How did people respond to your leadership skills.

So, that carried forward into the concept that all physicians are leaders; that as a doctor, in almost any environment, unless you're alone in a dark room all by yourself, you have influence and you have impact, whether that's talking to a patient and trying to get them to stop smoking, lose weight, take their medicines, leading a healthcare team in the trauma bay, the ICU, the clinic, influencing the behavior of medical students, residents, fellows that are around you watching your behaviors, how do you communicate, how do you handle stress. And recognizing that I think is the key to where I am now, getting individuals to recognize that, and then institutions, both healthcare and educational institutions to say, "Oh wow, this is an important thing that not only do we not teach, but we're not even really explicit about."

Host 2: We've talked about, you know, clinical performance and how do you balance even at the senior executive level, but there's barely enough time supposedly to cover our clinical competencies. Where do we find the time, either in medical school or in residency to actually start teaching what you had to do through West Point and what the military does, but that continuous feedback so that we are making, one, better teams and then, hopefully, better leaders.

Leon Moores, MD: Yeah, great question. On a couple levels, at the individual level, if it became part of the culture, there are many ways you can both for yourself and for the people around you, impact that leadership awareness, first of all, and then competency, second of all. In terms of awareness, just saying—you know, the subtitle of the book is Redefining Physician Leadership, and that implies that when you ask a hundred doctors to name a physician leader, they're inevitably going to name a medical director, a chair, a chief, a dean, a CMO, someone with a card-carrying leadership position, a place in the organizational hierarchy. They won't say, "I am, I lead every day." If you take the fundamental definition of leadership as influencing behavior to achieve a desired result, there are many definitions of leadership out there, but that one sort of crystallizes what it is influencing behavior to achieve a desired result.

Then, every time you're talking to a patient, every time you're doing a case in the OR, every time you're running a code in the trauma bay, every time you're in clinic, just trying to move the patients through and help the staff make that efficient and give the patients a good experience, you are leading. You're setting the tone, you're setting an example for behavior. So, it begins with that awareness.

Once you are aware—there's a neat little vignette that I give out. I do a lot of true stories in the books and when I give talks. This one is not a true story, but I think people can relate. I want to be clear, I did not do this. But imagine that you are on your way to clinic and you're running a little bit late, you drive up to the parking garage and you key card doesn't work. You try it again. You push the button for help, nobody's answering. Now, there's people backed up behind you. You've got to put it in reverse. They all need to back up. You need to back up. You're even more late now. You got to park on surface parking, which is further away from the clinic. And then, it's raining. Well, you didn't bring an umbrella because you're supposed to park in the garage. So now, you're walking into clinic. You're wet, you're late. You had to park in surface parking. You open the door, and the clinic administrator says, "Oh, hey, Dr. Moores. How you doing this morning?" And your response might not be as positive and professional as you typically portray, right? You're like, "Are you kidding me? This is the third time this month that this hasn't worked. Ahhh!" you know.

So, let's take a couple of scenarios, dissect that down. If you don't recognize that you're leading every day, every moment, people are watching you, you have influence, you have impact, then you'll probably just go back, slam the door, take a breath, and then go out and start seeing your clinic. If you recognize that you're a leader, at the very least level one, you will say, "Oh my gosh, that was inappropriate, that was uncalled for. I need to do better." You'll have the self-awareness. Maybe you didn't have the self-management at that point, but you're thinking about that interaction and you're saying, "How can I be better?" That's the second step. So, recognizing it and then reflecting on it with the intent to improve. A higher level is you recognize that you're going to have to work with that administrator more. And you say, "Okay, I need to go back and mend fences and spend some time and say, "Okay, this is what happened. Not an excuse, but an explanation. I will do better in the future. I apologize."

And then, the highest level is to recognize that that administrator isn't the only one that witnessed you, right? The front desk saw it, the nurses saw it. So, imagine a scenario where in my business, people would drive from West Virginia, you know, three, four hours to come see me. The clinic policy is if you're more than 15 minutes late, you have to reschedule. So, someone comes in in that moment, an hour later, say, and how likely do you think that front desk person is going to be to come to me and say, "Oh, hey, Dr. Moores, you know, you're in such a good mood today. Would you still add this patient on, or do you want me to reschedule?" You're not even going to know the negative impact your behavior had on that person and that patient who's now going to either reschedule or go somewhere else because of that.

So, that's what I am trying to get across, recognizing that, and you talked earlier, the big question that I'm getting to the answer to is how do we do this with all the other things that are going on in our lives and trying to keep up. That kind of awareness, self-awareness, self-management, recognition, reflection with the intent to improve, can be done in real-time. Yes, you need some fundamental theory and education. Read some books on emotional intelligence and say, "Okay, I'm going to make this part of my toolkit," but that doesn't require a lot of didactic education.

Likewise, at the scrub sink, I'm talking about what could go wrong if we get into tumor that's stuck to the brainstem. But I can also talk to the resident about, "Hey, in the last case, when the tech dropped that instrument, you handled that really well. I mean, you kept your calm. You said, 'Oh, no worries.'" The tech was obviously flabbergasted and was like, "Oh my gosh, I just dropped the instrument that the surgeons needed." "No, you're fine. I can use this one," and kept that under control, really nice job, good leadership skills that made a difference in the room, brought the temperature down. So, those are sort of things that we can do with very, very little additional time commitment.

In terms of schooling, both at the medical school and the residency fellowship level, there are required teachings in professionalism, communication skills, systems-based practice. Those are all leadership-like topics that I sort of like to call leadership adjacent. My concept is you put all of that training under an umbrella of leadership. It makes it coherent, it makes it progressive. So, you take those contact hours you have that are teaching these things, put them under a leadership rubric and say, "It's really important that you learn these things, not because the ACGME says so, but because they make a difference."

And then, finally, the argument that they make a difference is very compelling. And that there's super good literature that leadership at the front lines in the point of production and, in our case, at the point of care improves retention, improves team member engagement, decreases error rates, improves the environment of production, in our case, the environment of care. All of those things contribute to a better patient experience and arguably better patient outcomes.

Host 1: Amen. Goodness gracious, you are preaching my gospel here. This is what I get to go around this place and talk about. And by the way, if anybody's reading the book, all Physicians Lead, what you mentioned about leadership being a core competency is page 17 of your book. I'm looking at it right here. It's Fantastic. And it is an easy airplane read as well. So if you're flying somewhere, that's a great one.

Leon, let's back up a minute. When I think of neurosurgeons, let's just say that potentially stereotypically, they can be seen as being, let's say, confident. Confident.

Leon Moores, MD: James Bond used the term prickly at one point.

Host 1: Prickly. Prickly. So, I didn't say that. He said that. I said confident. But what I hear from you is something different. And what I hear from you is actually humility, to say, "Hey, I've had the time in my career and I've had these maybe revelations to me that have made me step back and evaluate, seek further education, training, et cetera."

But when I talk to people about this, I also say that, "Hey, my training actually taught me to be the opposite of humble. My training taught me to be a hero." And there are times when we have to be heroes, right? You have to step up and when somebody comes to you, brain tumor and a young person, gosh, yes, you have to know exactly what to do. You have to be right. But if we take that into everything that we do, we can absolutely destroy the teams that we're on. Where did that come from, the humility that I hear in your voice? Was that inherent? Was it taught to you in the military? Was it taught to you along your journey? Where did you pick that up?

Leon Moores, MD: A lot of times what people will ask, and I'm sure you've gotten this question too, you know, are leaders made or born? And my immediate response to that is, "How many 18 month olds have you looked at and said, "Wow, that's a born leader"? So, the implication there is by the time you point someone out as a born leader, they're at least In senior, in high school, in sports and captain or they're in their junior part of their career. And you're like, "Boy, that person's a born leader." But think of the impact the community, family, sports teams, church have all had on that person up until that point where they're 18 or 28 or 35 years old, and you go, "Wow, that's a born leader right there."

So, that kind of answers your question. I don't know specifically. My mom's a retired career nurse. My dad was in the Air force and, you know, worked his tail off in a factory his whole life. We're from the back woods of Bayne. Folks are humble because you can get humbled a lot hunting, fishing, logging, by Mother Nature, you name it.

So, I think, the more you know, you don't know, the more you're willing to learn. And there's a great quote that in order to learn, one has to first admit that they're ignorant, right? If you know everything, no new information's going to get in. I'm still learning lessons. I still have, you know, an uncomfortable interaction every now and then that I think, "Oh my gosh, I should have done better," or "How do I do better?" I think keeping that in mind makes you a lot more human.

Host 2: Here's the irony, right? I mean, medicine is a profession. And a profession implies that there is lifelong learning. And so, we could talk about leadership, we could talk about being physicians, but we should be doing the same thing. And then, you know, we've talked about humility, just listening to you talk. We talk about trust, right? And when we have a transition to practice rotation for our senior residents where they learn how to deliver team-based care, and one of the things that I try to tell them is that, "Look, you can micromanage care if you want. You can tell people what to do, right? But there's a difference between telling people what to do and whether or not somebody decides to listen to you down the road.

And if you stay on as an attending or wherever you are, you know, my focus is that you're trying to build a team where at 2:00 AM in the morning, your CRNA or AA is willing to tell you and ask and say, "Hey, did you actually think about this before you walk into something you don't want to walk into?" Right? That is, one, having the humility to say that, "Okay, I didn't see that. I didn't know that," right? But then, two, thank you, as you have said, that they trust you enough to voice their opinion so that we can take better care of a patient, just as you said.

Leon Moores, MD: Yeah. And, you know, I'll plug someone else's book here because I love recommending folks to read Stephen M.R. Covey, Stephen Covey, the younger book, the Speed of Trust. And I love that book. It is fantastic and, at the organizational level and the individual level, has a lot of good messages, but building that psychological safety where people feel comfortable talking to you.

An important point about that, when we talk about all physicians are leaders, it is not to say that we're always the boss. It's not to say we're all that. It's not putting us on a pedestal. I'm not suggesting that at all. But what I am saying is that there is often a psychological size mismatch between the doctor in the room and the other team members in the room. It's a team-oriented environment. We get that now. We've been preached that. But we're not just one of the guys or one of the gals. There's a difference. And so, the reason to recognize that that influence and that impact is there. The reason to recognize that that psychological size mismatch is there is not to say, "Oh yeah, I'm bigger and tougher than everybody," but rather to do just the opposite, to go out of your way to make people feel comfortable approaching you with uncomfortable information.

And if you don't do that, they may very well default to, "I'm not going to challenge the doctor." And that's part of that every day, all the time. As soon as somebody says, "Hey, Dr. Moores, I have a suggestion, here you go." Stay in your lane. That sends a message to that individual and everybody else who heard it, that you don't want to hear it. And that's exactly the opposite of what we need to get the best data to make the best decisions as the leader. Ultimately, you're going to make the decision. They call them doctor's orders, not doctor suggestions for a reason, right? And so, it's still going to be your decision, but you're going to get better data, you're going to make better decisions if you get input from.

I counted one time I was in the OR, it was an anesthesiologist, a CRNA, an SRNA, two circulators, a tech, a resident, and me. A hundred and ten years of OR experience with all those people. You don't set up psychological safety where people can raise the flag and say, "Hey, Leon, you're doing something stupid. You're missing out."

Host 1: Yeah, I have a good friend here at UAB in Department of Engineering, Ivan Pupulidy, says the currency of safety is information. Anything we do to degrade the ability to gather information impacts the safety of the system. And gosh, you're saying all the things that I try to go out and say. You just say it better than me. So, thank you. I hope people will listen to this instead of listening to me.

You mentioned books, right? We talked about your book, you mentioned Covey's book. Tell us about the process of writing the book, All Physicians Lead. I have tremendous interest in this. How did that process go? Looking back in hindsight, would you do it again? Tell us about writing the book.

Leon Moores, MD: Yeah, thanks. And like many things in my life, dumb luck. You're just in the right place at the right time. I had published a manuscript for the Army, 4,200 physicians in the Army. Treaty's Proposal For How to Do Physician Leadership for army Doctors in 2013. It came out 2011, 2013. And somehow that got somewhere to someone I'd been lecturing on this a bit. And Forbes Books Advantage Media reached out to me and said, "Hey, we think this is a book." And it was at the point in my career where I did have a little bit more bandwidth and said, "I've been talking about this a lot." I know for a fact that the book will never get written if I don't have somebody, a bunch of wingmen, wingwomen, you know, keeping me on task, doing a lot of the grunt work. And that process was really terrific. You know, the writing, the editing, the publishing, the marketing all covered I would joke for a small fee, but it's actually for a large fee. Clearly, not in this to make money, it's to get the message out. But the quality of the product that they were able to bring to market and the continued partnership, I commend people to the website that they help design and maintain the content for. There's a ton of stuff on there, All Physicians Lead. Google Leon Moores' All Physicians Lead. And the website comes up. It has podcasts and newsletters and blogs and how to reach out if you want to collaborate. But all of that was really packaged from these terrific folks at Forbes and Advantage Media.

I won't say it made it fun, but it made it doable. I love the saying—I don't know which authors attributed to this, but you know, "I hate writing, but I love having written." And so, that's kind of where I'm at now.

Host 2: Matt knows that I do this on the podcast, but you know, my dumb idea of the day, and what you've talked about in the clinical setting and the importance of what we need to do, I think it's probably taking those lessons and the frameworks. And then, even for physician executives, I would argue that, you know, it's the same construct. So, Matt and I would like to talk to your publishers. We're just going to take your book and we're going to write a book called All Physician Executives Lead, and then we'll just change physicians into physician executives, and we'll just put out a brand new book.

Leon Moores, MD: Piece of cake. Every partner I can get to help get this message out, I am all for it.

Host 1: Leon, you, like a lot of people that we've had on this show, kind of continued your education. We talk about, you know, you get your MD and you go through residency and you think that's kind of the pinnacle of your education. And then, you get out in the real-world and go, "Gosh, there's a lot of stuff I still need to learn." Shout out to UAB, right? You know, go Blazers!

Leon Moores, MD: Go Blazers!

Host 1: Got a doctorate here in leadership. When you went along that journey, as somebody who had kind of already done the military leadership thing, did you find that it just reinforced what you already knew? Did you come across absolutely new and interesting things? That's really interesting to me, for somebody that had your kind of background in leadership already to go through it. What did that program teach you?

Leon Moores, MD: if you look at a military career, someone who spends 20 years in uniform as an officer, you'll spend about a third of your time in command, about a third of your time in staff jobs, and about a third of your time in leadership schools. That's the level of commitment that the Army has to growing your leadership education.

But in the words of a former Secretary of Defense, there are unknown unknowns. And so, when I got out, started working in the civilian world, it was kind of this self-directed MBA. I'd get in a meeting with a bunch of senior execs, and they'd say something. And I'd go, "Oh, I don't know anything about that." So then, I go grab a book and read about that, kind of like we do in clinical medicine, right? You see a case and you go, "Oh, I've never seen this case before, and you go read about it."

But I realized that there were a lot of things that I didn't know I didn't know. And coming up with some framework, MBA MHA program, things like that. And as I looked at the UAB catalog for the executive doctoral program in healthcare leadership, I said, "Oh, This is exactly what I want." A lot of the programs have a big smattering of healthcare policy. That's great. Somebody's going to do that. A lot of the doctoral programs are very research-heavy. Great. Somebody's got to do that. But what I wanted to do was learn how to run a healthcare system. And that's what this particular program at UAB was tailored toward. So, I said, "This is it. I've looked for several years. This is clearly the one I want."

And to your other question about what was the big takeaway if you could only pick one, and there were many, but the biggest one for me was the exposure to the empiric literature on leadership. The real behavioral science, mathematically rigorous data-driven work that's out there on leadership. I had spent most of career up until that point, studying more of the practitioner literature, like you said, you know, reading Jack Welsh and Covey and Daniel Goldman, and you know, all of those and said, "Oh wait, there's this entire universe of folks that are really doing the experiments and the clinical work, if you will, to say this is how leadership affects organizations and people. And that was really a gold mine for me.

Host 1: Yeah. I say that in my workshops that we all want to be evidence-based clinicians. I want to be an evidence-based anesthesiologist. You want to be an evidence-based neurosurgeon. But gosh, when we're working in team environment, I think we also have to see and understand that there is an entire body of literature and evidence behind teamwork and leadership. And if we want to be evidence-based, we work in a team environment, we can't ignore that. And we've ignored it for a long time, I think. I'm glad you're out there pounding the drum and bringing that to the forefront.

Leon Moores, MD: Yeah. It's a lot of fun. Very briefly, my doctoral dissertation was looking at physician versus non-physician CEOs in US hospitals and trying to determine if there was a difference. It turns out there wasn't anything that we could mathematically prove. And that answer comes up almost everywhere you study CEO impact on organizational outcomes, because there's so much in between CEO traits and organizational outcomes that it's hard to say this trait and this situation makes for better outcomes.

However, if you go down, as I mentioned before, at the front lines, at the point of production, there's a ton of very, very good literature that shows that that's where leadership makes a difference. And so, we spend all this time in healthcare teaching our "leaders" when they're eight, ten, fifteen years into practice.

Now, you need to learn how to lead, when really the most impactful leadership is happening in the ORs, in the clinics, in the trauma bay, where doctors are closest to patients and we ignore that.

Host 2: So, it's March Madness. And I'm just going to bring up Duke, because you know, Coach Krzyzewski and, you know, Scheyer has taken over. And I still remember this video clip. I think it was on Facebook or it was on ESPN and Scheyer shooting three pointers with the Duke players on the bench. And they're just warming up, kind of hanging out. And he is looking at each player and he goes, "Do you trust me?" Shoots the three, nails it, right? And then, he goes to the next player. "Do you trust me?"

And we talk about that trust. But you think about Coach  Krzyzewski and you think about the leaders in the world, and the Army does a phenomenal job of this. It's not just the individual themselves, right? It's all the people that we don't see or don't know about that they've impacted. And going back to that 10 years of practicing clinical medicine, and then finally we're going to find the leaders, we've missed out 10 years of an opportunity to develop, you know, better physician leaders, what would you do differently if you knew everything that you knew now and then we popped you in a time machine and sent you back 20 years?

Leon Moores, MD: Yeah. Well, buy a lot of Grecian formula and I get hair growth for men earlier, because now it's too late. I think a lot of the training that I had in leadership and, I mean, understandably so you're thinking outward. So, how do I impact this person? How do I impact this group? How is this group responding to me? And I really didn't focus as much on self-awareness and self-management.

And in the book, and this is not something that I made up, but this concentric circles model of leadership puts leading self at the very center of the model, and it's incredibly important that that is the core of being an effective leader. And so for years and years, my leadership focus was outward. I was trying to lead others. And if I had started much earlier and leading myself in many, many situations, I'm sure I would've been much more effective.

Host 2: I would also add that, you know, that concept scales up to at an organizational level. And I think the military does a very good job that, you know, if the platoon leader does go down, there is somebody ready to step in. I think we're missing that in academic medicine where we don't think we need a future chair or a future director until somebody steps down, right? But we should have been training several people to take that job if we needed them to. And so, again, it's this retrospective, backwards-looking view that we have in medicine.

Leon Moores, MD: Yeah. And Mitchell, you implied it earlier, and I make a big point of this, that if we're doing leadership education and training from the beginning, from medical school into residency where we're raising the tide for everybody, and then when we do have to pick a medical director or a chief or a chair, we've got this whole pool of people that have been thinking about their influence, improving their leadership competencies for eight, ten, twelve years to pick from.

Host 1: Leon, these things always go fast, man. I always get to the end them and say, "Gosh, that was quick."

Leon Moores, MD: I want two more hours.

Host 1: That's right. I can sit here and pick your brain on leadership stuff for hours and bore our audience to tears. One of the things I get in my workshop series is people say, "Well, I'm not a leader. I don't have a title of any kind." And I tell them, "No, no, no. You can impact people. Going by your definition, right? Setting the tone with your behavior is one of the ones you gave earlier, I think, you can, even if you're "in the middle of the organization." So if you were to tell one of our listeners who doesn't have a VP role or, you know, a chair dean of this, how they could impact people with their behavior today and how they could lead with their behavior today, what's something you would tell them? How do they go out into the world today and impact people?

Leon Moores, MD: I think it absolutely starts with a recognition that you have influence and you have impact. And I write about physicians because I say uncomfortable things and can get away with it because I am a physician. But in reality, you know, it's current, classy thing for organizations to do to condense their organizational name into initials. So, Proctor and Gamble becomes P&G. Ernst and Young becomes EY, right? So, all physicians lead becomes APL.

Well, but physicians aren't the only ones that are caring for patients and providing care. So, all providers lead, but it's not just providers that are impacting patient care, every colleague in the hospital is. So, all professionals lead, but it's not just people in hospitals, it's really all people lead. So, everybody has influence upon everybody they interact with all the time. The young man checking you out at Trader Joe's is influencing your behavior and you're influencing his all the time.

So, the question is not are you leading? It's do you recognize that you have influence and impact. So, it starts with that recognition and say, "Wow, people do pay attention to what I'm saying and what I'm doing." My impact matters in this healthcare environment. And then, reflect, you know, a couple times a week, everybody's going to have positive and sometimes less than positive interactions with other humans or teams. And when you do, you feel it. So when you get that signal, "Wow, that went really well," take some time later in the day or jot some notes in a journal. And at the end of the week maybe, or that evening, reflect on that interaction with the intent to improve. What did I learn from that? Why did it go so well? How did I set the environment? What did I say? Or was I just really listening better and therefore the person opened up to me? You can learn a ton just from two or three reflections a week on leadership events that you initiated or were part of, and just reflect on those with the intent to improve. Really basic, really straightforward, really human.

Host 1: Awesome. All right. Well, Leon, thanks, man. This has been awesome. We are super grateful that you came on the show today. For people that want to check out more, hear more from Dr. Moores, allphysicianslead.com is the website. The book of the same title, All physicians Lead is available. I'll give you mine if you want it and you're here at UAB. But please go out and buy it, right? Help more Dr. Moores, pay back all the debt from putting it out there in the world. So man, thank you so much for being here. We appreciate what you're doing, keep doing it, and for being on the Fresh Flow Podcast.

Leon Moores, MD: Matt, Mitchell, thank you very much and keep doing what you're doing as well. Look forward to future collaborations.

Host 1: likewise. Thanks, man. All right, y'all. This is another episode of the Fresh Flow Podcast. Thanks for listening in. See you next time.