Coming Full Circle… 5 years ago a cancer patient at City of Hope; Friday I found myself leading a workshop for a leadership team at the City of Hope. Life is so good!! I shared an interesting story with them that helps us understand the true power of leadership.

At the time I got the diagnosis of the melanoma I was reading Daniel Pink’s book, To Sell is Human. One of the stories in the book referenced some research done on radiologists. A young Israeli radiologist, Yehonatan Turner, was looking to encourage his colleagues to do their job with more gusto and greater skill. 

I would refer to this as being a transformational leader. One who is helping his team recognize their real purpose and passion and inspiring them to bring that to their work.

One of the skills that high-performing radiologists bring is to identify “incidental findings”. That is to see something they were not originally looking for. By being more engaged, meticulous, and thoughtful they may see more than the fracture in the broken arm they were examining, for example; they may also recognize a cyst nearby that could reveal another issue.

Turner experimented by sharing photographs of patients (with their consent of course) alongside their CT scans for the radiologists to examine.

Turner then re-submitted 81 scans where incidental findings had occurred to the same group of radiologists but this time without an accompanying patient photo. Astoundingly, 80% of the incidental findings were NOT reported where the photo of the patient was not present!

This is the power of TRANSFORMATIONAL leadership. Turner knew how to reach the radiologists. In this case by humanizing the scans. We can also do this as leaders in an even more targeted way. We can take the time to connect with each person we manage and help them understand how to do the same for the people they manage. Teaching leaders to lead people by connecting with them – on their terms, meaning from their point of view. Helping them to see things differently by understanding how they see them to begin with.

This is on us as leaders to connect with people more uniquely, more deeply, to understand them from the inside out – through compassion, empathy, caring, relating. We can then frame things in a way that will help them to see the significance of how they are connected to, and impacting, outcomes. They, in turn, are able to connect with their own purpose. To derive satisfaction and accomplishment from their own internal drivers.

This is how leaders can help others experience passion. And often in the same exact role they may not even have been experiencing satisfaction in before. 

While it was the Enterprise IT leadership team at City of Hope I was working with on Friday, I happily reminded them that their work is just as purposeful as the work of the surgeon. The hospital wouldn’t run without them. The care that is provided wouldn’t exist without them! This is a newly integrated team. Helping them be the best leadership team possible was truly an honor for me!

How are you bringing Transformational Leadership to your organization? I really would love to hear your stories! I’m interviewing for my next book, in fact.

Or, if you have the desire to be a transformational leadership team yet unsure how to become one let me know! I am a warrior around aligning Purpose, Passion and Profit!!

And to come full circle with my prior experience at City of Hope while reading about Turner’s experiment, I decided to hand my surgeon, Dr. Benjamin Paz, a photo of me in advance of my surgery. I asked him to share it with his team along with the excerpt of the book with this story. He did! I thank him for this, amongst many other wonderful things!

#PurposePassionandProfit #LeadershipTeams #TransformationalLeadership #FromtheInsideOut #ItsaChoiceToBeaTeam

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