Dr. Thom Mayer
speaker
81 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Dr. Thom Mayer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, first of all, I always hired people not only who were better than me but were much better than me. People would say, what's it like working for you? And the answer is I have zero idea because no one's ever worked for me. They've worked with me. I started almost every statement that I made to my folks, my team, by saying two things. One is, I need your help. Instead of, you've got a problem.
Starting with, I need your help. I mean, even if the person you're working with is a difficult person, you know, egocentric, whatever it might be, locked into the boss mentality instead of the leader mentality. When you say, I need your help, most people are going to say, okay, I'm going to try to help you. And two is I like saying, what would have to be true?
My point being, what would have to be true in order for us as a team to be able to deliver what it is you've just told me is something, a desired state we need? You know, here's where we are, here's where we want to be. What would have to be true in order to get there? Yeah. There's a difference. There's a fundamental paradox between a team of experts, a very smart, talented group of people.
And that's not the same as an expert team, people who work seamlessly across boundaries, who understand what the goal is, the ability to trust each other, to come up with ideas. The Kansas City Chiefs, you know, famously are a very innovative team.
Well, that starts at the top with Andy Reid, who sits down with his entire staff, his entire team on the whiteboard and looks at ideas about different plays that they could run. How could we exploit in this situation, this down in distance, they're going to be in cover one, they're going to be in cover three. That's an expert team, a group of people saying, let's take creative chemistry.
That's a great question. First of all, I didn't get a phone call. I made a phone call. Wow. I picked up the, you know, I saw what was happening. I thought, you know, I've been very fortunate, as you know, to have led in some of the most prominent crises of our generation. It's an honor to serve others in the course of that and to have been asked to have done so.
But to me, I thought this is an injustice that can't stand. I'm an emergency physician, so I'm uniquely trained. and have a mentality, you know, we have this weird thing of, you know, explosions, fire, you know, gunfire. We run into that, not away from it. You know, we're just not normal. And so I made phone calls connected with Team Rubicon, a group of former Marines.
And so literally within three weeks of the invasion, We were there, boots on the ground in Ukraine in order to take care of patients. So having been at the tip of that sphere, exposed to air raids literally every day and every night, you know, I saw the results.
People blown out of their homes, blown out of their apartments in the middle of the night, having to get on a train and go 900 miles west and hope someone would be there to take care of them. But you see, it's hard not to think about what kind of mentality
results in men doing that i think your point is extremely well taken that authoritarian way of dealing with things does not in my opinion have the right results
You know, how does a team operate as an expert team? Certainly you recruit smart people. But Bill Belichick said, talent sets the floor of a team, but character sets the ceiling of a team. And I think that's true in any team. So our group came together and bonded. I mean, serious badasses. And that's the highest compliment I can give somebody in an emergency situation.
You quickly develop those bonds of trust. You talk about team, how are we going to react in this situation? I can tell you, when I was dealing with those patients, They're right there working with me and I almost never had to ask them to do anything.
You know, it's like in the midst of an emergency resuscitation, I put my hand out when the nurse puts a chest tube in because she knows what I'm thinking. And the same thing occurred there. So, you know, from great teamwork comes great preparation. great trust, a great sense of the ability of people to work across boundaries. You develop that very quickly.
And I think the more we understand that the work begins within, but it turns very quickly towards teamwork.
Wherever we're leading, whether we're leading our family, our kids, you know, whether we're leading a large organization, we have to learn to tell the story of the people we serve. Tell a story about the people. that you represent. Too many organizations, too many teams are so bogged down in statistics and data instead of telling the story of the people that we serve.
Mark Twain was very good at this, as most things, when he said, if you want to rise to the meteoric heights of literary greatness, don't write about man, write about a man. Tell the story of the person who's doing it.
Yeah, obviously, I think failure has to be our fuel. But driving failure is curiosity. That, huh, I wonder why. Why, why not? Why did we do it this way and why not do it a different way? Why are we doing it this way? We hear that all the time and the most common answer to that, because we've always done it that way.
Because we've always done it that way, that doesn't show curiosity, that doesn't show, you know, hey, why couldn't it be done another way? So, the question, you know, why should be, it adds value to the people we serve. But the bigger question is why not? Why couldn't we do it another way?
Because I ask people to think about leading in a radically different way, to act on those thoughts within a week because if the people who listen to this don't, in some small way, do something differently if they don't act on it within a week, they're not going to act. And the third is to innovate. Think, act, and innovate.
And to innovate takes that curiosity to say, why couldn't it have been done another way? Why couldn't this, the play that we drew up, why couldn't that have been done in a different way? Why the strategic plan that we laid out? How did it fail? To what extent did it fail? Sure, it's nice to have stats to show, data to show, you know, the delta between what we aspired to and that which we achieved.
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