From the basketball court to the operating room, leadership and teamwork lessons are everywhere.

Our Chief Innovation Officer, Jon Darsee, joined Iowa Innovation Leadership Fellow Lauren Lavin (host of the Plugged Into Public Health Podcast), Iowa Men’s Basketball Coach Fran McCaffery, and Dr. Matt Howard, Department of Neurosurgery Chair and DEO at University of Iowa Health Care, for a powerful discussion on leadership and building effective teams.

Covering topics like mentorship, empathy, managing egos, and building trust, this conversation offers insights valuable to any organization or profession.

Key takeaways from the conversation include: 

• Leadership can be both innate and learned through experience and mentorship. Effective leaders often display humility, empathy, and the ability to build trust within their teams. 
• Humility is an important trait for leaders to cultivate, as it allows them to learn from mistakes and support their team members. Successful leaders often serve as role models by openly acknowledging their own shortcomings. 
• In both sports and medicine, the ability to foster a strong team culture and recognize the value of all team members, including support staff, is crucial for building resilient and high-performing organizations. 
• For students and young professionals, the advice is to prioritize finding the right mentors and teams over short-term financial incentives, as the opportunities for growth and learning will be more valuable in the long run. 

Tune in now:
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A transcript of this episode is available at https://tinyurl.com/bdcrypua