56_Moving from the Great Resignation to the Great RE-SIGNation: Re-Recruiting High Performers with Dr. Thom Mayer

Special guest host Dan Collard, Co-Founder/Partner with Quint Studer of Healthcare Plus Solutions Group  interviews Thom Mayer, MD, an emergency medicine physician, medical director for the NFL Players Association, and author of the book Battling Healthcare Burnout: Learn to Love the Job You Have, While Creating The Job You Love.  He says the Great Resignation is the perfect time to think about who we should re-sign: attracting and hiring high performers is great, but we can’t assume they’re going to stay. We need to focus on keeping them.

During his work as an ER physician, Dr. Mayer learned the basics for retaining the best people. Simply put, “please” and “thank you” matter! At the end of every shift he would personally thank every nurse, every tech, and every housekeeper. And he would ask “What could I have done to make your job easier today?” He says this practice was humbling but also enlightening.

In this podcast he’ll share other insights he has learned from his career. For example:

• A good culture is about two things: 1) making patients happy, and 2) doing the right thing for the people who take care of the patients.
• The concept of leadership is worthless because it’s a noun; it’s something you say. Leading is a verb—we demonstrate leadership by our actions, not our words.
• Every person on the team is a leader—they lead themselves or they lead other team member
• The work of battling burnout begins from within. Every team member is a performance athlete, involved in a cycle of performance, rest and recovery, over and over and over again. This is why it’s so vital to invest in yourself and your team.
• One of Dr. Mayers’ favorite tools is the Love, Hate, Tolerate tool because it forces a lot of reflection
• How do you get a great job (like one with the NFL)? Don’t focus on resume building. Instead, build trust and relationships and your career will take care of itself.

Finally, he’ll talk about why the true key to battling burnout is not about building resilience in people, but adaptive capacity. Those who use the systems and processes have to be the ones who re-design them. That’s why Dr. Mayer is adamant that innovation doesn’t belong in the C-suite.  As Napoleon Bonaparte once said, leaders are dealers in hope. Our role is to create the trust and hope that empowers the frontline people to say “I see a way to do it better.”

Email: thommayermd@gmail.com