The Lead Up Podcast

Knowing what to do and actually doing it, especially when the pressure is on, are two very different things.

Think about a leader who leaves a leadership development workshop motivated to coach more, delegate better, and stop solving every problem for their employees.

They know what they should do. They've even committed to doing it.

But a few days later, the department is short-staffed, an employee needs an answer, and their boss is asking for results.

Before they know it, they're right back to doing what they've always done.

Sound familiar?

In this episode of the Lead Up Podcast, I explore why knowing the right leadership behavior doesn't guarantee we'll practice it when things get difficult.

Drawing from Chip and Dan Heath's book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, I share a practical framework for understanding what may be getting in the way of meaningful behavior change.

We'll look at three important elements:

Here's what I want you to remember: Awareness can begin change, but awareness alone cannot complete it.

If you're investing in leadership development but struggling to see consistent behavior change, this episode will help you look beyond the symptoms and identify what may be getting in the way.

Listen to Episode 510 and take one practical step toward helping your leaders turn what they know into what they consistently do.

To continue the conversation or learn how Harbour Resources helps healthcare organizations develop, reinforce, and measure the leadership behaviors that drive stronger culture and sustainable results, reach out to Mike at [email protected].

What if the biggest influence on your leadership behavior isn't what's happening around you, but the story you're telling yourself about it?

In this episode of the Lead Up Podcast, we're continuing our Leadership Behavior Advantage series by exploring how our beliefs, assumptions, and interpretations influence our leadership behaviors, the habits we develop, and ultimately the culture and outcomes of our organizations.

I'll share a healthcare leadership story that illustrates how quickly an unverified assumption can change the way we treat and develop someone on our team.

We'll also explore a practice I call the Meeting with Self, a simple but powerful way to pause, challenge our thinking, and choose a more intentional response when emotions or pressure threaten to take over.

Because understanding the right leadership behavior doesn't guarantee we'll choose it. We have to examine the thinking that's driving our decisions.

Your thinking drives your behaviors. Your behaviors become habits. Your habits shape your culture. And your culture influences the outcomes you experience.

Leadership begins between your ears.

Step up. Lead up. Never stop working to become the leader people want to follow.

If you found this episode valuable, share it with your executive team and another healthcare leader responsible for developing leaders and improving organizational performance.

To continue the conversation or learn how Harbour Resources helps healthcare organizations develop, reinforce, and measure the leadership behaviors that drive stronger culture and sustainable results, reach out to Mike at [email protected].

Healthcare organizations invest significant time and money in developing their leaders. They track attendance, completion rates, and participant satisfaction.

But how do we know whether any of that investment is actually changing the way leaders lead?

In this episode of the Lead Up Podcast, Mike Harbour challenges the way healthcare organizations measure leadership development and explores the missing KPI that matters most: leadership behavior change.

Mike shares the story of a manager who left training equipped with a better approach to delegation, only to return to old habits when operational pressures took over. It's a familiar example of the gap between knowing what to do and consistently doing it.

Using the Harbour Performance Equation, Mike explains why lasting organizational results depend on the leadership behaviors that become daily habits.

Thinking → Behaviors → Habits → Culture → Outcomes

In this episode, you'll learn:

Here's the challenge: Look at your organization's current leadership development efforts. Can you identify the specific behaviors you expect leaders to demonstrate differently, and do you have a way to know whether those changes are happening?

Because leadership development shouldn't be measured only by what leaders learn. It should be measured by how they lead when they return to work.

If you found this episode valuable, share it with your executive team and another healthcare leader responsible for developing leaders and improving organizational performance.

To continue the conversation or learn how Harbour Resources helps healthcare organizations develop, reinforce, and measure the leadership behaviors that drive stronger culture and sustainable results, reach out to Mike at [email protected].

Healthcare leaders spend a lot of time trying to improve employee engagement, reduce turnover, strengthen accountability, and improve patient experience.

But are we focusing on the results instead of what's actually producing them?

In this episode of the Lead Up Podcast, Mike Harbour introduces the Harbour Performance Equation, a practical framework that explains how leadership thinking drives behaviors, behaviors become habits, habits shape culture, and culture ultimately influences organizational results.

Thinking → Behaviors → Habits → Culture → Outcomes

Mike shares real-world healthcare leadership examples and explains how to work backward from disappointing results to identify where meaningful change needs to begin.

In this episode, you'll learn:

Here's the challenge: Before launching another initiative, ask yourself what leadership thinking and behaviors may be contributing to the results you're experiencing.

Because better organizational results begin long before they show up on a scorecard.

If you found this episode valuable, share it with your executive team and another healthcare leader who needs to hear it.

To continue the conversation or learn how Harbour Resources helps healthcare organizations develop, reinforce, and measure the specific leadership behaviors that drive stronger culture and organizational performance, reach out to Mike at [email protected].

A resignation hits your inbox from one of your best people.

You didn’t see it coming.

But was the decision really sudden, or was it only sudden to you?

In this episode of The Lead Up Podcast, Mike continues the Leading Indicators series by challenging leaders to rethink how they view employee turnover.

The resignation letter is rarely where the story begins. Long before someone announces they’re leaving, there may be changes in their engagement, frustration that continues to build, missed opportunities for development, or conversations that never happened.

The challenge for leaders is learning to recognize those changes while there is still time to lead.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

Mike also explores an important leadership question:

When did this employee’s relationship with the organization begin to change?

More departures may be preventable than leaders realize—but only if we get better at seeing what’s happening before the resignation arrives.

Clinical expertise can earn someone a seat at the leadership table. But it doesn’t automatically prepare them to lead people, influence peers, navigate change, or shape culture.

In this episode of the Lead Up Podcast, Mike Harbour sits down with Dr. Kristen Woods, a family physician, seasoned healthcare executive, and leadership and strategy advisor, to discuss what has to change when clinical experts step into leadership.

Kristen shares lessons from her own transition from practicing physician to senior healthcare leader—including the moment she realized passion and clinical knowledge weren’t enough to influence decisions at the executive level.

Mike and Kristen explore why leadership requires a different way of thinking and behaving, the cultural risk of promoting high performers without preparing them to lead, and why healthcare organizations need to begin developing future leaders long before a critical position becomes vacant.

They also discuss the hidden costs of disengagement, how leaders can create followership instead of relying on authority, why change efforts often stall, and the importance of learning to be kind instead of nice when giving feedback and having difficult conversations. Pasted text

In this episode, you’ll hear:

About Dr. Kristen Woods

Dr. Kristen Woods is a family physician and seasoned healthcare executive with more than 10 years of senior leadership experience transforming care delivery across complex health systems. Her work includes value-based care, physician engagement, organizational strategy, and trust-centered leadership.

Today, she works with healthcare leaders and organizations to navigate sustainable change and build cultures where caregivers and patients can thrive.

Listen to the full conversation to hear how healthcare organizations can better prepare clinical experts not simply to take leadership positions—but to think, behave, and lead differently when they get there.

If you found this episode valuable, please leave a 5-star review and share it with another leader. To continue the conversation or learn how Harbour Resources can help your organization develop future-ready leaders and create lasting leadership behavior change, reach out to Mike at [email protected].

In this episode of the Lead Up Podcast, host Mike Harbour asks a question every healthcare executive should consider:

If we're measuring so much, why do we keep getting surprised?

Healthcare organizations track turnover, engagement, patient experience, quality, safety, vacancies, financial performance, and more.

But when a good employee resigns, engagement drops, or culture begins to deteriorate, leaders can still find themselves reacting after the damage has already been done.

The problem isn't that these metrics don't matter.

The problem is that many of them tell us what already happened.

Take turnover.

By the time an employee appears on a turnover report, the story behind that resignation may have started months earlier.

That's why Mike challenges healthcare leaders to move upstream and look at the repeated leadership behaviors producing the outcomes on the dashboard.

In this episode, you'll discover why two hospital units operating under similar conditions can produce very different results, what your traditional metrics may be missing, and what leaders should begin measuring earlier.

The goal isn't another dashboard with 50 more metrics.

It's identifying the specific leadership behaviors you can see, coach, reinforce, and change before the outcome shows up.

A dashboard can tell you where you landed. It can't lead your people.

If you found this episode valuable, share it with your executive team and another healthcare leader who needs to hear it.

To continue the conversation, reach out to Mike at [email protected].

Better healthcare outcomes don’t start with the metric. They start with the leadership behaviors behind it.

In this episode of The Lead Up Podcast, Mike Harbour sits down with healthcare executives Jennifer Naran and Leilani Scott for a practical conversation about improving retention, patient experience, culture, and organizational performance through better leadership.

Jennifer and Leilani share what this looks like inside a large, complex healthcare organization—from developing frontline leaders and strengthening accountability to building trust and creating greater consistency across teams.

They discuss how their organization uses stay interviews, leadership effectiveness measures, span-of-control expectations, coaching, and greater visibility into performance data to turn leadership expectations into everyday behaviors.

One theme runs throughout the conversation: dashboards alone don’t change outcomes. Leaders do.

Jennifer Naran and Leilani Scott are experienced healthcare executives whose work spans physician leadership, talent strategy, leadership development, culture, and organizational performance.

Together, they offer an inside look at what it takes to translate executive priorities into consistent leadership practices across a complex healthcare organization.

If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to The Lead Up Podcast and share it with another healthcare leader working to strengthen retention, culture, patient experience, and performance.

In this episode of the Lead Up Podcast, host Mike Harbour reflects on the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001, honoring the lives lost, the families impacted, and the first responders and healthcare professionals who demonstrated extraordinary courage, service, and resolve.

Twenty-five years later, those values still matter, but the way we lead must continue to evolve.

Healthcare leaders today are navigating a very different kind of challenge—high turnover, rising labor costs, manager burnout, generational differences, and growing disconnection between the executive suite and frontline care teams. The command-and-control leadership style that may work during an acute crisis isn't enough to build a healthy, sustainable healthcare organization for the future.

In this episode, Mike discusses:

Mike also challenges healthcare executives to take an honest look at their leadership pipeline.

Are frontline managers developing the relational skills needed to lead today's workforce—or relying on outdated command-and-control pressure?

Is your organization investing in leadership development that produces lasting change—or continuing to rely on one-time training?

And if your organization faced another significant crisis tomorrow, would your leadership culture remain united and resolved under pressure?

As we remember September 11, this episode is both a reflection on the leadership we witnessed 25 years ago and a challenge for the leaders of today.

We honor the past not by standing still, but by preparing leaders for what's next.

If you're a healthcare executive working to build a future-ready leadership culture where people stay, grow, and thrive, this episode will challenge you to consider whether the way you're developing leaders has evolved alongside the workforce they're being asked to lead.

If you found this episode valuable, please leave a 5-star review and share it with another leader.

To continue the conversation or learn how Harbour Resources can help your organization develop future-ready leaders and create lasting leadership behavior change, reach out to Mike at [email protected].

In this episode of the Lead Up Podcast, host Mike Harbour takes on something that is quietly costing healthcare organizations good people, stronger performance, and potentially millions of dollars:

Cultural contamination.

In healthcare, culture isn't soft. It isn't optional. And it isn't simply HR's responsibility.

It's an operational and clinical performance variable.

When culture begins to deteriorate, the impact eventually shows up in the places hospital executives care about most—employee turnover, burnout, engagement, patient experience, safety, financial performance, and organizational trust.

The challenge is that by the time those problems appear on the dashboard, the behaviors contributing to them may have been present for months or even years.

In this episode, Mike identifies 9 cultural contaminants healthcare executives and leaders should be watching for:

But Mike doesn't stop at identifying the problems.

For each contaminant, he shares an Elite Leader Move—a practical leadership response designed to address the behavior before it becomes further embedded in the culture.

Throughout the episode, Mike challenges healthcare leaders to look beyond the metrics and examine what's happening underneath them.

Healthy hospital cultures don't happen accidentally.

They are intentionally built, reinforced, and protected through disciplined leadership behavior.

As Mike shares in the episode, elite leadership isn't about charisma. It's about cultural discipline—the behaviors leaders consistently repeat, reinforce, and refuse to compromise.

So here's the question to take back to your executive team:

Where is cultural contamination quietly being tolerated in your organization?

If you found this episode valuable, share it with your executive team and another healthcare leader who needs to hear it.

To continue the conversation or learn how Harbour Resources helps healthcare organizations develop, reinforce, and measure the specific leadership behaviors that drive stronger culture and organizational performance, reach out to Mike at [email protected].