The Lead Up Podcast

In this episode of the Lead Up Podcast, host Mike Harbour breaks down what separates average leadership from elite leadership through what he calls the 7 Pillars of the Elite Leader.

Mike explains why most leadership breakdowns do not start externally—they start internally. While many organizations focus heavily on tactical leadership skills, Mike argues that sustainable leadership growth begins with self-awareness, emotional regulation, adaptability, and the ability to lead consistently under pressure.

Throughout the episode, he walks through 7 critical leadership capacities that directly shape culture, execution, communication, and organizational trust. He explores why leaders must continually evolve as their responsibilities grow, how leadership behavior silently teaches organizations what to normalize, and why burnout, inconsistency, and team disengagement are often symptoms of deeper leadership gaps upstream.

Mike also discusses:

One of the biggest takeaways from this conversation: elite leadership is not about doing more—it is about becoming the kind of leader who can create more clarity, and develop stronger people around them.

Whether you lead a hospital, a department, a frontline team, or your family at home, this episode offers a practical framework for strengthening your leadership influence and building organizations that operate with greater alignment, trust, and resilience.

If you found this episode valuable, be sure to leave a 5-star review and share it with another leader. For questions or to continue the conversation, reach out to Mike at [email protected].

In this episode of the Lead Up Podcast, Mike sits down with Aja Chavez, Vice President of Adolescent Services at AMFM Healthcare, to discuss the hidden organizational cost of unresolved leadership issues, culture during rapid growth, and what it takes to build mission-driven healthcare teams.

They explore how leadership clarity reduces overwhelm, why organizations slowly adapt around unresolved problems, and the impact the wrong leadership hire can have on culture, retention, and operational trust. Aja also shares practical insight on helping leaders create ownership at the front lines while maintaining alignment during expansion.

This conversation is packed with real-world leadership perspectives for healthcare executives navigating growth, retention, accountability, and leadership development inside high-pressure environments.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a 5-star review on your streaming platform. Mike encourages you to reach out at [email protected] to share your thoughts and suggest future topics.

On this episode of the Lead Up Podcast, host Mike Harbour sits down with Barbara Gustavson—author of Regroup and a brain health educator—to explore a reality many leaders are living but rarely naming: hidden depletion.

From the outside, these leaders look steady and capable.

Behind the scenes, they’re running on low reserves while continuing to carry the weight of leadership, teams, and responsibilities that don’t pause.

At the center of the conversation is a practical truth:

Leadership isn’t just about output. It’s about sustaining clarity and steadiness under pressure.

Barbara shares her own experience navigating years of caregiving while leading and building a business—not a breaking point, but a slow erosion of energy, focus, and connection.

The conversation unpacks why leaders are especially vulnerable. Responsibility becomes identity. Being the strong one feels non-negotiable. And over time, leaders normalize a pace that quietly costs them more than they realize.

They also explore the organizational impact. When leaders are depleted or dysregulated, teams feel it. Communication tightens, risk tolerance drops, and culture shifts into survival mode.

Barbara introduces the idea of “productive peace”—not as an escape, but as a way to think clearly, lead steadily, and make better decisions in high-pressure environments.

This episode offers a grounded look at what it means to regroup—not by doing less, but by operating differently.

If you’re a healthcare leader carrying a heavy load and trying to stay effective under pressure, this conversation provides a clear and practical perspective.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a 5-star review on your streaming platform. Mike encourages you to reach out at [email protected] to share your thoughts and suggest future topics.

On this episode of the Lead Up Podcast, host Mike Harbour sits down with Anthony Stahl, President of White Oak Medical Center, to explore what it really takes to turn around performance in a complex healthcare environment.

When Anthony stepped into the role, the organization was facing financial pressure, average quality and safety scores, and low morale. What followed wasn’t a quick fix—it was a deliberate shift in how leadership showed up, how culture was built, and how daily operations were managed.

At the center of the conversation is a practical truth:

Leadership theory only works if it holds up under real conditions.

The conversation highlights how culture directly impacts outcomes. As White Oak invested in leadership development and operational discipline, they saw measurable improvements in safety, quality, engagement, and financial performance—ultimately becoming one of the top-performing hospitals in their region.

Anthony also shares his perspective on physician burnout and wellbeing, including the importance of reducing friction in daily work, creating space for connection, and addressing system-level challenges before they lead to disengagement.

This episode offers a grounded look at how strong leadership, clear priorities, and consistent execution can transform an organization—even under significant constraints.

If you’re a healthcare leader focused on culture, performance, or developing leaders who can deliver results under pressure, this conversation provides a practical and honest perspective.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a 5-star review on your streaming platform. Mike encourages you to reach out at [email protected] to share your thoughts and suggest future topics.

On this episode of the Lead Up Podcast, host Mike Harbour sits down with Maggie Brennan, CEO of North Shore Community Health, to discuss what it really takes to address turnover, burnout, and workforce instability in healthcare.

Rather than treating these as market-driven challenges, Maggie shares how her organization reframed them as signals of deeper system issues—and made deliberate changes to better support their people.

The conversation walks through a pivotal moment when North Shore faced a significant provider exodus. Instead of blaming external factors, Maggie and her team looked inward, gathered direct feedback, and identified specific operational constraints that were driving dissatisfaction.

From there, they implemented targeted changes—including eliminating call requirements for providers, building structured onboarding and development paths for new clinicians, and investing in tools that reduce administrative burden and restore time back to providers.

Maggie also shares how leaders can create environments where people can succeed, not just expect more from them. That includes shifting from reactive problem-solving to deliberate leadership, developing other leaders instead of becoming the bottleneck, and designing systems that make the right behaviors easier to execute.

If you’re a healthcare leader navigating retention challenges, workforce fatigue, or pressure to deliver more with less, this episode offers a grounded look at how system-level changes can drive meaningful results.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a 5-star review on your streaming platform. Mike encourages you to reach out to him at [email protected] to share your thoughts and suggest future topics.

In this episode of the Lead Up Podcast, Mike Harbour takes on a quieter, more dangerous breakdown in leadership—what happens when teams believe they’re aligned, but that alignment never reaches execution.

He walks through a pattern seen repeatedly in healthcare organizations: strong strategy, clear intent, and apparent agreement at the top—followed by slow, fragmented execution across the system. Not because leaders don’t care, but because alignment stopped at words and never translated into behavior.

Mike breaks this down in stages, showing how misalignment stays hidden early on, then surfaces through slowed decisions, siloed execution, and increasing pressure on middle leaders. As clarity fades, leaders begin optimizing for their own areas, managers are forced to interpret direction, and frontline teams create workarounds just to keep moving.

The episode challenges a common assumption: that agreement equals alignment. In reality, most teams align on language—not on tradeoffs, risk, or what execution actually requires.

One of the key takeaways: strategy doesn’t fail at the point of intent—it fails in the gap between what’s said and what’s consistently reinforced through decisions and behavior.

If you’re trying to ensure your strategy actually shows up in day-to-day execution, this episode will help you see where that breakdown begins and what it takes to close it.

If you found this episode valuable, be sure to leave a 5-star review and share it with another leader. For questions or to continue the conversation, reach out to Mike at [email protected].

In this episode of the Lead Up Podcast, host Mike Harbour sits down with Scott Becker, founder and publisher of Becker’s Healthcare, to explore what separates organizations that grow from those that stall—and why leadership evolution is at the center of it.

Drawing from decades of experience building businesses across healthcare, media, and professional services, Scott breaks down the stages leaders must move through as their organizations grow. He explains why many leaders become the limiting factor without realizing it, and how the shift from doing everything to delegating to building teams that outperform you is what ultimately determines whether an organization can scale.

They discuss where companies—and hospital leadership teams—most often get stuck, particularly in the transition from individual contribution to true team-based execution. Scott highlights the risks of staying too involved, the hidden cost of leadership bottlenecks, and why organizations slow down when decisions, priorities, and direction continue to run through a single point.

The conversation also explores the importance of focus, hiring, and role clarity. Scott emphasizes that growth doesn’t come from doing more—it comes from knowing where you can win, building the right team around that, and consistently reinforcing it. He also addresses a common tension in healthcare: balancing team engagement with patient-centered outcomes, and why both must be held as top priorities.

One of the key takeaways: the true measure of leadership is not how much depends on you—it’s how well the organization performs without you as the constraint.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a 5-star review on your streaming platform. Mike encourages you to reach out to him at [email protected] to share your thoughts and suggest future topics.

In this episode of the Lead Up Podcast, host Mike Harbour sits down with Tom Dahlborg, healthcare executive and author of From Heart to Head and Back Again, to examine what happens when leadership becomes overly transactional in a system that depends on human connection. Drawing from his experience as both a leader and a patient, Tom challenges the assumption that better outcomes come from better metrics—and instead points to the standard of leadership underneath them.

They discuss why healthcare has seen limited progress in patient safety and experience despite decades of focus, and how an overreliance on measurement, incentives, and control has shifted leadership away from its core responsibility. Tom explains how well-intended systems can unintentionally strip away intrinsic motivation, turning meaningful work into transactional activity—and why that shift shows up as burnout, disengagement, and moral injury across teams.

The conversation also explores the difference between managing outcomes and leading people, and why many leaders default to fixing systems without first examining their own role within them. Tom emphasizes the need for courage, self-reflection, and a willingness to make decisions that prioritize what is right—not just what is rewarded.

One of the key takeaways: organizations don’t get better results from new strategies alone—they get them from leaders who are willing to operate at a higher standard, especially when it’s difficult.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a 5-star review on your streaming platform. Mike encourages you to reach out to him at [email protected] to share your thoughts and suggest future topics.

You can learn more about Tom here and find his book on Amazon.

In this episode of the Lead Up Podcast, host Mike Harbour sits down with Emily Craig, Vice President of Palliative Care at Constellation Health, to explore what it actually takes to build leaders in fast-growing, high-pressure healthcare environments. Drawing from her experience scaling a multi-state palliative care program, Emily shares how leadership—not strategy—is what ultimately determines whether priorities hold or begin to drift.

They discuss the common mistake of promoting strong clinicians into leadership roles without preparing them for the decision-making demands that come with it. Emily explains why hiring for character and connection matters more than technical skill, and how leaders can identify the qualities that truly translate into effective leadership under pressure.

The conversation also highlights how to develop leaders without compromising productivity, maintain culture across geographic scale, and build trust when you can’t be physically present. Emily emphasizes the importance of strong onboarding, consistent communication rhythms, and treating people with humanity—while still holding high standards.

One of the key takeaways: while skills can be taught, who someone is cannot—and that distinction shows up quickly in leadership and decision-making.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a 5-star review on your streaming platform. Mike encourages you to reach out to him at [email protected] to share your thoughts and suggest future topics.

On this episode of the Lead Up Podcast, host Mike Harbour talks with Joel Sylvester, Partner and Chief Client Officer at Five Star Call Centers, about leadership, workforce challenges, and how AI is transforming recruiting, training, and coaching across large, distributed teams.

For healthcare leaders facing staffing shortages, rising labor costs, and the need for consistent patient experience, this conversation explores practical ways technology can support frontline teams.

Joel shares how AI can dramatically speed up hiring and improve candidate fit by converting resumes into applications, enabling voice-based job applications, instantly screening candidates, and conducting avatar-based interviews. These tools can reduce time-to-hire by up to 70% while improving the experience for both candidates and hiring teams.

The discussion also explores how AI-powered analytics can help leaders coach and retain employees more effectively. By analyzing recorded interactions, sentiment, and speech patterns, organizations can identify performance gaps, predict retention risks, and provide real-time coaching and personalized training.

Mike and Joel also discuss how healthcare organizations can use AI to rapidly build SOPs, knowledge bases, and training resources, helping teams scale through complexity, maintain compliance, and close critical skill gaps across departments and locations.

If you’re a healthcare leader looking for ways to strengthen your workforce, improve operational consistency, and leverage technology to support your teams, this episode offers practical insights you won’t want to miss.

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to leave a 5-star review on your streaming platform. Mike also encourages you to reach out at [email protected] to share your thoughts on the episode or suggest topics you’d like covered in future conversations.