In a world where healthcare seems to be more about profits than patients and burnout and turnover are at an all-time high, we find relief in knowing there are doctors out there trying to reshape the industry. Dr. Katie Cole, an award-winning psychiatrist, is affectionately called “The Healer’s Healer” for her reform and thought leadership work within the healthcare industry. Her podcast Hope for Healthcare is a platform for healthcare providers to reinvigorate their passion for medicine, prevent costly burnout by expanding the well-being community, and create a healthier work-life balance, all while framing their work around helping others.

Recently, she brought keynote speaker Dr. Thom Mayer onto her podcast to better understand and discuss his idea of servant leadership within the realm of healthcare. His experience as a leader in emergencies like 9/11, government anthrax exposure, and most recently boots-on-the-ground medical training in Ukraine, has shaped his career as a trusted leader. He now serves as the Medical Director for the NFL Players Association where he has headed the implementation of life-saving measures on the sidelines, was the originator of the entire NFL Concussion Guidelines program, and was recently named “100 Most Important People in the NFL” by USA Today.

In his conversations with Dr. Cole, Mayer dives into his new book Leadership is Worthless…But Leading Is Priceless where he outlines the top lessons he’s learned from being a national leader. His hands-on approach to leading is a guide map for how you can embody the traits that make up servant leadership.

There Are No Future Leaders

The most important thing for everyone to understand, according to Mayer, is there are no future leaders. Every morning is a new chance to choose to be a leader — within your career, life, and family. We often put our leaders and the thought of leading up on a pedestal. We imagine these people have some sort of inherent and unattainable skill set.

But Mayer reminds us, leadership is something we take on in every decision we make. Each day you choose to lead is a step towards becoming the best leader you can be. Being a leader doesn’t lie in some C-suite title and it’s not determined by your paycheck. Leadership is found in the small decisions you make to help your team on a daily basis.

Burn In, Don’t Burn Out

Mayer says the most effective and authentic way to be a leader is to burn in and encourage your team to do the same. In healthcare especially, the burnout rate is extremely high. In his studies, Mayer found that the burnout rate is directly related to how close you work with the patient. So, nurses and doctors tend to burn out much faster than, say, the chief financial officer of a hospital.

How do you prevent burnout? Mayer says you must search for what brings you deep joy. If you can find deep joy in your day-to-day tasks, you will begin to burn in or ignite with passion. Once you conduct your career according to your deep joy, inspiring others to do so is simply an act of living.

As a leader, your role in preventing burnout is to remove friction from your team’s day-to-day duties. Studies show the more friction a team member experiences the more likely they are to burn out faster. Whether you’re an employee or an executive, if you want to be a leader you should look for ways to simplify your teams’ jobs and lives.

Failure As Fuel

But nothing truly changes without innovation. It’s easy to say “Simplify processes to prevent burnout,” but how do you simplify? That’s the tricky part. Mayer says innovation like this, as well as big industry-disrupting innovation, can only occur at the speed of trust.

A key ingredient in innovation is failure. If you aren’t failing some of the time, you aren’t pushing the limits of innovation. However, failure is often condemned within organizations. Creating a culture of trust allows your team the support and confidence it needs to try new things without fear of failure. Until you instill trust in your team, you will never see real innovation.

Mayers says to use failure as fuel. He likens it to a football team that spends more time than any other team watching tapes and learning from their past failures. By viewing failure as fuel, your team will learn to celebrate the failure that comes with taking big leaps, instead of praising mediocre successes.

Dr. Katie Cole and Dr. Thom Mayer go further into depth within her podcast Hope for Healthcare. If you’re curious about becoming a better leader, listen to the full podcast to learn more from Dr. Thom Mayer. You can also pre-order his new book Leadership is Worthless…But Leading is Priceless and contact Executive Speakers Bureau to bring him to your next event.