Leading through Uncertanity

This is Lab Medicine Rounds, a curated podcast for physicians, laboratory professionals and students. I'm your host, Justin Kreuter, the Bow Tie Bandit of Blood, a transfusion medicine pathologist at Mayo Clinic. Today we're rounding with Dr. Matt Binnicker, the Director of Clinical Virology and Vice-Chair of Practice in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at Mayo Clinic to talk about working and leading through uncertainty. Thanks for joining us today Dr. Binnicker.

Dr. Kreuter, it's always good to be here. Thanks for having me back. It's great to have you back and to, you know, focus on many of your other additional talents beyond just covid. You, you are certainly, you know, a wise sage when it comes to microbiology, but also also with leadership. Yeah. Held a number had the chance to hold a number of leadership positions in the Department of Lab Medicine and Pathology.

I've learned it's a fantastic way to really understand the organization, meet a lot of people create networks, and it's all about knowing who to reach out to and the team members to pull around the table to get major initiatives done. So I've been happy and honored to serve in those leadership positions.

So maybe we can kind of share some of this wisdom with our listeners today. Maybe start off with, you know, this, why, why is working with uncertainty an important skill for us to cultivate? Yeah, uncertainty and ambiguity is part of the fabric of being a leader. And that's because the higher up you move into leadership positions the more ambiguity and the more uncertainty becomes common. When an issue reaches a high leadership team it's usually because there's no clearcut answer.

If there was a clearcut answer the hope would be that it would've been resolved by frontline teams and team members. But when there's significant challenges when there's uncertainty, that's when issues rightfully so get escalated for discussion and resolution by leaders or leadership teams. And so again, it's really just a normal part of being a leader or being part of a leadership team is dealing with situations where there's no clearcut answer.

So it's a really important skill to develop regardless of whether where you're at in your career path but certainly if you are interested or are already in leadership positions to be able to be comfortable with working through uncertainty.

You know, so I hear you talking and and so for our students young and career professionals to hear, you know this is something to be deliberate about trying to understand when you look to your mentors who are dealing with uncertainty how are they navigating that? And for a more senior leadership to think

about as you're mentoring people, to be explicit about helping them understand how you are dealing with that uncertainty. You know, one of the things I imagine, or that I struggle with sometimes when talking about uncertainty with my trainees, my learners, is kind of how do you how do you navigate it while being grounded, right? Because when there's uncertainty, there might be a changing of minds as new information comes available.

And I could imagine there is that challenge to understand when do you shift gears, when do you pivot? And then obviously communicating that to the team so that you know, they understand you are, you are a thoughtful deliberate leader versus somebody who, I mean, you know not to invoke politics, but people talk about flip flopping in a negative connotation. I'm kind of curious how how do you navigate and thread that needle?

Yeah, it's one of the biggest challenges that being in leadership positions is being able to stay grounded or have a direction yet be willing and open to course adjustments as new information becomes available. I think the key here is to always have a true north what is the value or values that you as a leader or as an organization hold true to?

And what do you use as your true north to always come back to regard regardless of what situation and uncertainty are in the midst of, for example, here at Mayo Clinic our primary value is the needs of the patient come first.

So as we are dealing with issues where there's not enough or ample information or data to make a real clear cut decision we'll commonly come back to that true north statement of is the decision we're making in the best interest of our patients to help them receive the best diagnosis in management. As that really helps you to guide you through or your teams through periods of uncertainty and ambiguity is to always go back to that true north or that guiding principle or value.

But it is very true that leaders oftentimes are criticized for changing their mind or changing their opinion on a situation as new information becomes available. And I just think it's so important to get the message out that a leader who is open to course adjustments that's not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of being willing to take in new information to change your potential direction or strategy dependent on that information.

But as long as that direction continues to align with your true north.

I'm really curious to explore a little bit your con- this concept of, you know, the true north. Because I think a lot of times we think about, you know leaders rising to a particular occasion. And I imagine that for you this isn't something that only during those really stressful days that you are doing something to kind of, I I'm not sure I, I don't wanna put words in your mouth to live or communicate this true north.

So I'm kind of curious, maybe my question is when you're not in a crisis moment when it's not necessarily an ambiguous time how do you kind of prepare or how do you behave in a way that kind of further cultivates this idea that everybody understands you're a leader that's got a a true north, how, how does your off season look? Yeah Yeah. I mean, the goal is to not be operating in chaos mode or response to tragedy or again, chaos.

That hopefully at least half the time you're you're operating in some sort of a, a rhythm or run state. Now, during those times where there's not chaos involved I found it to be effective to use those periods of relative calm to overemphasize and overcommunicate the strategy direction and gain clarity within the team of where you're headed and why.

So as long as your teams have a strong appreciation of where you are leading them and where the future what the future will look like then we're able to navigate those periods of uncertainty or chaos a lot more effectively

because they still will be able to go back and remember this is ultimately where we're headed. We're gonna weather this particular storm. The landscape may change after the storm but ultimately we know we're gonna get back to that true north and that future direction that we've talked about and over-communicated and overemphasized during the periods of calm.

I'm curious in your answer there you're talking about the, you know, the importance of kind of normally operating with a, a rhythm and a run. And I know you got a lot of rhythm, you're a runner. Yeah. And I'm curious about how we could help our colleagues who are struggling with uncertainty during these times. You know, as a leader, sometimes maybe junior leaders or you know, early career professionals might be struggling with that uncertainty and, you know may feel very out of a, a rhythm.

So how, how can we help those colleagues who are struggling? Yeah, I've learned that it is a skillset that's learned over time and with experience. It's just not something that many people are born with in terms of being able to be dropped into uncertainty, ambiguity and be comfortable with that. I think we're wired to be uncomfortable when things aren't clear. And so what do we need to do as leaders to help prepare the future generation to deal with that?

We need to give them exposure and experience in dealing with difficult decisions. So it all goes back to leaders being willing to grow the next generation of leaders. And you look for good talent, you put them

in opportunities that will test their skillset and allow them to develop you even allow them sometimes to fail and talk through what that failure to look like and how we could do things differently in the future. Failure is an opportunity to learn and if if people aren't given opportunities to be in those situations and learn from experiences they're not gonna be battle tested and be able to respond during periods of uncertainty and ambiguity when it really matters.

So again, it's all about growing leaders, giving them opportunities supporting them through success and failure. That's really the key. A as you talk about that, I, I really see your point there on that kind of debrief, talking with them particularly about when there has been a failure and something I've come across is people that kind of have I guess what we talk about more of that fixed mindset as opposed to a growth mindset.

And so they take that conversation in in a very hyper critical negative way. That person may have a lot of talents and how can we help them to kind of move from that kind of, wow, I, I really don't this getting a negative feedback is really uncomfortable. How, how can we kind of help them see the the growth and opportunity in front of them? Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned, you know the fix versus growth mindset.

And I think as leaders it's really essential to help develop a culture of growth mindset. In other words, we view challenges we view failure as opportunities to grow and become better rather than grow challenges and failures.

Meaning that you are a failure and so many people have that mindset, if I don't succeed in this particular situation, I can't become better. And that's one of the key attributes of a good leader is to help your team members work through that and be able to see that you can work through challenge and failure and come out on the other side to be a better leader or a better team member.

And it goes back to giving people opportunities putting in them in situations where you hope that they will thrive and succeed, but they may fail. And being there to support them and talking them through that, helping them to see what the future might hold if things are done a little bit differently and always encouraging them along their path of leadership.

You know, I'd like to kind of close, I I think stories are are powerful kind of teacher, I, I'm kind of curious if you would share with our listeners kind of a story of how uncertainty has has really surprised you most? Yeah, you know, when I think about this question I have a number of stories come to mind immediately.

And the, the story I'd like to tell is is during the Covid 19 pandemic in which Mayo Clinic stood up what we called our diagnostic stewardship group which comprised of laboratory leaders, infectious diseases occupational health, primary care, and really the task of that team was to develop the testing strategies and the safety strategies for our patients and our employees. And they, the difficult thing about that group was we were truly dealing with new information on a daily basis.

There was so much uncertainty and so much ambiguity involved that it was a prime example of leading through uncertainty. And I think what that experience taught me is that if you bring together a number of different voices you're much better prepared to weather a storm than if you try to make decisions in isolation. I had my, I brought some expertise and I had things that I was aware of and familiar with but I also had blind blinders to other issues.

And so by bringing in multiple team members it helped to expand the layers of expertise and gave us a much broader picture of the situation. Did we get it all perfect? No, but we were able to make the best decisions with the available information at the time and we were also able to communicate when things changed why they changed.

So again, just to reemphasize, when you are leading through a period of high levels of uncertainty and ambiguity, it's very important to pull together a team a diverse team that allows you see the complete landscape that's gonna help you better weather the storm

and be able to make the best decisions possible. That's so profound. A, a word that we haven't said in this podcast yet that I'm thinking about is, you know, really vulnerability. And one of the things that I'm taking away from our conversation today that's really kind of been a thread to a lot of your answers and your insights has been that by leaders making ourselves vulnerable.

And then in your story there I see that vulnerability by inviting several people under the tent to form it helps you make the best decision, really leads to the best decision as opposed to, I think there's a lot of other thoughts when people want to think about a strong leader as kind of the, the monolith.

And, and I really like how you've kind of really threaded that through a lot of your answers cause I think that's something that, you know myself and probably a lot of our our listeners can really benefit from. Absolutely. Yeah, it, it definitely helps as a leader to surround yourself with an A team that is really critical to dealing with daily operations but also handling those significant challenges. We've been rounding with Dr. Binnicker on leading and working through uncertainty.

Thank you so much for taking the time to talk about this with us. Absolutely. Thanks again for having me back. And to all of our listeners, thank you for joining us today. We invite you to share your thoughts and suggestions via email. Please direct any suggestions to [email protected].

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