—Systemic change begins with personal change—
Rob is Director, Medical Intensive Care Unit, Sinai Hospital of Baltimore, and Professor of Medicine, George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences.
He is board certified in Internal Medicine, Pulmonary Medicine, and Critical Care Medicine. His research interests include heart-lung interactions, COPD, and thoracic transplantation. His clinical work focuses on lung transplantation.
His specialties include general pulmonary medicine, COPD, advanced lung disease, pulmonary embolism, and lung transplantation.
He is also a client of my leadership coaching, which he shares about.
Rob starts by sharing his experience from leadership coaching in the context of a hospital with people in intensive care as well as their families. Situations are often emotionally intense. Treating just facts doesn't work, or can work against you. It can be "terribly ineffective" (not unique to medicine). He recounts learning to lead through emotional awareness, using social and emotional skills he developed through practice in our coaching. He connects with people meaningfully: patients, their families, the other members of his team, everyone. He talks about not telling people what to do but to listen and act with empathy and compassion, that he's developing through deliberate practice. Maybe the most heartfelt part of our conversation comes at the end where he speaks about his longtime vision and dreams for being a doctor. As much as he wanted to care for patients and their families, now he sees how much the skills of leadership enable him to help far more people by leading others to care more effectively.
Rob is one of my coaching clients. I asked him to be a guest here since many people perceive leadership and learning it as different than I mean. His work in medicine may not be at the center of sustainability, but I work in leadership, which I apply to sustainability. Listen to this episode to learn what changes to your life you can expect when you take my workshops. Listen to him for the full picture, but I think you'll hear profound and enduring personal growth, professional growth, improved relationships with spouse, children, and coworkers, promotion, security, connecting with your passions and realizing them, and more. It seems an overwhelming majority of people I talk to who haven't explicitly learned leadership associate leadership with the opposite of what I mean when I talk about leadership. They think of it as imposing authority, manipulating, convincing, telling people what to do, and the like. My definition of leadership is helping people do what they already want but haven't figured out how. Rob shares how he is learning and improving his leadership. People in sustainability can learn a lot from his fast and significant learning.