Simplify, Communicate, Act: A New Leadership Formula

In this episode of Membership IQ, Sarah Sladek sits down with Tom Gehring—retired Navy officer, former CEO, and founder of a health leadership academy—to unpack the essentials of strategic leadership in chaotic times. With wit and wisdom, Tom outlines the four major barriers leaders face today: time scarcity, lack of actionable follow-through, excessive non-value-added tasks, and what he calls “the branching problem” of modern complexity.

From submarine life to managing physicians, Tom shares stories and strategies that highlight the importance of simplifying decisions, mentoring the next generation, and leading with integrity. His practical leadership compass—seven roles every leader should play—serves as a timeless guide in an era of rapid change. Whether you're steering a membership organization or leading a team, this conversation is a masterclass in meaningful leadership and human connection.

Transcript

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(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.) Welcome back to another episode of the Membership IQ. This is where you go to get smart about membership and about so many things in terms of community building and belonging and inclusion. And I'm really honored to be joined today by a member of the XYZ University Advisory Board and someone I consider a mentor and one of the smartest people on the planet, Tom Gehring. So welcome to the podcast, Tom, would you just tell our audience a little bit about yourself? Well, first of all, I am absolutely not the smartest person that she's ever met. So we'll get rid of that fantasy right away. My name is Tom Gehring, I have an interesting background, I can't seem to hold a job. I spent 22 years in the submarine force, working and living on nuclear submarines. Almost all that time was at sea, almost all that at sea time was submerged. So it has had a few impacts on my behavior. My wife is luckily a psychiatrist, so I've been taking the meds. I spent three years as a slimy consultant, one word, no hyphen, working for Booz Allen Hamilton, and then had the best 15 year run as a CEO of the planet. I was CEO of the County Medical Society, and had a chance to make a real difference in the lives of both the doctors and their patients. And I retired eight years ago, and I thought I would be going to the woodshop and you know, making furniture, which I still do occasionally. But it turns out I had the best eight year, nine year run that I that I ever thought I would have, because I have the opportunity to make a difference in people's lives. And I swore then that I would never do three things. One is I don't do staff meetings, I don't do HR, and I never wear a suit and tie ever again. So therefore my low life appearance. And I now run a health leadership academy at which I've been honored to have Sarah as a speaker for the last eight years, where I take 40 to 45 leaders and managers who are just growing into their positions, and over a period of year, teach them what they need to know, to learn to teach themselves how to be better leaders and managers. In addition to that, I wound up spending a lot of time with other organizations consulting with them. So as, as, as someone has said, that's a that's a biography that only a mother would believe. But so let's kick it off. All right, let's do it. So Tom, you have a lot of experience, yes, in military, but also most recently with the health leadership academy at UC San Diego. And I'm just curious, what's the word on the street? What are the questions and concerns currently top of mind? I don't think there are going to be any surprises in what I'm about to tell you. And none of this is novel. But to me, there are four things that are on top of everybody's mind. One is they don't have enough time. It is overwhelming. The number of distractions, the number of non-value added steps, it is just overwhelming that they're not able to get at what they really want to do. And I jotted down in my notes in preparation for this is that as leaders and managers on the matter of time, we have to be ruthless guardians of our daytimers. I use the word ruthless advisory, advisedly. Time is the most valuable commodity we have, and it is wasted in so many ways. And I think it is part of the job of the leader is to be appreciative of the time sucks on their people and more importantly, on themselves. And that's one of the reasons I wrote the first book I did, which was, what are you really going to do as a leader? And frankly, delegate everything else. So to me, number one on the hit parade is time. Number two is something that is so ridiculously simple as to almost, you know, why is he talking about that? And the answer is, or the question really is action. We tend to talk a lot, theorize, my God, we have books coming out the gum stump. I've written three, I'm working on my fourth, and we're really proud of that. And at the end of the day, what really matters is something Sarah has heard me say during my courses, what are you going to do differently on Monday? And there is a bent toward theory and talk and lots of other stuff. But at the end of the day, it's what you do. And therefore, the bent to action is kind of what I think one of the biggest concerns people have is they want to get stuff done. But first, we have to have four meetings and five theory books, and we've got to publish a paper on it. And the end of the day, the most important thing you can do as a leader is, what are you going to do differently on Monday? Is to ask that question. I think the third thing is there are so many non-value added steps in our work processes. We do all this stuff and we ask ourselves, at the end of the day, was that worth my time? And in many cases, it's not. So the growth, in fact, the metastatic multiplication of non-value added steps, non-value added tasks, non-value added, fill in the blank, I think is bringing us to our knees. And so we got to get rid of the stuff that really is not central to the mission and the vision. And the fourth thing, and Kathy and I, my wife, we're talking, my wife's a practicing psychiatrist and she's actually seeing patients in the next room, is what I call the branching problem. So nowadays, information is scattered across so many places. And we have access to it. In the good old days, you wanted to fix something, you had to go to the library. You know, remember that where they have all these books and racks? Yeah. Well, we don't do that anymore because it's at our fingertips. And the cause, the result of that is that in order to do X, we have to do Y. In order to do Y, we have to do Z. And pretty soon, you're four deep in an outline and you don't know where you started from. And so the branching problem is killing us. This morning when I was, I had a task that I needed to do, but I needed to do this before that and that before that. And so nowadays, when I start a branching problem, I get out a three by five card and go, okay, I'm going to get this done. Then I have to go down four layers and back up. And what happens is you get down four layers and you forgot, why am I here? And so getting rid of the branching problem, I think, is kind of critical. So it's time, it's a bent to action. It's getting rid of the non-value added steps and it's figuring out how the branching problem, you're not going to make it go away. What you need to do is make sure you recognize it and then take steps to prevent yourself from getting lost. So those are the four things that I see in the class that I teach and as I walk around and in the places that I work. You know, you mentioned time as being a commodity and I am curious, just off the fly here, what do you think is the best use of a leader's time right now? Funny you should ask that, and I'm not going to pitch the book that I wrote because that's inappropriate, but the answer is decide on what's really important. And when I've talked to hundreds of leaders and at the end of the day, I came to the conclusion that most people love to delegate. The problem is delegation takes time. So what I said was, okay, here are the things that I'm going to not delegate and everything else belongs to somebody else. Then the next question I ask is, okay, so what am I now staring theatrically at the sky? What is it I'm not going to delegate? And to me, those are the fundamental roles of the leader. And if you like a compass, always go back to those seven things. And I came up with seven. One is you're the chief censor. You're the chief visionary. You're the chief cultural officer. You're the chief enabler. You're the chief decider. You hold yourself and everyone else responsible. So you assume, you grasp responsibility. And finally, you mentor the next generation. So if you use that as a compass and says, okay, I got to take this phone call because my boss and I got to deal with this crisis. Okay, fine. Then you like a compass, you come back to those seven roles. And as a leader, if you can stay focused on sensing, visioning, culturation, enabling, deciding, pursuing or grasping responsibility and mentoring, then you have a better chance of not being a tactical leader or rather being a strategic leader. Mm-hmm. You know, you have just kind of verbalized basically that we have a lot of noise. We have a lot of distractions. It's difficult right now to lead. There's a lot happening and change is happening so incredibly fast. One of my clients was just talking about, we're talking every single day as an organization, like what should our focus be? And it's like, they're just kind of following the whims of all the noise that's happening in society right now. So crazy way to try to ineffectively lead, right? It doesn't work. So I am curious, you know, if you had to pass along some tips to our audience about what are your insights, what are your experiences on how to effectively lead in a time of change, in a time of absolute chaos and distraction? So I'll share with you kind of five ideas. I would argue that on a temporal spectrum, the leader's role is to do three things. One is they have to understand the past. How did we get here? Yep. You have to contextualize the present for your people. Let me set context for you is one of the things that I always love to hear leaders say. Let me set context here for you. And finally, you have to have a vision about the future. So if you look at the past, understand, contextualize, envision. And so I'm going to use a nautical analogy. And no, I was not there in the age of sail, although I made the bad mistake of graduating number two in my class and they sent me to the oldest submarine in the fleet. The first guy who graduated first got exactly what he wanted, should have worked a little harder. But I wound up going to the oldest submarine in the fleet and they didn't let us go very far because we were broke all the time. So one time we were headed into Halifax, Nova Scotia in December of 1977 at the same time that the movie was made about a perfect storm. We were in that perfect storm, actually. Oh, gosh. And so on the surface, the submarine is just, you know, it's being tossed and turned and tossed and turned. But at the end of the day, we always came back to base course. And I would argue you as a leader need to know base course. Now, I can talk about how to get to that point. But the key is you're going to get tossed and turned and change priorities and people yelling in your ear and this and that. But at the end of the day, you're always coming back to the same course. And to me, that is about vision. So I think you've got to understand contextualize and vision. And then I think you have to do two things. One is you've got to communicate the snot out of what you're doing. You cannot over communicate. There's no such thing. So you've got to tell people what's going on. And I think the last one is you've got to simplify. People can't deal with 157 things on their plate. One of my favorite authors is a guy named Dave Oliver, who wrote a book called Lead On. And he says, you know, as a leader, you get three things. If you get three things done in a year, you're doing great. You've got to pick the right three. And you've got to simplify. And he says, your list of things to do today is not 152 long. And so it is communicate, simplify, and then tell your people about understand the past, contextualize the present, and vision the future. So that would be the advice I would give to any leader. Yeah. You know, using that perfect storm analogy, I've also heard it described that when you set out to go on a road trip, you know where you're going. You have your destination, your city in mind. And there may be travel delays. There may be construction along the route. And you may have to take a detour. But you're always going back to figure out, how do I get to my destination? Whether it's Disney World, or the Rocky Mountains, or whatever the case may be, you don't just all of a sudden say, oh, forget it. We're going to Alaska instead, or Hawaii, or France, or wherever. And so having that vision, as you put it, that destination in mind is critical. I got to say, all right, did you steal my notes? No. Did I read your mind? I'll elaborate on this, OK? Because one of the analogies that I'm giving my Health Leadership Academy class is the idea of when you're on a road trip, honest to God, we came to the exact same place completely independently, that your vision is your destination. And yeah, you got to go. There's a detour. And to continue with that automotive analogy, because I'm working with a group in the capital right now, that has a number of traffic delays in the analogy. They know where they got to go. Sometimes they're going 70 miles an hour. Sometimes there's congestion. There's a storm. There's an incident, whatever. And so as a leader, you perhaps don't have the ability to identify how fast you're going. Ideally, you want to be going 70. And I mean, if you've got a Maserati, you want to go 140. But still, you want to go fast. And yet in the day-to-day crush of potholes, crises, you can fill in the metaphor and the reality. Sometimes you don't get to go 70. Sometimes you're going five miles an hour. One is you're headed in the same direction. And to continue with that analogy, one of the things I'm coaching my team is you got to have a brand. And a lot of people go, well, what's a brand? You want me to just do it or something? And the answer is it's the bumper sticker on your car. Everybody looks at your car and reads the brand slash bumper sticker and goes, I know who they are. And so I have in my class write a branding statement, which initially starts out about 152 words long, right? And at the end of the day, it says seven words. That's all you get. And it helps people focus. You know, there's a little bit of a sidebar. You know, sometimes the teacher doesn't follow their own advice. And at the end of this whole session on branding, one of my more aggressive students says, OK, Tom, what's your brand? And truth be known, I hadn't thought about it. What was interesting about it is when asked the question, it took me literally less than a second to come up with the brand, which is mentoring the next generation, four words. I got to check mentoring the next year. Yeah, right. OK, when you get to be on Social Security, you got to start wondering about your brand. The point is that that distills who I am. And then my vision, OK, making a tangible, positive difference in the lives of family, friends and community is the destination I'm striving for. But who I am is my brand. And that's what I suggest all of the listeners here. Think about what's your brand. Think about what's your vision. You're going to go there. There's going to be deviations in course and speed. But accepting that and dealing with that is the key to successful leadership. So I probably went we probably went on an automotive road trip there. Yeah, but it's kind of funny we were talking about the same thing. So mentoring the next generation for really crucial words and an important mission. So congrats on that. But you and I have talked a lot over the years about generational shifts. When you and I first met, it was a while ago. I think Gen X was just coming into the fold. I think you were in your teens at that point. Yeah, I was really young. And then we started talking about millennials. Now we're seeing Gen Z. You're working with these young physicians and leaders. And you have a front row seat to generational change. So I'm curious to know what trends you're observing right now in terms of generations and how that's affecting health care, really. Well, let me let me take that in two bites. But I'm going to focus on the trends. And you're probably too young to remember bell bottoms. Come on, go with the compliment. OK, OK, OK. Yes, I was way. I have no idea what you're talking about. Good, good history. In my generation, bell bottoms were the thing. White belts, long hair. And you know, it weighed about five years. And that went away. And short hair and whatever. And so what you realize is that a lot of things oscillate. This generation is a little bit more conservative. This one's a little more liberal. And at the end of the day, what the leader needs to do is acknowledge the differences and accept them and understand them. Not in that order. Actually, I got it backwards. You need to understand the differences. You've got to acknowledge them and then you've got to accept them. And so I'm going to put in a plug for what Sarah's done. I first heard about Sarah, like I think it was before the dawn of. I think the dinosaurs were still out. Great, thanks. You just said I didn't know bell bottoms. The point is that I heard Sarah at a meeting. I think it was in Knoxville or somewhere in Tennessee. And you had spoken about the generational differences. And suddenly the light bulb came on. Because I was treating the young ones the same way I had been treated, which was, as it turns out, not effective. Well, why isn't it effective? Well, because you are a different generation than they are. And so she helped us understand the generational differences. And that was the easy part. The hard part is accepting them. OK, so my son, I'm going to use a real world example. My son is 27. He's a relatively early Gen Z. So he was he's right on the cusp of going from millennial to Gen Z. See, I know that I was paying attention. You are. And and he, unlike me, does not know what this thing is for. This is not a text machine. It is a telephone. Alexander Graham Bell invented this. Not this, but you get my point. And and they don't believe in picking up the phone drives me nuts. So I have to accept the fact that that is not their prime choice. And then I have to understand it. And and at the end of the day, you reach an equilibrium. And that is the key to my way of thinking is there is no one thing that is different about any one generation than the other. What is different is that there are differences. That's the key. And and how you communicate to me is all about it. What's most important? And I kind of scribble down in my notes in preparation for this, acknowledge that differences exist. But the prime directive in dealing with both the generations older and younger is integrity. And somebody says, all right, well, what's this integrity thing? Let me check my notebook. And, you know, they're on Reddit looking up what integrity is. And I would argue that it is three things. And to all the people who are listening to this, you cannot be successful as a leader, a manager, a parent, as a member of the community, unless you are able to do three things. One is honesty. Honesty is telling the truth. OK, and I don't care. It's how much ice cream is left in the freezer. If you lie just once, you're done. You're done in the eyes of your kids. You're done in the eyes of your spouse. You're done in the eyes of people you work with. So you need to be honest. But that is more than just telling the truth. It is also accepting the reality. Dishonesty can be manifested by not acknowledging what's wrong. No, we don't have a problem. Nope, everything's fine. No problem here. Well, you're being dishonest, not by lying, but by obfuscating what's really going on. The second thing is you have to have as part of this integrity equation is you have to have courage. You have to have the willingness to go, nope, not doing that. Sorry. No matter the consequences. And so I define integrity as honesty plus courage, knowing what's really going on, doing something about it, multiplied by transparency. So it's not just doing the right thing and knowing the right thing. It's by telling everybody about it. So I think the universal standard for every generation is this idea is you have to have integrity, which is honesty plus courage multiplied by transparency. And if you can do that, it doesn't matter whether you're working with this or working with a semaphore. It gets you to the same place. And so that would be my advice to your listeners about dealing with generational differences. Understand them, know them, accept them, and then have integrity about it. Long-winded answer, but that's where I'm thinking. I love it. I love it. I love it, love it, love it. I love how if you've noticed, audience, Tom tends to break things down in little lists, like here are three things. I love that. One, two, three. Absolutely. And there's a recipe with all of Tom's answers. What's your recipe for bridging gaps in community building? Because people who tune in to this podcast tend to be somehow involved with a membership organization or initiative. Community building is really, really important to them. So I'm curious to know what your recipe is for that. Again, since I like threes, one, pick up the phone. And that's a metaphor. What it really means is go talk to people. I mean, you know who your constituents are. You know who your peers are. Go talk to them. What a novel concept. Have lunch. Drop in. But it is all about building the relationship before you need the relationship. You know you're going to need something from somebody. Don't wait till you're hat in hand at their front door. Build the relationship before you need the relationship. And then back to transparency. You're going to do some things that they're not going to agree with. I mean, that's just a given. Every institution has interests. Sometimes they conflict. OK, but if you've talked to them, if you built the relationship, then you are trying. See, I got the three. Yes, yes, I see. And if you're transparent and explain why it is you're doing something they don't necessarily like, you may not. They may not like what you just said, but they will respect you for telling them the truth. So those are the three things that I would tell you on how to build community. Talk to people. Yeah, and in your health leadership program, I've observed that you are always mixing people up. You are getting them to talk to each other. You really, really talk about relationships a lot and that that's key to leadership. Right. Yeah. Thank you very much. This program's over. She's just said it. About building a relationship. It's about, I take 45 people who don't really know each other and over a period of a year, by insisting that they don't sit with their best friends, but talking to each other, understanding that that's really the key. You know, we are not solo flyers. We are, as Dave Logan likes to say, we're tribal. We like to be in a tribe, so go build your tribe. Right. Well, and I will just add that you also bring the people in the academy to your house. Like you are transparent. You are cultivating those relationships and modeling that behavior yourself, right? Yeah, it's really cool. One of the things that good leaders do, and this is something I teach at the Health Leadership Academy, is you're going to screw up. I'll just, that's a written guarantee with a $500 cashback response if you never screw up. The question then becomes is, what are you going to do about it? Right. And one of the very first things I did is I put on my reading list a book by an author who was, well, let's just say they were not, they did something really stupid and were appropriately removed from a lot of people's reading lists, and I missed it. I just missed it. I wasn't thinking about it. And so I put that on the reading list because I'd been there for seven years. And somebody went, Tom, over here. And so I use that as an example. If you're not, let me rephrase, not if you screw up, when you screw up, okay? Acknowledge it, okay? Figure out how to fix it and get over it. Okay? Because if you're constantly looking in the rear of your mirror going, oh, I screwed up. Yeah, you're going to be frozen in place. So acknowledge it. I screwed up, okay? Fix it. Fix the underlying problem, okay? And be transparent about it. So that always loops back to, well, it's kind of like that integrity equation, right? You're honest about it. You're courageous because you went out and fixed it. And you're transparent about it. So it all goes back to those same three things. Yeah. Well, throughout our time together, you have shared a lot of wisdom and lists and important steps to take. And I just, before we adjourn, I want to ask if you would be willing just to share some parting advice, whether it's a strategy or success story or just something to leave our audience with in terms of leading in this time of change and bridging those gaps and community building. I think the most important skill that I've developed over time is the art of asking good questions. The sad truth is the more senior you get, the less you know. And it's just, you know, as you move up the ladder, you don't know as much. So you need to be a good asker of questions. And a book that I just recently reread is called Wait, What? Written by, in fact, I was sharing this with somebody at the Capitol who I very much respect. The book is written by a guy named James Ryan. And it's Wait, What? And it focuses on five essential questions. The first one is, wait, what? I mean, I'm sure you've heard your teenager go, what? What are you talking about? Right? Which is really a seeking to understand. The second question that he posits, and I really like this, is, I wonder if, or I wonder why? The why part is, well, how did we get here? The if part is, what do we do next? So seek to understand, I wonder, question mark. And the next one is the one that really