E63 A framework for understanding good leadership

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Mayo Clinic On Human Optimization

Episode 63: A Framework for Understanding Good Leadership

Release Date: July 1, 2026
Host: Dr. Christopher Camp
Guest: Dr. James Hebel (Medical Director for Leadership and Talent Development, Mayo Clinic)

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Episode Overview

This episode unpacks the nebulous concept of leadership, moving it from a vague ideal to a concrete and actionable framework. Dr. James Hebel shares practical ways to define, assess, and improve leadership at every level—starting with the self and scaling up to institutions. The episode also delves into why so many struggle with developing as leaders and introduces Mayo Clinic’s L Life model—a structured approach to cultivating effective leadership behaviors.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Defining Leadership Practically

• Leadership as a Social Process:
  "Leadership is a social process of engaging colleagues to do two things: to overcome challenges and to capitalize on opportunities." – Dr. James Hebel [02:06]
• Leadership is not a static achievement but an ongoing journey:
  "Leadership is not a destination. Leadership is a journey...a lifelong journey." – Dr. James Hebel [00:02, 17:57, 18:09]

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2. Why Leadership Feels Vague

• Contextual and Multi-faceted:
  Leadership is highly situational (organizationally, culturally, or circumstantially dependent) and demands wearing many hats: teacher, supervisor, mentor, advisor, and coach [02:32].
• Infinite Roles and Responsibilities:
  The broadness of leadership makes it feel empowering yet confusing – frameworks provide clarity [03:46].

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3. A Hierarchical Framework for Leadership

The Mayo Pyramid: Five Levels of Leadership [04:15]

1. Leading Self: Foundation; focuses on personal wellbeing, goals, and self-management.
2. Leading Others: Directly supervising and developing a few team members.
3. Leading Teams: Overseeing larger, more complex groups and requiring advanced leadership skills.
4. Leading Leaders: Managing other leaders, demanding strategic thinking.
5. Leading Institutions: Visionary roles stewarding entire organizations.

"We all need to be leading ourselves...You could be doing multiple levels at any given time." – Dr. Camp [06:11]

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4. Personal Leadership Profile: The Three Ps

1. Prerequisites:
   Knowledge, formal education, training, and certifications.
2. Performance:
   Past experiences, roles, and demonstrable accomplishments.
3. Potential:
   Underlying skills, behaviors, natural tendencies—the "iceberg below the water."

   "The only way that we get to that aspect of your profile is through the use of leadership assessments." – Dr. Hebel [06:52]

• Blind Spots:
  Feedback, especially 360-degree tools, is critical in revealing what we don’t see in ourselves [12:20].

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5. Common Challenges and Growth Strategies

• Struggle to Execute:
  "Everyone has a leadership journey...You don't go to some weekend course and become the expert leader." – Dr. Hebel [16:11]

• The Danger of Promoting Based on Performance Alone:
  "Never can we confuse performance with leadership. They are certainly not one and the same... Allowing high-performing but ineffective leaders can destroy trust, collaboration, and retention." – Dr. Hebel [18:46]

• The Peter Principle:
  People are promoted to their level of incompetence—remedied through coaching or recalibration [21:07].

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6. Assessment Tools and Practical Steps

• For Individuals:
  Self-reflection on alignment with organizational values, identifying role models, and honest self-assessment [22:14].
• For Organizations:
  Use of Mayo’s Leadership 360, Heydrich Leadership Assessment (L Life model), EQI 2.0 (emotional intelligence), Watson Glaser (critical thinking), OPQ32 (leadership behaviors) [23:47].

"You can change and promote and alter your profile over the course of time…if you want to put the time, energy and work into that effort." – Dr. Hebel [14:01]

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The L Life Model: Mayo Clinic’s Five Leadership Competencies

1. Leads Self

Key Behaviors:

• Self-care (wellbeing focus)
• Composure under stress
• Personal & professional development
• Results-driven goal setting
• Perseverance through failure
  [27:46]

2. Leads Others

Key Behaviors:

• Recruiting the right talent
• Retaining talent
• Developing team members
• Providing actionable feedback
• Delegating effectively
• Accountability for self and others
  [28:50]

3. Inspires Others

Key Behaviors:

• Building trust
• Encouraging inclusion
• Visionary communication
• Empowering teams
  [30:50]

4. Forward Thinking

Key Behaviors:

• Strategic planning
• Entrepreneurial/data-driven decisions
• Transformative, outside-the-box thinking
• Critical thinking (RED model)
  [32:13]

5. Engages Others

Key Behaviors:

• Networking within and outside the organization
• Influencing through vision, congeniality, EQ, and logic
• Change leadership (embracing continuous change)
• Adaptability
  [33:26]

"The stronger engagement you have, the more influence you have...and the more they will want to follow you during times of change, chaos and struggles." – Dr. Hebel [34:56]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "Leadership is a lifelong journey...as long as people understand that you never achieve it, you're always continuing to master it." – Dr. Hebel [17:57, 18:09]
• "Just because somebody is the best athlete on the team doesn't necessarily mean they should be the team captain." – Dr. Camp [20:34]
• "We all have blind spots. No matter who you are or what institution you're running or how good you are at this, you have blind spots, know what they are, get feedback, ask for help from other people." – Dr. Camp [Summarizing at 38:21]
• "Step one: do some self reflection and ask yourself, where are you in that pyramid of things in those levels of leadership?" – Dr. Camp [38:54]

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Major Timestamps

| Topic | Timestamp | |-------------------------------------------|:--------------:| | Leadership as a journey | 00:02, 17:57 | | Definition of leadership | 02:06 | | Why leadership is vague | 02:32 | | Introduction of 5 levels (pyramid) | 04:15 | | Leadership profile: 3 Ps | 06:52 | | Leadership blind spots & feedback | 12:20 | | L Life Model explained | 27:22–34:56 | | Five competencies & key behaviors | 27:46–34:56 | | Applying self-reflection for growth | 22:14 | | Assessment tools for leaders | 23:47 |

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Actionable Takeaways

• Leadership is built on self-mastery, honest feedback, and continual development—there's no finish line.
• Use candid self-reflection and peer feedback to spot development areas.
• Understand that leading others starts with effectively leading yourself.
• Use frameworks (like Mayo’s L Life model) to systematically build competencies.
• Develop adaptability and engage others—leadership is never one-size-fits-all.

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For more on human optimization and resources, visit:
https://ce.mayo.edu/optimize
Instagram: @MayoHumanOptimization
YouTube: The Human Optimization Project
Email: [e-mail]

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*Summary created to reflect the episode’s language, tone, and most practical insights for new listeners.

Transcript

[Dr. James Hebel]

Leadership is not a destination. Leadership is a journey, right? There's never a point where I cross the finish line or I get to the parking lot and put my car in the park and say, I'm here, I've made it. No, Leadership is a lifelong journey.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

This is Mayo Clinic on Human Optimization, a podcast where we break down the science of human potential to help you understand how purpose driven effort leads to high level performance and long term wellbeing. I'm Dr. Christopher Camp, Director of High Performance for the Minnesota Twins and a sports medicine surgeon with Mayo Clinic. Everyone loves a good leader, but they're often held up as these singular examples of success, vision, inspiration and perseverance. And we struggle to learn from their stories and distill them into a practical, repeatable blueprint for good leadership. So in this episode, we're joined by Dr. James Hebel. He's the medical Director for Leadership and Talent Development at Mayo Clinic and a certified Executive Coach for Healthcare Leaders, and he's here to break down the somewhat nebulous concept of leadership into something that we can define, measure, and get better at. The three big questions that Jim is going to help us tackle are, number one, what is leadership really? And how can we move it from a vague concept into something concrete? Big question number two, why do so many of us struggle to develop ourselves as leaders and to teach others about leadership? Big question number three, we'll get into some solutions when he tells us how can we use this framework to better lead ourselves and others? Well, Jim, thank you for joining us for this discussion today. Really excited to talk through this with you.

[Dr. James Hebel]

It's great to be here. Thanks.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

So I'm curious for you, how do you define leadership in a way that's actually practical and usable for us?

[Dr. James Hebel]

The one I personally use is leadership is a social process of engaging colleagues to do two things, to overcome challenges and to capitalize on opportunities.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

I love the two components to that and you added some specificity there, but it's still, for a lot of people, it feels kind of vague. So why do you think leadership is always talked about or commonly talked about in these broad, vague ways that can be difficult to comprehend?

[Dr. James Hebel]

Leadership is a complex topic that can be applied to many different circumstances and situations, and it's highly dependent upon the unique situation in which you're being asked to lead? It can be organizational dependent. It can be culturally dependent. You may be asked to lead within a circumstance that may be different on day one versus day 90 or day 100. I think the other thing that makes it a Little bit more challenging is because it's a broad topic. We ask leaders to wear many different hats. They may wear the hat as a teacher for their teams and their staff, or they simply transfer knowledge or skill sets. They may wear the hat as a supervisor where they are responsible for accountability in day to day operations. They may be asked to be a mentor in which I give advice to you based on my experience. They may be asked to use the wear the hat of an advisor in which you work on problems and create recommendations. Or lastly, they may have to wear the hat as a coach where you work on the experiences of the of the team member to bring out the best in them as possible. So leaders wear many different hats and you need to be good at all of them if you really want to achieve the pinnacle of that great leader.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

It almost feels like the roles and responsibilities of a leader are nearly infinite, which in some ways is empowering, in other ways is very confusing and complex. I want to see if you can help us get that organized. I think this is often where frameworks are really helpful. So to help us conceptualize this and add some specificity, can you talk to us a little bit about how you think of the different levels or roles of leadership?

[Dr. James Hebel]

So I work at Mayo Clinic, and at Mayo Clinic we really view as an organization that we really have five different levels of leadership, if you will. And at the base, and you can kind of view it as a pyramid. And at the base of that pyramid, the most foundational aspect of leadership is leading yourself, which really focuses on those well being principles. And what do we need to do individually to understand what are our goals, our aspirations, our priorities as an individual, how are we fostering our own well being, our own personal goals? And so leading self is kind of foundational. The very first level, the next level of leadership then at Mayo Clinic would be those individuals that lead others. And that others could be a handful of direct reports, it could be four direct reports, 10 direct reports, whatever it may be. But that requires, and that builds upon that first foundation. You need to be able to lead yourself, but then you have to start leading others. And that requires some additional foundational concepts of leadership. And then the third level beyond that would be leaders who lead teams. And so those would be larger departments or clinics or hospital wards, for example. And this continues to build on the prior two levels. And at this level of leadership, they need some more advanced leadership skills. I would argue the fourth level then are individual leaders at Mayo Clinic who lead other leaders as large practice leaders or leaders within The House of Surgery, for example. And in those examples, those leaders need the skill set of strategic thinking. Right. And then ultimately, the fifth and top layer of leadership at Mayo Clinic are those individuals that lead the institution, lead the organization, where you need more of that transformative and visionary mindset. And so very distinct leaders, different skill sets and capabilities and behaviors that are unique to each layer. But build upon one of them from the foundational level.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

I love that structure. I like the sort of the visual concept of the pyramid. Leading self as the first level, then leading others, then leading teams, leading other leaders, and then leading institutions. And I would say in that, we all fall somewhere in there, right? We all need to be leading ourselves, so we all have to have that foundation, and then all the additional layers on top of that. We all have various differing roles in that. But you could be doing multiple levels at any given time.

[Dr. James Hebel]

Absolutely. Okay.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

I've also heard you talk about different things that help shape someone's ability to kind of become a leader, being their knowledge, experience, and skill. So can you elaborate on that a little bit?

[Dr. James Hebel]

Every individual has what we refer to as a leadership profile. And that profile we refer to as the three Ps are prerequisites, performance and potential. And I'll walk through each of those very briefly. The first part of anyone's profile is the prerequisites, which is essentially the knowledge they bring to the role as a leader. This is the knowledge they may have acquired during acquisition of their degree. It may be individual coursework or certifications or training that they've done over the course of time. It may be the knowledge they've gained during their academic pursuits within the organization. So it's that body of knowledge that you have as an individual that you bring to the table. That's the first P in the leadership profile. The second P is performance, which correlates with experience. What are prior roles, prior experiences that you've had? What are past accomplishments you may have had within growing the practice or in quality and safety and in financial sustainability? What. What demonstrated successes have you had in innovation or in transformation? And so it's all those rich experiences you bring to the table. So that's the second component of your profile. And then the third component or the third P of the profile is the potential. And that's something that maybe not quite as visible, and that's the skills and the behaviors and the capabilities that make up your internal DNA of who you are as an individual, who you are as that individual unique leader. And I can kind of compare it to an iceberg. Right, the iceberg, the tip of the iceberg. That ice that's above the surface of the water. That's kind of the first two aspects. That's your knowledge and your experience. I can look at your curriculum vitae and bibliography, and I can say, these are the roles that you've held. These are your accomplishments. This is your knowledge acquisition. But I can't, by looking at your cv, understand what's your internal potentials, what are your natural tendencies, what are your capabilities? That's the massiveness of the iceberg below the surface of the water. That may not be visible to colleagues, to peers, to direct reports. It may not even be obvious to yourself. And the only way that we get to that aspect of your profile is through the use of leadership assessments.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

Or the other way you do it is you put the person in the role, and then when they struggle, you realize on the shortcut, that's the hard way. So you're telling there's a hard way and there's an easy way.

[Dr. James Hebel]

Exactly.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

This is not easy. This is a struggle. Many of us have a really hard time about this. And so I want to know if you can give me some guidance on where we struggle and how to deal with it. So maybe why don't we take the little construct that you just gave us, the prerequisites, performance and potential. So prerequisites being your knowledge, performance, kind of being your past experience, and potential being your skills and behavior. Out of those three things, which areas is the biggest challenge for most people and why?

[Dr. James Hebel]

You know, I think it really varies. It varies from individual to individual. You know, one of my past leaders that I had said, you know, really envision these aspects of your leadership profile as three major boulders that you're trying to roll up to the top of the hill. Right. Very few people can roll three at a time. You might be able to roll two at a time if you're lucky, probably one. But your ultimate goal in your leadership journey is to get all three of those to the top of the summit. Right. And so I may be working on knowledge during this year and next year, and then I may be able working on some of that experience component or some of those internal tendencies I need to work on as an individual. But regardless, our goal is to maximize that profile to the point where it helps us achieve future desires. And what I mean by that is just like there's an individual profile, there's profiles of leadership roles out there. So let's take within our organization at Mayo Clinic, for example, the Dean of Research at Mayo Clinic. What knowledge, experience and skill sets I need to be successful as a dean of research maybe look very different than a dean of practice or a Dean of education. And so I need to understand what are my aspirations. I need to understand what that profile may look like. And then I do self reflection, understand, here's my profile. There's the profile I want to sometime aspire to be. Where are the gaps? Do the gap analysis, put together an individual development plan and help my profile match up in the best way possible to the profile of a leadership role I'm aspiring to get to. And so understanding that, and it may be different throughout the course of your career and journey and you may need to pivot and you know, take course corrections. But that's the ultimate goal is allowing my profile to match up with the profiles of the positions I hope to achieve. And that's where I would argue mentors come into play. Your leader or an executive coach may come into play.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

In your experience as a leadership coach, as a leader of leaders, what are some common examples that you see where folks maybe first don't fully understand their own potential? How does that come up in practical ways for people?

[Dr. James Hebel]

Yeah, so as an individual we all have blind spots, right. And obviously we don't recognize them, which is why they're called blind spots. Right. And the only way we are able to recognize our blind spots as an individual is to get feedback. And to ask for feedback, we use a tool like many organizations referred to as the Mayo Leadership360 where we get feedback from a multitude of stakeholders which include your direct reports, it includes your peers in your department, it includes peers outside your department, it includes my one up leader as well. And, and really getting that 360 feedback, it can be a shocking experience as you, as you read through some of these three 60s because once again it brings to light some of the things that people either may not be aware of or they've had a tendency of not wanting to recognize or admit to in the past.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

And how do you handle that when you're talking to high level leaders? I imagine it could be a real challenge. If you do the work, you get the feedback and ultimately maybe let's say this is not necessarily a problem with deficiencies of knowledge, experience and skills, but it's just that it doesn't line up with the role, but it's a role that that person really wanted and thought that they were capable of handling. I imagine that's pretty tough pill to swallow for a lot of leaders and I'm asking this because I think that we all struggle with that a little bit. So how do you coach people through that to manage? We're going to line you up to somewhere where you can be successful and do so in a way where we don't break your ego and your struggles with that.

[Dr. James Hebel]

The unique aspect about being an executive coach is as a coach, I do not give answers, if you will, to the clients or to the talent. Right. They have all the answers within themselves, and it's my job as a coach to bring them to the surface. Right. So when we start with an individual looking at their assessments, I ask them, what's your first impression of this? What resonates with you? What surprises you? What would you like to see different? Let them identify which aspects of that profile that they would like to see changed. Now, the beauty is they can change it. It takes intentionality, it takes effort, it takes resources. But you can change and promote and alter your profile over the course of time if you want to put the time, energy and work into that effort. And so that coaching experience is helping people understand from their perspective with self reflection. Where do I want to improve? Why do I want to improve? How do I think that I can improve? Where may I need help with that? And that's kind of that whole coaching process.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

So part of your role as a coach is helping them see, you know, here's what you're good at, what you're not good at, here's what it would take for you to improve the resources, time, effort and energy you want to get there. And then you as an individual have to decide, is that worth it or not for me to do that to get there? And if not, maybe I should look elsewhere.

[Dr. James Hebel]

And if that's a coaching priority for them, we have coaching engagements that will ask anywhere between six and 12 months. And we ask them to establish what are your three top coaching goals for the next six to 12 months. And then we work on those different skill sets or perceived gaps that they may have the blind spots, they may have areas they may want to improve or enhance. And that's what we work on during that engagement.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

Okay, so now I want to talk a little bit about the actual execution of leadership. And at the end of the day, the goal is to get the job done, whatever that job is. And it feels like a lot of us, we understand leadership intellectually, but then struggle to actually execute when the time comes. Why is that?

[Dr. James Hebel]

Everyone has a leadership journey. And what I mean by that is you don't go to some weekend course and become the expert leader. You don't get an executive coach and become the expert leader. Right. Your leadership journey is something that does not happen overnight and it includes many different facets. 55% of your leadership development are your day to day experiences. You're on the job learning as an individual, as a staff member, as a leader. It's your daily work, it's those stretch assignments you're asked to participate in, it's that committee assignments, it's being a project champion. That work that happens when you walk in the door in the morning and you leave at night. So that on the job experience that accounts for over half of your leadership development. 55%, the next 25% is the exposures that you've had working with others. Those are the coffee conversations you have with your leader, those mentorship activities and maybe the coaching activities that we talked about, those career conversations. Right. How can I learn and benefit through others? That's about 25%. And then the last 20% of the model is the didactics, it is the retreats, it is the coursework, it is learning through the use of assessments, it's attending seminars or gaining knowledge outside of your organization by attending weekend courses. Right. And so the execution is not simply going to a lecture, understanding the content and declaring myself a leader. It, it's what I do at work, it's during my interactions with others. It is that knowledge gaining through this coursework. But it's a, it's a comprehensive process that takes months and years to develop

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

over the course of time and never really ends either.

[Dr. James Hebel]

Exactly. Leadership is not a destination. Leadership is a journey. Right. There's never a point where I cross the finish line or I get to the parking lot and put my car in the park and say, I'm here, I've made it.

[Podcast Disclaimer Narrator]

No.

[Dr. James Hebel]

Leadership is a lifelong journey. And as long as people understand that you never achieve it, you're always continuing to master it.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

Another common issue that I have seen in my experience is when we take somebody who is a high performer in their area, their space, their profession, occupation, hobby, and we assume that they will be a good leader, that's not always the case. So why is it that some folks can be incredibly high performers individually, but then make relatively poor leaders of other people?

[Dr. James Hebel]

That's a struggle that many organizations deal with. Right. Many times leaders are put into a leadership role because they're good clinicians, they're high performers, high quality, great patient experience scores. Right. Practice growth, bringing new techniques to this field of medicine. Right. If they're good at that, they must be good at leadership. Well, that's not the case. Right. Never can we confuse performance with leadership. They are certainly not one in the same. And because of that, if you have a highly effective, highly productive, high quality physician, for example, that in no way can excuse any type of toxic behavior or suboptimal leadership behavior they bring to the practice. Right? Because if you allow individuals like that, that may be high performing clinicians, but quite frankly they're inadequate or ineffective leaders, you know that that impacts the trust of your entire team, of your entire department, that impacts psychological safety, that can impact collaboration, staff retention, patient outcomes, for example. And so we need to be very clear that performance in no way equates to leadership. And so when we are choosing future leaders, we need to keep that in mind. And as we go through leadership selection processes, I would argue we need to look very closely at what their profile is, but also make sure there is a strong cultural fit within that realm as well. Because cultural fitness and cultural leadership is equally if not more important as being a high performing physician.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

And I think this is really true across all industries.

[Podcast Disclaimer Narrator]

Right.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

Just because somebody is the best athlete on the team doesn't necessarily mean they should be the team captain. Is it fair to think in the structure that you gave us earlier with the pyramid and leading self being level one, it's possible that people are phenomenal at leading themselves and do a great job, but they're, but they struggle to make that jump to the second level of leading others. And just because you're good at level one doesn't mean you're going to be great at level two.

[Dr. James Hebel]

Exactly, exactly. And they all build upon one another. As we talked about earlier, which I

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

think gets a little bit to the Peter principle which has been described, people often get promoted to their level of incompetency, which I think if you're good, we'll send you to the next level and we'll keep going until you fail and then we rouse or until you

[Dr. James Hebel]

get a good coach.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

Yeah, there you go. Until you get coach. Okay, so we've outlined some, the framework for leadership here. We've outlined some of the common deficiencies and struggles. Now I'd like to jump into our third section where we talk about solutions, but I want to ask first, can we talk about how somebody can do an honest assessment of their leadership abilities? And I'd like to think about this in a couple of different ways, if you don't mind. So maybe for, you know, the average person out there, that maybe doesn't belong to a huge organization with a bunch of infrastructure and objective assessments. What can that individual do? And then maybe we'll look at folks that are a part of a big team or an organization, you know, what are the things they can do? So let's maybe let's start with the individual that's out there just trying to figure out, hey, do I have what it takes to be a leader of others?

[Dr. James Hebel]

It relies a lot on self reflection. So if you're starting to think about leadership, you would need to identify what is important to your organization. What, what cultural values are unique or important that are the core of who you are as an organization. Then you start asking yourself, do I represent those? And it requires some self awareness. It requires a lot of emotional intelligence in terms of being able to do self reflection and give yourself some of those honest answers. And so that's one way of self reflection on what are your organizational goals and priorities and values. The other thing for individuals that may be part of smaller organizations without a big infrastructure is to self identify which leaders stand out. To me as an individual, who would I like to aspire to be like? What is it about their characteristics that appeal to me? Are they good listeners? Are they effective communicators? Are they strategic thinkers? What is it that that makes them, in my eyes, such a great leader? And then ask myself, do I have those same skills, traits and capabilities? And so a lot of it requires self reflection individually and then also looking out in terms of which leaders do you want to aspire to be like? And then ask yourself, can I get there?

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

So now let's talk. Let's say you are part of a big team organization that has some resources behind it and has a real dedication developing leaders. What types of assessment objective, maybe scientifically backed assessment tools are out there?

[Dr. James Hebel]

Yeah. So very briefly, I mentioned a little bit earlier that at Mayo Clinic we kind of have a library of different assessments. And those assessments will be applied based upon the circumstances and from an executive coaching perspective, based upon what we think the client, or many times we refer to them as the talent, what they need. So a Mayo Clinic, we have our Standard Mayo Clinic Leadership360, which I talked about earlier, which gives that broad kind of 360 degree perspective of stakeholders and gives you that genuine feedback, realizing that it's all perception. But in many times perception can be reality to some extent as well. So the 360 is one assessment we use. Another assessment we use is referred to internally as the Heydrich Leadership Assessment. That assessment allows us to break down our Mayo Clinic L Life model, with L Life being a mnemonic for leading self, leading others, inspiring others, forward thinking and engaging others. And so it's a model that we believe make up the competencies at Mayo Clinic in order for us as an organization to achieve our strategic priorities going forward. This model helps our leaders understand how we need to accomplish their work, working both with and through others. Now, this L Life model, as I mentioned, are those five high level competencies. But within that, each of those competencies are associated with between 4 and 6 what we'll call behaviors or capabilities. So when those behaviors are present, that demonstrates competence within that individual pillar of the L Life model. Behind those behaviors are another 43 personality traits that if present, allow me to most naturally demonstrate those 23 behaviors of the model. So the one assessment does a little bit more of a personality assessment of those 43 traits to understand what are my natural tendencies? We all have natural tendencies. And those natural tendencies come to the surface most commonly during times of change or chaos or stress. Right. But as I alluded to earlier, we can change or modify those natural tendencies as well. So that's the second library of assessments is understanding those personality traits and behaviors within our L Life model. Then we also use other assessments that many organizations use. We use the EQI 2.0, which is an emotional intelligence assessment. We also use internally what's referred to as the Watson Glaser assessment, which allows us to evaluate critical thinking. And then lastly, we use an assessment referred to as the OPQ32, which looks at 32 different dimensions of leadership within different pillars of relationships, decision making and emotion.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

Wonderful. So this is for. If you're an organization out there that's doing this, here are some other options that I think you can. Or if you're looking to start doing this, these are a couple things you can look at to try to do. Okay, so you've set up this construct and how Mayo thinks about leadership. And you have these five major competencies with the L Life acronym. And then under each of those five, there are these behaviors. So 23 different behaviors that are spread out and then personality traits as well. And you mentioned that all of this is modifiable, some of it harder than others, but it, but it can be done. So if you don't mind, I'd like to run through that L Life acronym.

[Dr. James Hebel]

Sure.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

To kind of help people understand. And I'll run through the whole list. So the L Life L leads self, the next L leads others. I inspires others. F forward thinking E engages Others. Those are the five big competencies. Let's run through each of those and maybe you can tell me what the key behaviors are that we need to work on. So the first one leads self. What are the key behaviors there?

[Dr. James Hebel]

Yeah. So within lead self, there are five individual behaviors that we think really make up that competency. And that includes self care. Focusing on my own well being. Right. Your composure. Composure during times of stress or anxiety or chaos or confusion. Right. Your own personal self development. How am I investing in me? And my own professional growth and development. There's results driven. Have I established personal goals and goals for my team? Am I goal oriented and goal driven? And lastly, perseverance. Because we know within leadership there's always challenges, there's always going to be failures. We need to embrace those failures. My definition of success is what I've learned from prior failures. So I cannot succeed without first failing. And so having the perseverance of continuing forward when I experience those failures. And so those are the core behaviors or capabilities related to leading self.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

Okay, great. So five behaviors under leading self and now the next one, leading others. What are the key behaviors somebody needs to do to be effective at leading others?

[Dr. James Hebel]

Yeah. So leading others has six behaviors. And if we look at the broader pillar of leading others, it really demonstrates those activities that we as a leader need to master to deal with the day to day operations of keeping the plane flying, if you will. Right. The day to day operations of maintaining our medical practice in the case of Mayo Clinic. And how do we do that? We do that by building a team. Okay. So these behaviors include recruiting talent once again, looking not only at capabilities and expertise, but are they a cultural fit? Okay. Understanding. Recruiting the right people. Once we recruit them, we want to retain our talent. What are some of the pillars and thoughts that we need to do that go into retaining our people? And one of the big one is the third behavior which is developing that talent, focusing on your talent, asking what are their aspirations, professional goals and priorities and development they would like to do so Recruiting and retaining. Retaining through developing. And then a fourth one there is providing feedback. Right. Many times we don't do that well as leaders. Providing feedback in a genuine way that's really helpful. And I'll atta boy or an atta girl. That doesn't do it. Right. But being very specific in terms of the feedback. The fifth one then is delegating. Right. No one likes the micromanager of a leader. Right. Delegating authority out to your teams to allow them to participate and have skin in the game and to contribute to solutions that need to be addressed by your practice. So delegation and then lastly accountability. Keeping not only yourself accountable as a leader, but the tactics that we need to do to keep our teams accountable. So those are the six that really come to light in terms of leading others when it comes to the day to day operations of running a medical practice.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

Okay, great. And then the third one, I inspires others. So what are the key behaviors that we need to do to appropriately inspire other people around us?

[Dr. James Hebel]

Yeah, inspiring others within our organization are those that are in most alignment with our values. At Mayo Clinic, it's really that servant leadership model. Right. And there's three behaviors. It includes trust, developing trust with your team, which is absolutely critical for all else to go. Well, secondly is inclusion, including your teams, allowing them to be part of solutions to contributing to the success of your department, of your practice, of your organization. Next is being that visionary leader. We know that individuals want to follow you if they have a vision and an understanding of where are we heading into the future. So being that visionary. And then lastly is empowering your teams. Right. We know that leaders oftentimes have to tell the teams that where we need to go from a strategic priority. But that's establishing the guardrails. But then allowing your teams to find how we're going to achieve those objectives by working within the guardrail. So empowering your teams on the how aspect of what needs to be done in terms of change going forward. And so trust, inclusion, visionary and empowerment are the key ones for inspire.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

Okay, great. And then next, forward thinking. And I would imagine some roles require a little bit more of this than other roles. So you got to know what the role is. But if you want to be a more forward thinking leader, what are the key behaviors you need to demonstrate?

[Dr. James Hebel]

There's four of them. The first one is establishing a strategy. Once again, one of the key ways that we get people to want to follow us as leaders is providing that vision, understanding what is the strategy. And that always has to be at the top of any leader's list when they come into a new leadership role. So establishing the strategy. The next is having more of an entrepreneurial mindset. Right. Making decisions based on data, understanding what data is most important to your practice, to your organization, for your success. The third one is kind of more of that transformative thought, transformative approach that outside the box thinking. And then lastly it's critical thinking. Thinking. Right. Understanding what the Watson Glaser assessment uses as the red model, which is recognizing assumptions, evaluating options and Then drawing conclusions. How well do I do that in terms of a critical thinker? And so those are the four key behaviors or capabilities for forward thinking.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

Okay, so lastly, engaging others. We talk a lot about engagement now. Very popular and very common for good reason. But tell me, what are the key behaviors a leader needs in order to adequately engage others?

[Dr. James Hebel]

Yeah, this is that relationship aspect of leadership, right? There's four key behaviors. It includes your ability to network, not only network within your organization, but the ability to network outside of your organization. So an ease and a comfortableness with networking. Next is influencing. And as I mentioned, there's kind of four ways that a leader can influence their team. Number one is creating that vision. Number two is having what's called that congenial personality. Number three is strong emotional intelligence. And then lastly it's logical thought processes. If you can demonstrate those four things, you help influence those around you. The next one is being a change leader and helping your team not look at change as discrete activities. We're going to do activity change one over the next 90 days, but rather helping them understand the importance of change agility, which is a continuous, ongoing, never ending environment of change. Right. We're always striving to get better and to improve. And then lastly is adaptability, understanding. How do I adapt to external circumstances? How do I adapt and remain relevant within my practice, within my organization? Now, the engaging others piece is so important because the stronger engagement you have, the more influence you have with your teams. And the more influence you have with your teams, the more they will want to follow you during times of change, chaos and struggles.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

Okay, great. So four things for engaging others. Number one, networking. Number two, influencing. Number three, being a change leader. And four, adapting. All right, good. So you've given us, and I add them up, 23 different behaviors under the five different companies. Leading self, leading others, inspiring others, forward thinking, engaging others. And again, it's going to be challenging for anybody to fully embody all 23 of these simultaneously. So this is not a list that you, you have to check every single box, but you need to think about these components and sort of figure out what is it your team needs right now. And once I figure, okay, maybe we need forward thinking at this time, if so, these are the four behaviors that I need to, to brush up on and, and be ready to demonstrate and, and show for us to be successful and.

[Dr. James Hebel]

Exactly. And that's how it fits into the strategy that I talked earlier about very early on and adapting my leadership style and needs based upon the circumstances that I've Been placed in as a leader. Okay, great.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

And to a certain extent, our leadership abilities are adaptable. And I think some of the best leaders probably don't have just one specific style, but they have the ability to kind of understand the need, provide for that need, and maybe recognize that if they can't fulfill that need, say, okay, I need somebody else to fill this role because this is not quite in my wheelhouse or my strong. This is a. This is a weaker area for me. Let me bring in some support.

[Dr. James Hebel]

Exactly.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

To demonstrate these behaviors.

[Dr. James Hebel]

Either I get a coach to help me internally with those behaviors, or if I'm still struggling, or it's a behavior or a capability that I haven't been able to master. You surround yourself with team members that have that skillset. Exactly.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

Okay, great. So this has been a great discussion. I've been taking notes, and I'd like to summarize those quickly. So we started off with your definition of leadership, which I really like. It's a social process to engage others, to really do two things. Number one, overcome challenges. Number two, capitalize on opportunities. And if we think about it, both of those are around us constantly, so there's always opportunities for leadership. I really like that pyramid that you gave us to think about. Sort of the five levels. Level one, the bottom of the pyramid being leading yourself. Level two, leading others. Level three, leading teams. Level four, a leader of other leaders. And then level five is leading institutions. And you probably are not going to be good at level five if you haven't figured out. Level one would be my suspicion. Okay. We also talked about the different components that make up somebody's personal leadership profile in the three Ps, prerequisites, which is your knowledge, performance, which is your experience. And then the third being potential, which are your skills and behavior. And you can kind of think about these as three boulders that you're trying to roll uphill, and you want to get all of them as good as possible. Knowledge, experience, and then skills and behaviors. You also comment on the fact that we all have blind spots. No matter who you are or what institution you're running or how good you are at this, you have blind spots, know what they are, get feedback, ask for help from other people. You also talked about how all of these things are modifiable. Both the knowledge, the experience, the skills, and behavior. But one of the keys is knowing what you're good at, what you're not good at, and what you want to work on. We also talked about the L life model of competencies. So the five big competencies being number one, leading self, number two, leading others, number three, inspiring others, number four, forward thinking, and number five, engages others. So those are the five big categories of competencies that a leader needs. And then you gave us four to five behaviors under each of those that we need to embody, if that's what the situation is calling for. So my charge to the audience is going to be step one, do some self reflection and ask yourself, where are you in that pyramid of things in those levels of leadership? And start with question number one of leading myself. Am I leading myself appropriately? And ask yourself if you are. If not, make some changes to figure out how you need to do that. Or maybe you're sort of already above that and you're leading others or leading teams or leading leaders or leading institutions. But do some reflection to ask yourself where you are in that pyramid and then say, okay, have I taken care of all of the things at the lower levels in order to make me as good as I can be at this level?

[Dr. James Hebel]

Absolutely. Great.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

Jim. Thank you so much for joining us today and having this discussion. I really appreciate it. Learned a lot, took a lot of notes. I think it's going to be really helpful.

[Dr. James Hebel]

My pleasure.

[Dr. Christopher Camp]

If you like this episode, please share it with a friend and leave us a review on your podcast app. It really helps others find the show. Got feedback? A question or a topic idea? Each Email us at optimizeayo. Edu or leave us a voicemail at 507-538-6272. We might even feature your voice on the show. For more human optimization episodes and resources, check us out online at CE Mayo.edu optimize Remember, long term wellbeing starts with the habits you build today. Live intentionally perform exceptionally. I'm Dr. Christopher Camp. Thanks for listening.

[Podcast Disclaimer Narrator]

This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as medical or legal advice. Always consult with a qualified healthcare provider for any medical questions. The appearance of any guest does not imply an endorsement of them, their employer, or any entity they represent. The views and opinions are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Mayo Clinic. Reference to any product, service or entity does not constitute an endorsement of or recommendation by Mayo Clinic.