How To Lead 106,000 People Without Losing Yourself with Dr. John D'Angelo

Morra Aarons-Mele (0:04)

When you're in charge of a huge hospital system with 106,000 employees, how do you possibly take time for yourself, find time to think, maintain your energy, find people who you can be vulnerable with, manage your own emotions? Well, today we have Dr. John D'Angelo. He is the CEO of Northwell Health. He is an emergency room doctor by training who has gained increasingly visible and responsible roles in this huge medical organization over the past 25 years. Dr. D'Angelo identifies as an anxious achiever, but he, like so many of you, has done the work, has the self-understanding to know how his anxiety is powered by curiosity, by purpose, and servant leadership where he is in this to help people, and also a need to always prove himself. It's an incredible mix that he's made work for him after many years, and I love how open and candid and insightful his conversation is on everything too. How does a CEO manage his schedule and his time?

To going through big job transitions when you feel a little bit of the, really, you're asking me to do this, but you're so inspired and motivated that you do it anyway and learn along the way. It's a great conversation with Dr. John D'Angelo, who's the CEO of Northwell Health.

Hello, Dr. D'Angelo.

John D'Angelo (1:43)

How are you? Glad to be here. You can call me John.

Thanks for the opportunity.

Morra Aarons-Mele (1:49)

Of course.

I'm always excited to interview CEOs who are in the CEO seat, who are living it day in, day out, which you certainly are. I'm going to start with a question that I like to start with, which is, what does leadership mean to you? What's your personal definition of leadership?

John D'Angelo (2:08)

For me, I think the more successful leaders, and what I aspire to is those that lead through purpose, and I guess that's why health care is where I landed.

So for me, the great leaders are those who, if you think back of who's great movement, especially great social movements, they usually do so through a lend of purpose and commitment, rather than compliance, and I'm your boss, I have a paycheck over you. So for me, it's always been about servant leadership. It's been about purpose-driven leadership, commitment, which kind of ties in to being a doctor and going into medicine. I didn't intend on being a leader. I intended on being a doctor at the bedside, and then one thing led to another.

But still, it comes down to that simple fact, and that simple kind of attribute that I think, especially in healthcare, drives success and leadership. And what I tell our teams are the two simple rules that I've held with me from day one. I've heard somebody else say this. I'll say I shamelessly stole this like 30 years ago in residency when I heard somebody say this at a conference. It was rule number one, do what's best for the patient. Rule number two, do what's best for the people that take care of the patients. And to me, that's always been kind of my marching orders internally, whether it was leading at the bedside, taking care of an individual patient at a time of crisis or need, or whether it's now leading an organization of 106,000 team members that treat millions and millions of people a year. It's the same two guiding principles.

Morra Aarons-Mele (3:40)

When you find yourself in a moment of stress or overwhelm or chaos, how do you come back to that?

John D'Angelo (3:49)

I joke with others that that's why they picked an emergency medicine doctor to be CEO, because if you're a good emergency medicine physician, you are very comfortable over time. You have to be, or you wouldn't survive in the specialty. Navigating uncertainty, understanding when you need to be decisive and act, maybe when you don't have all the data you would like.

And you also get very good at understanding when you don't act and you let things play out a little bit and you monitor.

If you really take that emergency medicine mindset, you don't usually fail big. You're really trying to avoid failing big, especially when you're navigating uncertainty. You know when you need to act. But you pay so close attention to the outcomes and the incremental changes based on that action. And then you're quick to pivot to still set you on the right course of where you're trying to go, which is minute by minute sometimes in a critical situation at the bedside. But that ability to be kind of open to the action and then the reaction and then be responsive to that to get to the end point that you're trying to get to. I think it's something that really good seasoned emerging medicine docs are very good at, in addition to the multitasking and all the other things that we do. But to me, that's what is required of leadership in health care today, because it's a really dynamic time in the industry. But anyway, so yeah, to me, that's the the essence of it in kind of a nutshell.