Ep. 107 - From War Zones to Break Rooms: What Healthcare Leaders Miss About Change (ft. Dr. Loubna Noureddin)

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I am Meredith Hirsch, and this is Working Healthcare. Some people make an impression before the conversation even begins. That's how I felt when I met Dr. Lubna Norodin.

We were both speaking at a recent conference, and I was immediately drawn to her story, her strength, and the way she makes leadership feel personal, human, and real. Lubna reminds us that leadership is not just about strategy or getting through change. It's about people. It's about being human.

She is the co-founder and CEO of Mind Market and the author of Determined to Change. And in healthcare, where so many people are giving so much of themselves, her message brings us back to what matters most: clarity, hope, and humanity. Because healthcare doesn't change when systems change. Healthcare changes when people do.

Dr. Lubna Norodine, welcome to Working Healthcare. Thank you. I'm delighted to be here and honored to be among the people that you interview, with 2% at the top of the podcast in the globe.

That is what's so exciting. And I even question am I introducing you as doctor or not? And you said something really interesting. I really want to hear it.

Well, the doctors, as in physicians, stole the name from doctors like us who spend five to seven years working on one topic and going in-depth into the topic. And that was said to me by a very smart chief medical officer of a large organization. The name for doctors is medical doctors, not doctors. We are the doctors.

So for all the doctors out there, thank you for the work you do. So let's talk about medical doctors. Um, healthcare is changing faster than most people can process. AI is reshaping how people work, burnout is everywhere, teams are exhausted, and leaders are trying to hold organizations together while everything around them seems to be shifting.

And so my question for you is what kind of leadership actually works during disruption? Well, change initiatives are failing and they keep failing. It was at 75%, it's now 72%. And what has fallen off the cliff is the fact that employees are not willing to change as much as they used to.

Only 38% of employees today want or are willing to support organizational change. This is down from 74% 10 years ago. That's nearly, you're losing half of your workforce buy-in for change in just one decade. And one of the reasons is change fatigue.

We have a workforce crisis right now. 64% of US employees report that they are overwhelmed by not just the amount of work, by the amount of balance they have to do, along with change fatigue and this sensory overwhelm that they feel. So to go back to your questions, this is the most stressed generation of workforce that leaders have experienced in the world. And the best leaders out there are learning to slow down and to pause and to ground themselves to be more effective and not rushing and running after each and every transformation out there, but really understanding what success looks like, making that clear to their people, and creating a place where you connect the dots for people to understand and listen to their fears, their ideas, and what could be a potential risk for the change.

There's so much change happening, it's just not sustainable. Let's talk about how you even got into this world of change because you have actually lived through two civil wars. Correct, correct. So um, you know, at the age of 10, our priorities are very simple.

Our best friend in school and your wonderful Teddy at home. You wake up to extreme noise, guns and screams. You hear your mother's voice screaming for help. Dad is anxiously trying to save his family and pushing you out the door, and you're pushing back because you left your teddy behind.

This is a moment in life that impacts you and others, and memories like these stay for a long time. On that day, we lost everything. We lost our we lost our home, our memories, and many, many just like me, lost their memories of childhood. And you were and you are from Africa, you were in Sierra Leone, and your family had to leave the only home you ever knew.

What happened? What did you do? How did you end up getting to America? Which is a very long story, but I'd love to hear about your fear, I guess, because that is probably the best descriptor I can give to it by leaving your family or your community and going into the unknown.

What happened? It was it was late at night, and it was unwelcome visitors from outside uh Safadu, the city we were in, that came in, took over basically most of the town. Many families did not make it through the next day. We were one of the fortunate ones because our driver, Iffi, did not leave us.

So we went through literally forest uh to try to escape and find a way out uh to Freetown where you could you know be rescued by other family members. And Freetown is seven hours away. So you walk through the jungle and were tired, uh, exhausted, thirsty, and I could hear the drums. You know, we all heard the drums, and I could smell the barbecue, and it was amazing when you're hungry and you smell the barbecue.

Hope and excitement kicks in. You forget what just happened, only to find out that these were cannibals. It's a tribe, and they would love a child as a sacrifice. We knew about them, we all knew about them um really well from stories that our parents would tell us to make sure we don't stay on the streets when they're coming to look for sacrifice.

So it was a very scary moment in our lives to realize that I could be the barbecue on the on the next festive event. And this is why I believe in humanity. Humanity matters. This is why I do the work I do, because on that day we were saved by someone who was supposedly the enemy, the one who would want to share the sacrifice.

And instead, he gave us a second chance on life and helped us through move to the next area. Uh, and I watched him, and this could be very strange for many people, unless you have lived in the West or East Africa. I watched him blow air and animals freeze. It was magic.

I've watched him do things that no mother man could do, and yet we made it through to our next adventure. What was your next adventure? So um my parents decided to leave to Nigeria after losing everything, and I just could not cope with that change. So I I went to Lebanon where my grandparents are, and they took care of me, and I did my uh high school year as well as college at the American University of Beirut.

But there was civil war in Lebanon as well, and civil war in Lebanon was different. It's it felt like I can relate it a lot to the way people are living today in survival mode. It's so strange to me to even understand or fathom the fact that I see people going through daily fear and panic, the way we went through fear and panic because we were scared of dying. Civil war was intense in Lebanon.

My parents have lost their fourth home last year, and so this is re this is for real. Death is very close, and unfortunately, it could happen any day. But you start to have normalcy during war. So war was a daily event, but yet we went to school.

Do you graduated? Do you think that when somebody lives in constant fight or flight mode, that their body either adapts to it, their brain adapts to it, or they they die young out of the stress related to it? And I say that because you're right, right now in America, where we are, we're very fortunate. I was talking to a friend of mine who grew up in Colombia, and she now lives in Florida, and said it's a very different world, and I don't think people realize what it's like in other countries.

I remember going to Israel and having soldiers just having pizza in a local restaurant, and they had a gun strapped to them that they were holding at any moment, so they were ready. Do you think fight or flight becomes normalcy for people? I don't think it is normalcy at all. I think I've seen two types of people in this um experience: people that are completely broken because of the loss they have experienced and the grief, and people that grew stronger because of it.

So there is resilience, and resilience can actually make you stronger or braver. But one of the things that I noticed, for example, about um the experience with change is when COVID happened, a lot of people recognized the lack of control and became extremely depressed or anxious, and it caused uh, you know, some kind of a strong global effect on those people. When there's the other side of us, people who have experienced war, and the first thought for me during COVID was oh, at least it's not human-driven.

At least it's not humans trying to hurt us, it's the universe, right? It's God, it's whomever you believe in, but it's not human. That was the first thought that came to me. COVID did not impact me the way it impacted a lot of people that have not, that have been lucky enough not to be exposed to war and the incivility that you experience during war.

So that really resonates with me. My mom's house has been destroyed three times by a hurricane. Right before I got married and I was in college, all of my belongings, all of my childhood was at my mom's because I was in college sharing an apartment with two of my girlfriends. Everything was wiped away.

Everything was gone, washed away. All of these diaries I used to write to my future children, or all of these pictures I kept, everything was gone. And it definitely impacted and changed the way that I hold on to possessions now. I was 21 when that happened.

And now I look back and I'm like, oh, it's only things. It's only things. And that was probably a pivotal moment in my life. I had never lived through war, but for me to lose everything from my childhood, it definitely impacted me about, oh, we'll just move on.

We'll move on, we'll move on. And family is much more important that I can hold on to these memories as opposed to these actual artifacts. When you left Lebanon, where did you go? So when I graduated from uh the American University of Beirut, I went back to Nigeria and I really tried to.

My dad wanted me to stay. And, you know, a good Lebanese girl usually stays home until you're married. And you can work, but you stay within the, of course, the protection of your family. And I couldn't adjust.

I could not. Um, I had a lot of trauma events come back to me because of it. I could not adjust to a life um that is different from the one I've used to for many years, and I really wanted to get a second chance in life. So I went to um Montreal, Canada.

And I lived there for nine years, and it's almost like uh this broken person started healing because never once as a refugee did I feel lesser than any Canadian or a police officer or a social worker or a judge. You felt welcome, respected, and they understand. They they somehow understood the pain. And I the one thing I would tell you that it would be funny is um it was uh July 1st, Canada Day, and there was all these noise in the outside, and I was under the bed the whole time.

I was petrified, scared to death. And I thought I brought war to Canada because it was me. The only common denominator is Lubna. So oh my God, I created war here, war in Lebanon, and now I'm coming and I'm bringing war to Canada.

And it was the most terrifying hours of that year, because I felt, oh my God, I can't go through this again. So, yes, I'm very resilient, I'm very strong, but the fear lurks in moments that do not make sense to you. You have that trauma, and I certainly understand that trauma. How did you change up your life?

How did you no longer allow that fear to consume you? I think I do the work I do because of it. I believe in humanity, and I'm very optimistic in my belief that humanity will always prevail. Because in every path where there was danger, in every path where it was a moment where I could totally lose my life or be saved, I was saved by people that I did not expect to because they were the scary people in the equation.

I do believe in humanity and I did heal a lot of my fears in in Montreal, Canada. I owe them a lot. I owe them my life. And I started to want to do this for others.

And what drives me nuts is people in corporates experience very similar fears. They're scared for their lives. People are scared to lose that job because it might mean losing your home. I speak to people that became homeless overnight because they could not keep up with their payments, and that's a very scary feeling.

What was the one of my best employees? One of my best employees actually lived in his car for a year. He is one of the most talented, intelligent people I know. And for him to go through this must be so scary.

So I really want to do this work, and I want to create a sense of grounding and strength for people so that you can be here and not live in the survival mode. And what was the time that you realized that organizations struggle because of the people, not because of the strategies that they've put into place, but because of the people in working in healthcare for 20 years and leading the learning and development department, so working with leadership and working with middle management, I realized that what happens at the top, and I write about this in my book, what happens at the top, the conversations that happen in these boardrooms and conference rooms are completely not related to how employees feel and act.

Most if most research and a current research from Harvard, as well as accelerate the book from Cotter, and other many research shows that people are not informed. They're not really included when change-related decisions are happening. And the reason for people resisting change has to do with this lack of understanding of the reason behind the change. And so it creates this lack of trust and lack of awareness that even change is happening.

Why is it happening? Why am I impacted by this when I have so much to do on this end? But there's a misinformation happening here. People are, in general, because we're so busy and because there's no time to catch up on change, we are forgetting, we're leaving them out, we're keeping them underinformed, and it's causing confusion and disruption, unnecessary, negative disruption at the frontline and even at the middle, middle management level.

There's a lot of confusion there as well that I see when we work with people. You're the author of Determined to Change, and I really love this quote. You said people do not resist change, they resist confusion, which aligns with what you had said. How can leaders better help share the story or share the insight that they have so that change is not something that people fear?

And I um I shared that in the book. It's there's a step that is everyone that I know and every leader and senior leader I work with when it comes to aligning their teams to really drive results faster. They understand the importance of sharing the information, they understand the importance of explaining the purpose of change, and they understand the impact of including the front line in the equation. They get it.

What happens is they get busy and miss that step. And that misstep is the reason for many failures later that happen later. Why do people shut down when organizations move too fast? Well, for one, and you've heard me say this before.

For one, it's it feels like a five-year-old birthday in a bounce house. Everyone is bouncing and they're just bouncing and working the hardest they can, and they're exhausted by the end of the day, but no one is actually turning the air off the bounce house so people can stop and reconsider what is it I'm focused on? What's my priority for this week? The priorities keep changing, and it's an oxymoron to say another priority, because usually priority is one, one thing you're focused on.

So in healthcare, patient experience is a huge priority. Quality. Is a huge priority, right? Like not making mistakes and errors.

And yet we start to add more and more change initiatives without understanding that, hey, what is the priority? No matter what happens here, this is the priority and the other things. What I find when I'm working, I'm working right now with a healthcare organization in Fort Lauderdale, and their patient experience numbers are way down. And they have invested a lot of money in measuring patient experience, in bringing the best engineers to decide where to measure it, how to measure it, and who to follow.

So they have the data, but they don't understand why it's failing. Well, when we looked at the system as a whole, when you look at the system as a whole, what we saw is a lot of cracks in terms of when you're onboarding your people, are you really telling them the number one priority is quality and experience? Is everything you're saying actually lived in reality? Are the people you already have in place sharing that priority?

So we do we confuse the heck out of them when they enter the organization. They do not understand their priority. When it comes to big organizations like Disney or the RIDs, they understand that and they make it part of the everyday experience of the employee. We don't see that in healthcare as much.

We are always so busy because change is all around us. So we as leaders, yes, we as leaders, and I ask for myself, for a friend, right? Um, do leaders sometimes just assume that people understand more than they actually do? Yes, absolutely.

Yes, we do. And when I start to share, like for example, I'm working with a chief medical officer who's telling me, but they know this. This is a given. Well, it's not if I have 10 balls that I'm trying to manage, and this big one that doesn't break easily is at the top of the 10.

I may ignore it because there's something more urgent. What is urgent is what I'm working on, but what's important is not being visited and revisited, and that's where the miss is. We cannot continue to ask the nurses and physicians to do more and more and more, and we're not taking anything away. There has to be some kind of a balance.

So let's talk about executives and the higher-level leaders because, man, Lubna, I'm exhausted too right now. And you and I have been back and forth talking about this since we met. And yeah, we have some fails and we have some misses because we are trying to do so much all of the time. How can we take care of ourselves?

That is a wonderful question. Uh, thank you for that. The not stopping has to do with sensory overload that many, many uh physician leaders, nursing leaders, and healthcare leaders are experiencing. There has to be a way to go back and connect to your own source of wisdom and silence your mind.

Well-being is a powerful phenomena that I don't think is being supported right now because of how connected we are to every gadget and every communication tech out there. Think about senior leaders today, and you're one of you know you're a leader as well. You have your phone, you have your text, you have your chat, you have your teams, you have your emails, you have your your second phone, and then you have all the social media. When you're bored for a second, what do you people do and watch them do it?

They immediately go to their phone to fill that boredom. There's no time for silence. Our brains are losing momentum. Living in a chaos all day long, your brain cells are impacted.

There's new research from many top organizations, including a research that I just read in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, tracking the impact of technology and the and it's not really technology, it's me. I control technology. I need to find times and to really disconnect completely and consider ways for me to connect to who I am, to breathing, simple things such as breathing, to being in nature and having the mind get some clarity. I mean, one of the people I work with texted me on Christmas Day, um, wanting to do, you know, give me more ideas.

And I texted him back and saying, can you just take a break today? Because you have 38 people from family members in your house. Just take a break today. There is no break.

And that will cause us to experience burnouts. When do you take your break? I know, and as you're saying that, I always think I need to set aside time to meditate. I've been doing Yoga Nidra.

I probably do it on average only about twice a week, maybe three times a week. I really try to break away, especially before I teach on Wednesday nights, because it becomes a very, very long day for me. But I will tell you, last Saturday, I was at my in-laws' house for Shabbos dinner. They're observant and they live in an observing community.

And what I like are that the Jews within this community take a real Sabbath. They take a real break. There are no electronics, nothing. I come in and drive in for dinner.

Okay, so I'm obviously not observing the Sabbath, but from sunset on Friday night, we light the candles. And then until the Sabbath ends Saturday night, they don't have the electronics. And people just get it. So they don't even do what you did, Lubna.

They don't even respond by a text and say, hey, give it a break. They just don't respond. And I said at dinner on Saturday night, I need to do this. I recently Yeah, I recently listened to another podcast.

Uh, it was on the New York Times, and it was with Ben Sass, and he is a former representative from Nebraska. I'm pretty sure it's Nebraska, but he was the president of the University of Florida, and he's dying of stage four uh pancreatic cancer. And the question in the podcast was, what do you wish you did more of? And the guy's only like 54 years old.

What do you wish that you did more of? And he actually said, and he's a Christian, he said, observe the Sabbath, like take a break, know that I can be with my family. Yeah, yeah. And it's so sad because uh I was speaking to a very high-level um uh senior executive, and she told me that the pressure to deliver is so high that two days after delivering her baby, she was on a Zoom call with the board members because she felt she had to be there.

And that breaks my heart because the pressure to deliver is for real, and unless we start to truly disconnect and find the space, find the Sabbath in our life, we are truly doomed. I don't know if you've heard of the term email apnea. This is a term that started in the 80s by Harvard Business, um by Harvard Medical School, and it's people actually going through um heart failure while doing emails, and it's because people stop breathing, completely stop breathing when they're doing emails, and it was um a call to action to nurture self and to be aware of your alignment.

And I do a lot of work on alignment with senior leaders and their teams, but it starts with the person, the team, and then the organization. Because what we reinforce at the top gets promoted at the front line, and what we ignore also gets reinforced. So, what behaviors do you want to reinforce? And the ones we ignore gets reinforced.

If I ignore my well-being, if I ignore my balance, if I ignore my presence, if I'm in a meeting and I'm the first one to pull that phone and disconnect and show pictures of my daughter and my while while someone else is speaking, I am giving permission for the people around me to do the same. And it's not being present. It's funny, you reminded me of this is to me the epiphany of uh disconnectedness. So I'm working with uh a client, the CEO of a large organization, and I love this guy.

He's probably one of the smartest people I have met personally, right? We know a lot of smart people, but personal, one of the smartest people. And one of the things we worked on is him walking the hallways and actually going to the units to be seen because visibility was a big issue, and he was shocked. Visibility, I'm always visible.

Well, no, you're walking the hallways and you make people feel invisible because you just walk the hallways, you ignore everyone around you. So he goes to the ICUs because there's VIP or there's someone he knows, but he doesn't talk to anyone. Not because he doesn't care. On the contrary, he cares tremendously, but he's in his own head doing his thing in there and goes to visit and leaves, and people are saying, Oh, the CEO is here, and he doesn't realize his shadow.

Your shadow matters. Your visibility is making people feel invisible, and visibility means actually taking the time, that moment, and I believe in moments so well. Can I share a quick story with you? I love for you too, because I really resonate with this because we have kudos cards within our office that patients can write gratitude notes to our staff.

And I realized I love it. I realized I wasn't very visible as I got busier as our practice grew. I was stepping out a little bit more and people didn't know me. So every Monday I send an email out with all of the kudos cards.

I walk around and hand deliver them to everybody who earned a kudos that week, and then stop by and chit-chat. And it takes time. It's an obligation as well, but it's also good because this is my fourth child and I want to connect, and it's something that I know as a leader, I have to set time aside for because my employees matter, my team matters. So share that story with me.

Well, it was it was 9-11, and our CEO was Mr. Rozak Thomas Rowe, was like an amazing CEO. And I'm I'm I'm of Arabic descent, and uh I was a nobody in the organization, no one, like just a little you know, worker. And I will never forget this.

This is what 25 years ago. He is um he was a retired army man from the Navy and highly respected individual, tall and strong. And so when I saw it, was remember those people may not know, but this is the phones with the ID. In the ID, it says Thomas Rosak.

So my heart skipped a beat, and I pulled the phone, I'm like, oh my god, he's gonna fire me because all these people on TV were saying it's Arabs that this this monstrous work. I'm like, oh god, I'm screwed. So he I answer the phone and I'm petrified because I know I'm gonna be fired. And he says, Lubna, like, yes, sir.

This is Mr. Rozak. Like in my head, of course I know who you are. And he said, I care for my people.

And if anyone bothers you or make any implication of insult towards you, this is my personal number. Call me. I take care of my people. Guess who became his biggest fan in the organization?

I be I became the champion, culture champion for everything. I wanted to be, I volunteered for every event. I wanted to be the spokesperson for this organization because of him. It was one moment nothing more, nothing less.

That moment in time that told me I am seen and I'm respected for who I am, and not to allow anyone to in any way harass me because of something I have nothing to do with. Right? So those moments matter. And I think many executives do not understand the impact of their words, and it could be because they're humble, it could be because you know they're busy, but they do not understand the impact of moments like these in the lives of people.

It's a story I share everywhere, and I haven't forgotten. Do healthcare systems spend enough time focusing on company culture? So, yes, it's great to go by once a week like I do on Monday as the CEO and give the person who earned the kudos card a kudo. And it's great that that CEO went to you and said, Hey, I know that there's a lot of finger pointing right now, but I've got your back, and that's phenomenal, and that builds loyalty for you.

What about company culture as an entity within a corporation or within a medical practice or within a hospital? I think culture is daily work. It is it's culture is like oxygen. You only know it's not present when you don't have it, right?

Like we take it for granted until it's no longer there. And it starts at the top and transpires through day-to-day management interactions. So culture is intentional, it's not it's not haphazard, it's not by chance. A lot of people take, just like we do with oxygen, we take it for granted that it's going to happen on its own.

So in many organizations, what you would see is hundreds of cultures. So if you have a great manager here, that team culture is absolutely phenomenal. I had one of those, and my team, 10 years later, we still meet to talk about the good old days, right? So managers can create cultures.

What I would love for anyone listening to this podcast, and I'm speaking to you, is you do not have to wait for anyone else to give you permission to create an incredible culture because we are empowered in small groups to create the culture we want to see in the bigger specs of things. Sometimes we're always pointing up. And not necessarily we could create the culture we want within our circle of influence. What is a healthy culture look like?

Damn, that's that's uh, that's a that's an hour. Well, because I reflect upon it, and I will tell you in 2023 and 2024, our practice won a top South Florida workplace. And we were so proud, cheer, rah-rah, two years in a row. We didn't win it last year.

And I really thought we had a good culture. And so I ask for a friend, but what does a healthy culture look like? Because I want to get back there. So it's a big question for one reason and one reason only.

There are different fitness cultures based on the work we do. So let's talk about healthcare. If you're talking about healthcare in general, in healthcare, the patient experience is a very important phenomenon. So when the physician has a great relationship with the family, and even when a mistake happened, the family is easily forgiving when the physician is kind.

And there's a lot of research on this, so we do not need to. We also know that a culture of safety, right? A culture where errors are non-existent, has to do with a culture where the nurse or even the newbie on the team is empowered to share something he sees, he or she sees, without the this physician or surgeon screaming back at them. So when it comes to this environment, if we want to create an environment where errors are zero, almost impossible, 0.

001%, and where the patient experience is at the top of its essence, you've got to be able to have create a place where people trust each other, support each other, can hold each other accountable, can speak up when necessary, and they do not shy away from sharing fears. Because when we share what's what could go wrong or fail, we could save the organization millions of dollars a year later. So a culture of kindness, yet assertive, a culture where we hold each other accountable, but we trust each other, and a culture where I can speak up without feeling afraid or retaliated against or excluded.

So cross-functional communication, for example, is something that is cross-functional collaboration is such a powerful phenomena in any organization. And yet, when we go in, I can guarantee you two things. If you want to be a consultant tomorrow and tell people what to do, you go into any organization and say, you have a communication problem and you have a collaboration problem, because every single organization we go to has those two. So if you want to be a consultant tomorrow and sound smart, just say you have a collaboration issue and you have a communication issue.

In a healthy culture, those two are never an issue. Let's look at turnover because that is a huge issue right now. We can look at nurses, and I think the last statistic that I read, nurses in hospitals have a hundred and ten percent turnover. That a year, that means that they are leaving in less than a year and there's constant turnover.

You know, this generation doesn't stay in jobs. They're pivoting and moving all of the time. So, with so much instability going on, how do leaders rebuild trust? Trust is unnegotiable in our lives.

We demand it from our partners, our husbands and wives. We absolutely seek it in our parents. We expect 100% trust when it comes to our kids. And yet we're not really spending the time and effort on it when it comes to work, work experience, the employee experience.

Yes, nursing turnover is significant and it's costing organizations thousands of dollars. Each time a nurse leaves, according to Sherm, it's $40,000 in loss because to recuperate that, recruit, train, and so forth. So nurturing trust when these new nurses are coming into the workforce, nursing is one of the scariest jobs to get into right now because the schools are not preparing you for the real environment. A lot of healthcare organizations.

Are working with these uh colleges to bring them in early, to teach them within the frame, but it's not enough. What is required is much more time spent onboarding these nurses than ever before. So we had 120 days before, then it went to 180. Now it's a full year, and it's still you're okay.

It's not like wow. So the onboarding process in organizations has to change for these new workforce to be successful because they do not know how to lead their own job. One of the managers, I had a meeting with 11 managers yesterday working on communication, and one of the managers told me, I feel like 50% of my job is counseling. I'm a therapist, psychologist, counselor for my new eight employees.

Having eight new employees in nursing in one unit is a lot of work. But counseling is part of the work. And she says, I spend my whole day sitting in the room, and each one of them come to me, either crying, wanting to quit, scared. It's not an easy field to manage.

And yes, this is what the amount of anxiety and stress we're seeing in new nurses, it's not the norm. That's not normal. And yet, this is the reality we have. So, how do we deal with that and how do we manage it?

Because they will leave. Do you think that people are afraid that AI will replace them? I don't see that fear in healthcare. I do see it in definitely manufacturing.

It's already happening, right? The um the world economic report says 87 million jobs will be going away. There'll be 93 new million jobs happening, but we don't have people that are ready to take them. So the change is happening.

I think for healthcare, it's still uh patient-facing. So the threat of that happening is not here yet. I don't know. No, no wants their no one wants their nurses to be a robot.

Like who wants that? You're right, Lubna, but let's look at the front desk. Let's look at people who are answering the phones, who are triaging calls. That can certainly be automated.

What about medical records automated? I have a good friend who's a radiologist. I even joked with him last week. I'm like, I talk about you all of the time on the podcast.

He goes, I know, I know it's just that you're not gonna say my name. But he's a radiologist. And I said to him, How is AI impacting you? He said, Great, bring it on.

He said, There are so few radiologists that we want AI to come in to help with the quote simple cases. It helps me to be able to focus on more complex cases and to know what I have to read stat as opposed to what I can sort of put in the back bin and read when I'm available to read it or just review how AI has translated it. But I think for the lower level positions, I do think there's a fear in healthcare. How do leaders circumvent that?

I think it goes back to trust. Most of the organizations that I work with are sharing the fact that we want AI, CEOs are spending millions of dollars on AI initiatives. The boards, you know, board members are driving and pushing for AI in many, and we know that trillions of dollars are being spent on AI. So their replacement is a fact, right?

What conversations that are happening that are healthy when it comes to leaders talking to staff, is this is where we see AI doing the work, and this is how we need you to reskill and become more active in this area. So, for example, uh, with two large organizations, uh, the whole patient access, right? The whole patient registration is totally automated, where the best news you could hear is it would take three to ten days to have a claim approved for a patient so that they can get in to see the doctor.

It would take two to three weeks before you can even get a yes to see a referral. And now it's changing within 24 hours, they're able to do it because AI is capable of going in, looking at hundreds of data, and suggesting the best route to do for this. So this is good news. This is great news.

So, what happens to those people who were doing this and would spend days to be able to go back and forth with the insurance to get you in to do your CAT scan, for example, right? So in this case, they are working on the more complex cases, they are working on talking to the patient, they're doing other things that would expedite the process. So, for uh one of the uh chief medical officers from a healthcare system near me, the conversation is being very clear and connected, allowing people to share their fears and having dialogue with them around what they foresee reskilling as creates that level of trust that says they have my back.

The chief human resources officer in that organization every week is sharing this is new, this is what we're doing, that is automated, this is how we're reskilling our team, so that they can help us focus on this area where we have much more traffic, right? So they are shifting, there's a lot of shift happening, but they're saying we you're not being replaced, you're being reorganized. Do you think technology can help us with our company culture? I don't.

And I would love to say yes, but look at what technology is doing to us uh in terms of people, you know, so people are overwhelmed. Oh, let's let's have let's share an email every week in addition to that. Guess what people do with that email that we send every week as a reminder of things? Delete, delete, delete.

Exactly. What is going to be even more essential than ever before is your human skills, is the relationship. The relationship is going to be a non-negotiable in this new era. And research is proving we know this.

75% of change initiatives fail. 72% of tech initiatives are failing. And one of the major disruptors that will help us navigate that failure is the human connection. It's connecting the dots for the team, bringing in culture champions to help you with the change initiative, and having dialogue and networks of transformation where people talk about what could go wrong way in advance, way before the change happens, so you can fix it and navigate it and save yourself millions of dollars.

That is where the human connection happens. I'd like a starting point. So, what can healthcare leaders do now to start creating that communication and that collaboration and that positive company culture? Two things that come to my mind where I have seen uh really a shift in the culture.

One is take 10 minutes a day to connect to one person. It's a simple practice, it requires discipline, it requires a belief that this will make a difference. But one thing that I saw with the CEO who I was talking about to you before is he told me yesterday, he called me to tell me that one physician, a physician wrote an email to him telling him I was about to quit and I didn't because of the conversation we had last week. This is these are the moments of power and influence where leaders, healthcare leaders can make a difference, take 10 minutes a day to nurture trust.

Another uh simple exercise that is so simple and yet so powerful in its results is I tell leaders, put a chair, an empty chair, in your staff meeting. And on that chair, make sure it's empty and say, do not take the seat. And as everyone introduces themselves or shares whatever they need to share, you say, Well, this chair is here to represent the things that are in your mind that you're not saying. So, what is this chair saying to us today?

The first time it may not work, no one might say something. The second time, someone may not say anything, but over time, people will start to share what they would not publicly say to you. So the question you would ask is, what's sitting in this chair today? And wait, be patient.

Give it, don't fill the gap. Take a deep breath and count to 10. And if no one says anything, let it go. The next time do that again and wait 15 seconds.

And people will slowly start to share, I'm overwhelmed, I made a mistake today, I missed something today, and so forth. Allow the human factor to become essential in your dialogue and meetings. I typically end every podcast with the same question. If you could create one change within our American healthcare system, what would it be?

And you can answer that, but I wanted to adapt it a little bit because I wanted your insight on this. If someone listening feels overwhelmed by change right now, because I think we all are, everybody listening to this episode, what would you want them to remember? Humanity matters. Our human connections is the only thriving factor when everything else is so undeniably uncertain.

Uncertainty is for real. We're feeling it in our body, we're feeling it in our politics, we're feeling it in the news every day. And the only way is to really reconnect to you first, realign who you are, stay true to your purpose, align your team, bring them back to the ground, take the air off the bounce house and reconnect to purpose. Dr.

Lubna Noradeen, thank you for joining me on Working Healthcare. If this conversation hit home or made you think a little differently, don't keep it to yourself. Share the episode, tag a friend, or post about it on social media. Connect with me on LinkedIn to keep the conversation going in between episodes.

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