In this episode of Success in Chaos, Angela Adams and Kandice Garcia engage with Dr. Foster Mobley, a seasoned leader in healthcare. They explore the essence of authentic leadership (a topic we also touched on with John Hill), the importance of self-awareness, and the challenges leaders face in chaotic environments. Dr. Mobley emphasizes the need for leaders to connect deeply with their teams, cut through the noise, and embrace change, especially in the context of AI’s growing influence in healthcare. The conversation also highlights the significance of honoring oneself and others in leadership roles, and the continuous journey of self-discovery and growth.
Episode Chapter Guide
06:13 Foster Mobley’s Journey in Healthcare Leadership
11:24 The Essence of Authentic Leadership
13:39 Leading in Chaos: Insights from Experience
16:33 The Importance of Connection in Leadership
18:29 The Importance of People in Leadership
21:42 The Concept of Honoring in Relationships
24:54 Navigating Leadership Styles
27:51 The Role of AI in Leadership
32:55 Leadership Lessons from Experience
Foster’s book recommendations:
- Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything Is Changing – Including You: Brad Stulberg
- How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen: David Brooks
- Lead with Your Heart . . . Lessons from a Life with Horses: Allan J. Hamilton MD
- Leadersh*t: Rethinking the True Path to Great Leading: Foster Mobley, Ed.D.
And check out Foster’s Podcast “Step Wise: Conversations with Inspiring Leaders“
Full Transcript
AI-generated transcript. Accuracy may vary; please excuse any transcription errors.
Foster Mobley, Ed.D.
bullshit meters are up really high these days. So cut it out. Just cut it out. If you don’t know what something is, say, I don’t know how to do this, and let’s work together and figure it out. And do that promptly. Don’t spend a couple of months trying to posture and cover and all those things. Yeah, so keep the bullshit meters down low.
Kandice Garcia, RN
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Foster
That involves heavy self-awareness.
Angela Adams, RN
Welcome to Success in Chaos, a healthcare podcast where each episode is dedicated to unlocking success amid rapid change and uncertainty. I’m Angela Adams, the CEO of Inflo Health.
Kandice
And I’m Candace Garcia-Thomkins, Quality Director for the ACR Learning Network and owner of Tungsten QI Partners.
Angela
We are so excited to have our guest on today, Dr. Foster Mobley. A little bit about Foster, award-winning author, executive coach, one of the most trusted voices in healthcare leadership today. As the founder of FMG Leading, Foster has spent more than four decades helping C-suite executives, healthcare organizations, and…
elite athletic programs navigate high stakes environment through radically human centered approach, which I think we’ll get into today. Excited about that. He’s the author of the independent publisher award winning book, Leadership, Rethinking the Path to Great Leading. We are an adult podcast. So there you go, guys.
Foster
You
Angela
The book challenges conventional wisdom and invites leaders to lead from their essence, their mind, their soul, their body. He also hosts a podcast called Stepwise. You guys should absolutely check it out. Some great, great discussions on that podcast and some amazing leaders ⁓ across healthcare business and beyond. Foster’s work is grounded in the belief that authentic servant-minded leadership isn’t just an ideal.
it’s essential, especially in today’s chaotic healthcare environment. Today, we’re ready to unpack how servant leadership, resilience and clarity can cut through the noise and elevate people at the heart of healthcare. I’m excited about Foster because you guys know I have a CEO, mentor and coach that I’ve worked with for the last two and a half years, John Hill. He was also a member or a guest on the podcast.
And Foster is actually his coach and mentor. So we’ve got like two levels up. ⁓ So if I blame any, the grip, I’ll take it. I’ll take it. I wasn’t going to say it. So welcome Foster and thank you for being here.
Foster
The grandfather. I’m the grandfather.
Kandice
Hahaha
Foster
Hahaha
Thank you.
Kandice
It’s so nice to meet you, Foster. We like to start off every podcast getting to know you a little bit and testing who is better at guessing and recognizing the truth in our ⁓ guess. So we’re gonna ask you two truths and a lie and then Angela and I are gonna try to guess which one is the lie.
Foster
Excellent. OK. Statement one, ⁓ I once sang at a wedding. Statement two, I own a fly fishing lodge in Montana. Statement three, I have multiple family members who in the business of ⁓ organization development and executive coaching ⁓ and have for several decades.
Angela
Thank you, Candice.
Kandice
go with Wedding Singer. You are not a wedding singer.
Angela
Ha!
think you’re right. I don’t think you’re a wedding singer.
foster.
Foster
I am a wedding singer.
Angela
What?
Was it a Whitney Houston song?
Foster
Well, to be honest, it was a Beatles song, and I think it was originally intended seriously, but turned into a big spoof. The song was When I’m 64. And I have no earthly idea why my buddy, who was playing the guitar at this wedding, wanted me to sing at his sister’s wedding, and I did.
Kandice
you
Foster
We’ll never do it again, but yeah, me and Adam Sandler, we’re buddies.
Kandice
Yeah, was that one of many now?
Angela
You’re right, you’re, yeah, I could see that. That’s amazing. So then, do you own a fly fishing lodge in Montana?
Foster
I am a small investor in a fly fishing lodge in Montana. I do have family members in the business, but it’s been like 10 years or something. So it’s not been multiple decades.
Kandice
Hmm.
Angela
Okay, that was tricky. You know, I went on my first fly fishing trip recently It was ⁓ in Sun Valley It’s beautiful and the guide was towing me how to you know hook that fish and he was like you gotta get it you gotta get it hooked and so I hooked that fish but I Yanked it a little bit too hard out of the water
Foster
I know I threw that in there.
⁓ fun! Where did you go?
Lovely.
There you go.
I love this.
Angela
It came
out of the water so quickly it hit him right in the crotch. He bowled over like and wrapped around his leg and he could not like stand up and I was like the fish the fish he was like so if you ever want to invite me to your lodge I would love to come and fly fish.
Foster
I would love to. It is the Missouri River Ranch in Craig, Montana, and it’s fabulous. Quick story. My oldest daughter came out to fly fish. She had never fly fish before. She came out about a month ago and she was so excited and she hooked into a fish and landed it. And it was a, it was not a trout. was a big whitefish, but it was like 19 inches. It was big. And she was so excited. She had to get the ⁓ obligatory fish pick, you know, for Facebook or for Instagram. Sorry. The guide.
Kandice
You
Angela
That’s great.
Kandice
yeah.
Foster
takes it off the hook, hands it to her, and she is an animal lover like nobody’s business. She grabs the fish, it slips out of her hands, falls on the gunnel of the boat. Boom, like this, dead. Like, So our catch and release day started off very auspiciously. Hilarious. She had to laugh at the end of the day, but dead.
Angela
no.
Thank
yeah, yeah, was not, I was not gentle on those fish. I’m working on it. ⁓ Well, yeah, where do we start? You know, this is success in chaos. ⁓ What we would love to start with is first of all, you know, how did you get into this role and how did you find yourself here after the journey that kind of led you from organizational development to becoming a leadership voice in healthcare?
Foster
It was so fucked.
This is true to the theme of the podcast of chaos. Most things in life I’ve found and come to believe happen serendipitously. We can have a great path and then I have a little, it’s a little cliche card somewhere on my desk and it says, life can change in any moment, you just have to be present. And so being by present and being opportunistic, it led me one to the other. When I was going through graduate school and business,
focusing kind of as a dual focus with strategy and org behavior, org theory. ⁓ I started working in a small consulting firm and it just happened to be kind of a human capital consulting firm, it was great. Stayed in that field for many years and because of that jumped into healthcare, 1985. So I started doing leader development for the St. Joseph Health System of Orange, California and serving their hospitals in California and the Southwest. And had no connection to
healthcare at all, but then I chose healthcare because of the quality of people in healthcare. I said, these are my people. They’re serving the mission that I really sign up for. Anything I can do for them and with them to help them heal, I’m all about. So 1985 really focused almost, well, about 70 % of my work and my practice on healthcare from that point. But a lot of it was kind of organization development. What I found was all the change efforts.
that I would be working with C-suite on wouldn’t work unless leadership was behind it, capable of it, messaging properly, doing the right stuff, modeling it. And so I started to kind of become a CEO whisperer and say, you know, by the way, the message on this one’s a little off point. You need to tighten this one up a little bit to get this across to the people.
And so then I kind of evolved into executive coaching that way. And it was really all around change absorption and change effectiveness.
Kandice
Well, so what I’m hearing you say is servant leadership is a way of leading, but it’s actually a collection of skills of communication, a vision of leading people, but also being able to, ⁓ I don’t know what it is at the change or, you know, do the behaviors first and foremost. So, but this kind of like active change, personal change needs to occur before the organizational change can occur. Is that kind of like.
how you would describe servant leadership, that’s kind what I heard you say.
Foster
Yeah, in fact, I don’t use the term servant leadership at all because of that. And let me explain. I define leading, and I use the active verb because leadership could be a position. I use leading. Leading, I define as building capacity of self and others to create breakthrough results.
So it’s nice to be a leader that people will follow. Are you getting stuff done? Are you getting it done in a sustainable way? The notion of servant leadership at its core is a really great thing. John Greenleaf and 80 years ago, whatever. But yeah, I don’t use that. ⁓
Kandice
Yeah.
Foster
All we have as leaders is our example.
We can do pronouncements and with multiple generations today, the words we use are gonna land with some and not with others. We can behave consistently over time. Really, it is watch my feet, not my lips. And so, see how I behave. And I’ll tell you what the, or you can tell me what the values of the organization are. Right? It’s not a lot of pronouncements. And it’s also, there’s a very interesting thing, a very dear colleague of mine has done a lot of work.
Kandice
you
Foster
Julie Kennedy Alert has done a lot of work on ⁓ power paradigms with leading. We always think about leaders sitting on top of ⁓ on top of the pyramid like God, you know, like, and then looking down on his or her subjects and, you know, setting direction and doing all these really smart things. And in today’s world with the talent we have, but also with the mindset, with the interests, with the passions, with the needs to be important, the needs to be engaged.
The power is shifting from power over to power with. So it’s a much more partnering paradigm in leadership today. so, yes, servant leadership, absolutely, because I serve you. I do it because that’s how I want you to serve our patients. And that’s how I want you to serve each other. Boy, that was long-winded, wasn’t it?
Kandice
love.
Angela
It was really good and I think it kind of pulls
up our minds to kind of your book and the guess authenticity is what kind of like shown through in lots of what you teach. …
