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The Healthcare Leadership Excellence podcast was created to share valuable insights around leadership, communication, emotional intelligence and conflict resolution. Karl Pister, with over 30 years of coaching experience, is a passionate advocate of excellent and influential leadership. In each episode, Karl discusses real-life leadership challenges through the lenses of outstanding healthcare professionals. He is committed to empowering every healthcare leader lead with integrity, excellence, and inspiration.
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In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Katherine Meese, bestselling author of Gen Fluence: How to Lead a Multi-Generational Workforce. With a background in organizational behavior, healthcare research, and leadership development, Dr. Meese brings both research and practical insight to one of the biggest challenges facing leaders today: how to lead well across generations. We talk about the reality of today’s workforce, especially in healthcare, where four generations are now working side by si...
In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Sarah Smith, a physician from Australia and The Charting Coach for Physicians and Clinicians. Dr. Smith has practiced medicine in both Australia and Canada and has experienced firsthand the growing administrative burden that many physicians face. After years of long evenings and weekends spent finishing charts, Dr. Smith began asking a simple but powerful question: Is this sustainable? That question led her to rethink how clinical days are structured and ...
In this episode, I sit down with Cary Sparrow, Founder and CEO of WageScape and a former nuclear submarine officer. Cary brings a unique blend of technical thinking, leadership experience, and insight into today’s labor market. We begin with a challenge many organizations face: hiring people who actually stay. Cary explains that leaders often focus heavily on technical experience in interviews while overlooking something just as important—understanding their own culture. When the reality of ...
In this episode, I sit down with President Cameron Martin of Rocky Mountain University of Health Professions. We first connected at a healthcare leadership conference at Brigham Young University, and after one conversation I knew I wanted him on the show. President Martin shares the story behind Rocky Mountain University and the vision that built it. We talk about the difference between training great clinicians and developing strong leaders, and why that gap matters so much in healthcare. ...
In this episode, I sit down again with Dr. Kuhl, Chief Medical Officer at Providence Medford and a returning guest on the podcast. Every time we talk, the conversation leads to thoughtful insights about leadership and the realities of healthcare. We begin with a story from Dr. Kuhl’s early neuroscience research—what he calls “life in the rat lab.” After months of failed experiments, the breakthrough came when he stepped back and changed the approach, quite literally “flipping the rat.” That ...
In this episode, I talk with Radhika Dutt, MIT-educated engineer, startup founder, and author of Radical Product Thinking, about how leaders solve complex problems by changing the way they think, not just the way they act. She shares lessons from her early startup years and the “product diseases” that trap teams into chasing big logos, funding, and metrics instead of meaningful outcomes. Radhika reframes a product as a mechanism for creating change, which applies just as much to healthcare a...
In this episode, I sit down with someone I genuinely admire, Rick Burris, founder of Leaders Fuel and author of Leaders Fuel Daily. Rick and I go back several years, and every time we talk, I walk away sharper. This conversation centers around something deceptively simple: questions. Rick shares how reflective questions became the foundation of his work. Not as clever prompts, but as tools for clarity, alignment, and growth. We talk about how leaders can move from gathering more information...
In this episode, I sit down again with my friend and what may soon be our “periodic co-host,” Dr. Rob Orman. Rob is a physician, coach, and host of the Stimulus Podcast, and he works extensively with physicians facing burnout, behavioral challenges, and high-stakes pressure. We focus on one central idea: how to expand the space between stimulus and response. So many talented clinicians and leaders aren’t struggling with competence, they’re struggling with reactivity. Rob walks us through prac...
In this episode, I sit down with Lee Angus, President of Medi Leadership, a firm that has spent the last 25 years coaching healthcare executives in one of the most complex leadership environments in the world. Lee’s journey is not a straight line. With a master’s in accountancy from Brigham Young University, he began at Deloitte auditing and implementing SAP systems, watching firsthand how leaders either created the conditions for integration or sabotaged it. He saw something early in his ca...
In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Leo Spector, practicing surgeon and CEO of OrthoCarolina, to talk about what happens when physicians step into real leadership. Dr. Spector shares his path from the OR to the executive seat, why he pursued an MBA, and what it feels like to learn administration the same way we learn medicine: through a kind of internship and residency in real time. We get into the hard parts quickly: how to invite younger physicians into leadership when they don’t want “ex...
In this episode, I welcome back Dr. Joseph Michelli for the fifth time, and we focus on a topic that explains a huge percentage of leadership breakdowns I see in real organizations: emotional intelligence. Dr. Michelli and I talk about why EI is still treated as “soft” even though it solves the hard problems of miscommunication, defensiveness, mistrust, stalled execution, and unresolved conflict. We get specific about what emotional intelligence actually is: regulating personal emotions, rea...
In this episode, I sit down with Nancy Griffin, founder of Women Worth and Wellness. Nancy began her career as one of the first female managers at Procter & Gamble Canada and later built a successful wealth management practice focused on women. We talk about the connection between financial confidence and self-worth band why health and wealth are leadership issues, not side conversations. When leaders have clarity around their health, finances, and long-term plan, they lead with greater ...
In this episode, I sit down with Laura Sicola, author of Speaking to Influence, to talk about something I hear in almost every organization: “We need to communicate better.” Everyone agrees. Everyone nods. And then everyone goes back to the same habits. Laura and I dig into why communication so often misses the mark, especially in healthcare environments where people are tired, rushed, and under real pressure. We talk about the illusion that communication has occurred, and why what you inte...
In this episode, I sit down again with Dr. Jason Kuhl, Chief Medical Officer at Providence Medford Medical Center, to talk about something every healthcare leader faces: conflict, and how to lead it instead of avoiding it. I open with a moment that’s stayed with me for years: watching Dr. Kuhl navigate a tense physician call with calm, discipline, and persistence until the right outcome happened. It’s a clear example of what this episode is about. Conflict isn’t the exception in healthcare, ...
In this episode, I sit down with Amos Balongo, a leadership consultant whose work spans corporate America, senior levels of the U.S. military, and global philanthropic efforts. Amos brings a rare combination of discipline, humility, and clarity to leadership, shaped by years of working in environments where performance, trust, and execution truly matter. We talk about why leadership so often breaks down when it becomes overly complicated, and why simplicity is not a lack of sophistication bu...
In this episode, I sit down with Kim Bohr, President and Chief Operating Officer of SparkEffect, for a very real conversation about trust and why leaders can’t afford to treat it as a “soft” topic anymore. Kim and I talk about SparkEffect’s newly released 2025 Trust in Organizations Report, and what immediately stood out to me is this: trust is measurable, it affects the bottom line, and it breaks down faster than most leaders realize. We explore why trust rises and falls most dramatically a...
In this episode, I sit down with Dianna Anderson, CEO and co-founder of Cylient, and one of the early pioneers in the coaching profession. Dianna brings decades of experience helping leaders step into the conversations they most want to avoid, and shows why those conversations are often the ones that matter most. We talk about the real cost of the conversation that doesn’t happen. Not just in dollars, but in stalled initiatives, broken trust, and teams that never quite move forward. Dianna c...
In this episode, we step into new territory for the Healthcare Leadership Excellence Podcast and take on medical and biomedical ethics as it actually shows up in real clinical life. My guest is Dr. Deborah Kozik, a pediatric cardiac surgeon I’ve worked closely with over the past year. Alongside performing some of the most technically demanding surgeries in medicine, she also earned a Master of Science in Bioethics from Harvard University. We talk about why ethics rarely feels urgent until a...
In this episode, I do something a little different. Instead of sitting down with a single guest, I bring together the team that makes the Healthcare Leadership Excellence Podcast and much of the work I do with leaders, actually happen. With more than 185 episodes behind us, this felt like the right moment to look back, and reflect on the year together. We talk honestly about what stretched us last year. That includes deeper work in team facilitation and mediation with academic medical center...
In this episode, I sit down again with Laurie Baedke to tackle a topic that hits close to home for many leaders: control. We start with an honest admission: what makes us successful early in our careers often involves tight control, precision, and personal ownership. The problem is that those same habits quietly stop working as our roles expand. Laurie walks through why high-achieving professionals, especially physicians and executives, struggle to let go. We talk about the psychology behind...
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