Well, hello, and welcome to another episode of the Growth Edge Leadership Podcast. I am your host, Laurie Baedke, and I am excited for my guest today. He has one of those bios that I could absolutely spend the next three or four minutes reading. Physician, professor, gastroenterologist, division director, vice chair, senior vice president, all of the things, nationally recognized leader, mentor, TEDx speaker.
But after getting to know him and taking a recent get acquainted call, I realized that would be absolutely the wrong way to introduce him. Dr. Mark Pochapin has built an extraordinary career in medicine. But what I loved immediately were the ideas, the phrases, and the leadership lessons he's collected along the way. So, Mark, rather than me telling everybody who you are, who are you and what would you love the listener to know about what isn't in your bio?
I think that I'm very authentic to who I am and what I believe. I love people and ultimately everything we do comes down to relationships, that the quality of our relationships are critical and that trust is the core ingredient of all of them, that we need each other. An act of kindness has a ripple effect that literally improves the entire world. And if you save one person, you do save the world. That we are so connected.
The simple things make the biggest difference. The people around us in our lives are people who are so dear to us and we can't take anything for granted. And every day we should be grateful for the incredible things in our lives.
Indeed. I mean, there's the podcast and the soundbite. It’s so human. You gave me about seven leadership lessons in our first conversation. So can I have your permission to just toss them back at you and invite you to unpack them?
Let's go, Laurie I'm ready.
The first one, you said there's a reverse gear in a car for a reason. What does reverse look like in leadership?
This actually comes from my grandfather who I'm named after. I never met him, but his name was Max Pochapin. And he used to say that there's a reverse gear in a car because sometimes you have to go backwards to go forward. And in leadership, this happens all the time. That sometimes we think it's a straight line, that's the quickest and best way to get somewhere, but sometimes you have to go backwards or sideways, or you have to reevaluate.
And it's not that you did something poorly. This is a really important leadership concept. It's that when you did it, you thought you were doing it the best you could. But in retrospect, which we now have a vantage point that we didn't have before, it could have been handled better. In retrospect, is the reverse gear. If we can go back, what would we do differently? And how are we going to use that? And sometimes you create a program.
Remember New Coke? I thought what a great idea. Make a sweeter Coke. And it was a disaster. But they went back and said, okay, we're not making new Coke anymore. But they learned from that. And look, Coke's doing very well. There's so many examples. Anyone successful, any company successful is successful because not that they always got it right, but they learn from when they got it wrong. And so that's one of my quotes, one of my personal quotes. That there are only two outcomes to any endeavor.
There's success and there's learning. That the only time you fail is when you stop learning or stop trying. I actually put that out on social media and I got back, that's great, Doc, except in skydiving. I thought about it. So I have to modify it a little bit. As long as it doesn't kill you, there are only two outcomes to any endeavor. But the difference between success and people who are looked at as so lucky. They're so lucky they had this opportunity. People make their own luck.
And successful leaders make their own luck because they've had plenty of failures, they've had plenty of setbacks, but they learn from them. The difference is they learn from them and grow and say, how can we do better? Where people get stuck in their failures and say, I'm a failure. Why do things always go wrong for me? It's a different perspective, but the perspective of success is one of learning and growth.
I want to dig in just a little bit there because for high achieving professionals and you work in academic medicine. And one of the attributes that we're taught and that enables success is perseverance. Just double down and work harder. When does perseverance occasionally flip into stubbornness or have a negative counter effect to the necessity to just say, okay, let's back up, let's try something different.
It's a great point. Another statement I like to say, the only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary. So hard work is required for anyone to be successful. That's true. But then the other thing is this concept of working too much, the perfection. And I'm a we're all anybody successful is a victim of this. This concept of trying to make things perfect where good may be good enough. or very good, or doing good and saying maybe we'll do better, but let's get started with this. It's very hard to feel like you can do better and not stop trying because we're human. We could always do better. One of the hallmarks of leadership 101 is that no matter how well we're doing well today, we can do better tomorrow. And that's humanity, because we're never going to be perfect. So striving for perfection, working day and night, then starts to have that negative part. Because if we work too much, we actually become less engaged, less effective. And this concept of burnout, we're seeing in the medical profession all the time. So we have to recognize that we are human beings and we are people and that we need to rest. Our most creative times are when we're not focusing and working. It's when you're in the shower, when you're about to go to sleep, when you're walking, you know, on a trail.
It's amazing. In fact I have meetings that we call walk and talks where we actually are trying to brainstorm about different ways of doing something. Walking and talking is the much better way of doing it.
Absolutely. And I so wholly believe it. It's nearly impossible to do, but it's essential to put margin into your life for that creative inspiration or for that collaboration. I think for any leader, the higher you ascend in leadership the more demands on your time. But do a simple calendar audit. Look at this week, look at last month, look at the week coming up.
Do you have margin built in? And is it maybe even as little as 10 minutes to reset your mind before that next meeting or to meaningfully connect with someone else? If we don't have margin built in, we will never have that ability to find the creative space or the part of our brain where we get the best insight, we get the most reliable decision making.
And you know, I talked about kindness, and we recognize how important it is to be kind to others and why that feels good on both sides. But the people we're most unkind to are ourselves. We beat ourselves up all the time. I should have said, I could have done, I need to work harder, I'm gonna double down. And we have to give ourselves a break also. That's the other thing. Recognizing that we have to put those boundaries up because without them, things can really go awry. And I've seen it. I've seen people who are so highly functional really unravel because they can't stop.
Yes. Self-compassion is so crucial. Another Mark Pochapinism and you alluded to it a moment ago, but let's linger on it a little bit. Lucky leaders make their own luck. Explain that just a little bit more.
People, there's a great quote from Michael Jordan. I don't know the exact quote, but it's that he missed over and over and over again. He missed the game-winning shot. He missed so many times and failed, and that's why he's so successful. You look at anybody successful, they have had failures that they learn from. I mean, look at Steve Jobs and Apple. He was fired from Apple Computer. And look where it went. The point is People who fail in something don't live in the failure. They don't live in the victimhood. They say, what happened? What can I do now? What can I learn? How can I do better? And from the outside, doing better might mean an opportunity presented, and they jumped on it because they learned what they needed to know about when the opportunity is there.
It makes sense. The iPhone, this thing's a marvel, right? But when it first came out, people were saying, Are you kidding? A phone without buttons? I mean, it seems so obvious now that this thing's amazing, but it wasn't at the time. And opportunities that in retrospect look like they're so obvious required someone to jump onto it and recognize from the past experience that this is an opportunity that I need to move forward with. That may look like luck to the outside world, but to the person doing it.
It's their experience, their skill, their judgment, and their courage, maybe to take a little bit of risk.
So what's luck on the outside may very well be courage and skill and experience on the inside. That's why I say lucky people, lucky leaders, they make their own luck because they make the opportunities, they create the network, and yeah, they may just bump into it, but something had to happen for them to experience that this is an opportunity they want to take.
And that it's going to be something that they want to do. But a lot of things happen. You know, in leadership, there are two types: there's incidental and intentional. Intentional leadership is: I want to be a doctor. I'm going to go to medical school. I want to be a gastroenterologist. I'll do a fellowship in gastroenterology. Incidental is I'm in medical school and I don't know what career to go to. And I happen to put my hand on an endoscope and say, this is what I want to do. I had no idea.
That this is so amazing that you could peer inside the human body. I didn't think I'd ever go into gastroenterology. If I didn't have that experience, this incidental by chance experience of working with another gastroenterologist, I would have never gone into it. We all know our life is filled with these unexpected things. By the way, how do we meet like our spouses? Do we plan that? You know, no, we bump into them, we meet them, someone introduces.
It's all of this incidental stuff that makes life really exciting. But if you know when an opportunity presents itself, whether it's your network or your experience and you jump on that, that's gonna be something that you're gonna go forward with and if successful, could look to the outside like luck.
Well, and in thinking about your vitae and what I've learned about your journey, you are a trained gastroenterologist, but you're in academic medicine. You hold an advanced leadership role in academic medicine. You hold an advanced executive role in a health system environment. You've served as a president of a national association. I'm guessing that M2 Mark Pochapin had no way to anticipate. the journey that your career was going to take you on, nor could have he, but it is. It's seeking out those opportunities, being open to and investing in relationships, and really then having the courage and giving yourself the ability to discern what am I gravitating toward? What do I enjoy?
It's so true. And Laurie, what you're doing, this leadership training, this leadership focus, critical. I actually thought it was a bunch of baloney, truthfully, when I first got to NYU, I came here as a division director. We had a very small division, and this is something that we wanted to build. And the first thing they said to me, we want to give you leadership training. And I said, Well, what did I do wrong? What happened? I said, No, no, don't you want the tools to be the best leader possible. I said, Well, didn't you hire me? Because you thought I had the tools. I couldn't understand it because we're not trained to be leaders, we're trained to be doctors. And it's different. Yes, I lead a medical team or patient's care, but am I leading a division? Am I recruiting? Do I understand the concept of running a meeting or how to set a strategic plan or a budget? No. And getting the leadership training at NYU, and then ultimately nationally, which they sponsored because they recognize how important it is, made me not only a better leader, it made me a better spouse, a better friend, a better person because I'm more mindful. Leadership is about others, but it starts with you. Leadership starts with you and your behaviors, but the metric of a leader who's responsible for others is not what they do, it's what they can get others to do and have others be their best. So the metrics of outstanding leadership is the success and the performance of the people they're responsible for.
And that's a perfect bridge to one of the next isms that I wanted to point you to. And that is the grass is greener where you water it. That's a very different message from constantly looking for the next opportunity. What are you really saying when you tell people that your colleagues, your trainees?
We are always looking, and this is social media in general. We're always looking and thinking how great it is, how wonderful it is in other places, that the grass is greener on the other side. But that's actually not the case. The grass is greener where you water it. And if someone's grass is actually greener, they're doing more watering. The concept is self-improvement. Look at what we have and how we can make it better before we chuck it.
And say it's better somewhere else, let me leave. This is why younger people are moving around in jobs so much, because this idea is it's better somewhere else rather than let's fix what we have. You know, it's so funny because my older patients will always tell me that young people keep throwing things out and we fix them. You know, he said we used to fix something. And it's true, growing up we had the same vacuum cleaner for like twenty years, the washing machine, the guy would come over and fix it. But now we just throw things out, and unfortunately.
We don't focus on making things better, and that's watering your own grass.
I agree. And I think it's so important to think about that. Even what you said a few moments ago about your original mindset around someone suggesting leadership development training. You're a highly trained and high-functioning physician at that moment who'd shown leadership aptitude, but your institution knew, let's pour fuel on that fire. And it enabled you to now make a new section of your yard greener.
We have this incredible division. This leadership focus and training, there's something called the NYU Langone Academy which is amazing because it's really worked. I mean, NYU Langone as an academic institution is one of the top in the world right now. It's skyrocketed, focusing on metrics and leadership training and recognizing that without a metric you can't show that something's improved and setting goals and agendas and synchronizing leadership. Not only does it create success, it creates integration, unity, and a joint and communal pride of what you're accomplishing.
Agreed. So let's nudge forward yet again because there are a number of these pearls I want to continue to get through. But you spoke a moment ago about things that break and we fix them and keep using them. When you and I initially chatted, you talked a little bit about problem solving. And one of the attributes that you look for in high capacity, high potential leaders is being someone that is a problem solver or is willing to bring or find solutions. What separates the people who become indispensable in an organization from the people who simply want to be able to point at things and say they're broken.
So here's the other ism, and in the world of social media, they're called Poch-quotes. is that if all you do is identify problems, no matter how real the problem is, you could be identified as a complainer. But the same person who brings the same problem forward and then says, here's a recommended solution, is a problem solver. Who do you want on your team? And the caveat is that the person who brings the problem forward is probably best knowledgeable About the problem to bring forward the solution. They're the one that can then follow the problem with, and here's my recommended solution. So everyone on my team, and I, by the way, I start with my trainees, my fellows. I say, look, you come to me with a problem, that's great, but I want it to be followed with, here's my recommended solution. Even if that solution can't be implemented, I want to understand where we need to go to solve it. And so when you're in that mindset, not only is it a mindset of growth.
And positivity rather than focusing on the negative, like we said before, how can we do better? Not what we're doing poorly, but how can we do better? But then it brings forward ideas that perhaps someone who's more knowledgeable can bring forward. for people who are listening who want to develop more in their own area of expertise, every time they bring forward a problem or an issue or something that they need to address, follow it by, and here's my recommended solution.
When you're choosing who you wanna bring forward as a leader, who you wanna elevate, it's gonna be the person bringing the solutions and not just the problems.
No doubt about that. I appreciate that deeply. I think it really connects to your belief that life experiences cause us to see things differently. It's like a camera lens, right? So
Absolutely. And it's not just professional life experiences, it's personal life experiences too.
Everything that we experience contributes to our learning and our fuller understanding of what we're doing, what's important, how to prioritize and how to treat people.
So Mark, what is something that you believed about leadership or about medicine perhaps at 35 that you simply don't believe anymore?
It's a really interesting question. I would say that I always thought that the leaders, the giants, were not approachable, these were people who didn't want to be bothered by younger individuals or people who didn't have as much clarity about what they're doing. And it's just the opposite. These people want to give back, that the leaders that we really look up to love being approached and questioned by people younger who may have a different perspective. I tell younger people, please reach out to anyone who's inspired you or someone you want to achieve a similar type of of success and learn from them so you don't have to wait so long in your own life experiences. Start garnering some of this experience.
Expertise loves to give back. That's one of the things I didn't recognize when I was younger.
I think that's so spot on. And just my experience of the generosity of experts and mentors to enjoy and find it restorative to share of those leadership lessons learned. It is a gift, but also to the beneficiary, just having the intention and the graciousness to seek out. that insight from individuals, even though they might be busy, even though you might see them as not approachable. We can't overstate the value of what crisis or loss or experiences have taught those individuals that no leadership book or podcast could ever inform of us. Would you agree?
It's true. And actually here's another Pochapinism or Poch-quote, interruptions are part of a leader's job. If I'm about to see a patient and there's some issue that needs urgent attention in the division that I'm running, the patient will have to wait for a minute, and I need to focus on this because it is part of my job. It's not an interruption.
And the opposite, if a patient gets sick, there's nothing more important than that. Than a meeting or something's gonna have to wait. I have to address a patient. And that's part of my job too. So leadership is about interruptions. And once you say, I'm not being interrupted, this is just part of my job of what I do as a leader, it feels better because you're now actually doing your job rather than being interrupted in something that you need to do. So it's part of the way it goes.
Everything is perspective actually. Once you get the proper perspective, it feels better about how things will actually move forward and produce a better outcome.
I agree. And I'm super curious because depending on your personality, when you're interrupted, your response might be, great, yeah, fire away. What do you need from me? And for some people who get interrupted, it's far more negative. How have you taught yourself to engage when someone else taps you on the shoulder or grabs you right before you go into the next procedure room or the next meeting? so that you can in fact embrace those interruptions and navigate them helpfully.
This was a great concept. There's a book called TouchPoints, which was really helpful by two mentors of mine. The idea being that when you're interrupted, not only do you have to say, is this something I need to address now? And if so, this is part of who I am and what I do in my role, but maybe I can now elevate it to a touch point. So if someone asks me a question, not only may I answer the question, but I might use it as a teaching moment. Well, you know what? It's interesting because a study was done on that, or there was this interesting concept previously that led to this result that maybe we could utilize here. In other words, if you can elevate the moment of the interruption to one of a teaching touch point or an engagement touch point that elevates both you and the person, then not only is it not an interruption, but it's a moment of joy in the day. Now, can you do that every of course not. But if you could do it once a day or twice, in other words, say, can I make this a touch point? Can I elevate this person or even elevate myself in the process where you we both feel good about it?
I like that a lot. Now let's pivot to hope. This is a topic that you delivered a TED talk on recently. I'll link to that in the show notes. It's superb, but you spent a great deal of time thinking about hope, not as optimism or wishful thinking, but something that's consequential in medicine. What does hope have to do with leadership?
Everything. Hope is what drives us forward. In any endeavor, people hope for a better future of their kids if they had it rough. People come to this country for hope of a better life. People hope that by getting a different job or getting additional training. But hope is not a wish. They're very different. You make a wish, you blow out the candles, it goes up in smoke, and that's it. Hope is action. When you hope for something, you put action into making it happen. Now in medicine, we hope for the best care for our patients. So initially, patient comes to see you. What are they hoping for? Well, first, do they have something? And if so, can it be cured? If it can't be cured, is there a medicine that can control it? If not, is there something that potentially is being developed? Is there a science or a clinical trial that can be used that might be something in the future? If not, can they get to a life event? And in the end of life, there's still hope. Even at the very end of life, there's hope for peace and for comfort. That's called palliative care. The key is realistic hope, not false hope. False hope is very damaging. In fact, it does just the opposite. It creates undue and unnecessary stress. But realistic hope, as long as it's placed in the reality of the world, is incredibly powerful, probably the most powerful force. And it's on both sides.
The patient needs hope for what they can do to move forward in their illness. The doctor needs to provide the hope. If the doctor takes away hope, it's a terrible thing. I've had this happen personally in my TED talk. I talk about my mother who was told when she had cancer, I'm sorry, there's nothing more we can do for you. Well, what does that mean? What's next? She actually wasn't that sick when they told her that. It meant she wasn't responding to any of the treatments. But palliative care was different. We're going to restore you.
It wasn't that they were gonna cure her, they're gonna restore her. And they restored her and they restored me because I'm no longer my mother's doctor, I'm my mother's son, and my family can come and celebrate her and be with her. Hope is the most powerful weapon we have, whether it's our life condition, our health, our future. And it's the driving force that when used appropriately can actually make things happen.
Beautiful, beautiful. One quick follow-up question for you. I mean, there are no shortage of challenges, headwinds, things that bring uncertainty and disruption to healthcare, to everything around us. What makes you hopeful when you think about any of those, but you also think about what you view in the horizon?
The young people. I can't even tell you how engaged and how mature and how activated my young fellows and trainees, I love it. I meet them, I interview them, and wow. I never did any of these things when I was younger. They are mindful, they are focused, and they are gung ho, and they have tools that we never had.
They know about DNA and now with computers and AI is changing everything, but not replacing what we do as physicians because being a physician is about humanity and human touch and compassion, which AI can't give. But AI can give us the tools to spend more time doing the doctoring and putting together all the science and the knowledge, AI can make us better. And we're learning so much at such a rapid pace.
The breakthroughs are happening so quickly, and these young people are ready to embrace them. So I'm really excited about the future in medicine. I say if we could all live just another five years, we're gonna cure everything. It's amazing. You know, the hope is we live to 120, and then you just, you know, say, okay, but the key is the quality of life and the ability to live healthy, engaged, and in a way of joy that we recognize what we have in our lives not just focus on our work and our problems.
Indeed, indeed. Well, our time is starting to run short, but I wonder if you're willing to just spin around the dance floor with me on a rapid fire set of questions, quick soundbite answers if possible. Ready? Okay,
Let's go.
A leader loses my trust when?
They're not truthful.
Say more.
Trust, it's like a glass. Once broken, can never be repaired the way it was. It's unbelievable, takes forever to build and a split second to break.
Do you agree that trust can be restored with integrity?
Yes, and integrity is doing the right thing when nobody's watching.
Next one. I will follow almost anyone who?
Has enthusiasm, conviction, and authenticity.
Love it. The most underrated leadership skill is?
Silence, listening, sitting there and allowing silence to pass so someone can speak.
Young physicians should stop worrying so much about?
Their future. They should focus on the present and what they want to do in the now, worry about the future, but not focus so much on it that it affects the now.
The best career advice I ever received was?
Don't get so crazy about things and just do what you feel is right.
A piece of advice that I ignored but shouldn't have was?
Ask if you have any questions.
Say more.
You feel like when you ask questions you're showing vulnerability and perhaps inadequacy, but actually just the opposite. The only mistake you can make is not asking a question. You make mistakes when you're uncertain about something and you're afraid to ask for help. Ask for help, that's what we're here for.
Curiosity, humble inquiry, and really just pursuit of clarity because in anyone's busy day, we can give a directive, we can answer a question, but be off base from what someone needed. And the courage or the curiosity to clarify, I think is really, really crucial.
I tell my interns, my fellows, my trainees, there's only one mistake, one mistake they can make, and that's not asking for help.
One thing I wish senior leaders would do more is?
Meet in person with people who report to them. Walk the floor, visit the locations, show up rather than be behind a screen or behind an email. Go and experience.
One thing I wish emerging leaders understood is?
That leadership isn't about them, it's about others.
And last is hope is?
Life everything. Without it we have nothing.
Mark, this has been such a delight. I have grown immensely from the brief time that I've gotten to know you, and I am so grateful for your generosity and sharing of your wisdom with the listeners today. When people you've led someday describe what it was like to work with Dr. Mark Pochapin, what do you hope that they say?
Fun, exciting, enjoyable, tough.
I hope that they feel like they're part of something that made them feel special.
That's a pretty good place to leave it. Thank you so much and carry on. Continue the extraordinary leadership that you're delivering to your patients, to your learners, to medicine.
Laurie, I just want to say this was a great interview, by the way. And I think this is fabulous. I hope a lot of people listen to what we're talking about, recognize the importance of it, and thank you for all the work that you're doing, trying to bring this these messages that we all need, not just leaders, everybody, because we all lead our own lives and our own behaviors. Critically important, and thank you so much for taking the time doing this.
Indeed.
