Salus Forum: January 7, 2026

And one of the real big pieces of it was that when you’re leading, you have to understand you’re leading change. When you’re leading stability, you’re managing. And that’s important, to be managing things. But leadership is about inducting change, which is a big challenge. Not all the time. Sometimes it’s a little challenging. And for those people who have led for a long time, they have sometimes been very thoughtful about choosing tiny little things to change. They really had things be very stable. But in this world, that’s probably going to make you fall far short of being able to adapt and grow and evolve to meet the challenges that are ever going. This is part of the Salus philosophy.

So, how do you work with adaptive leadership? And I’ll just share one little take-home for me. There was a wonderful graph that showed that most of the time, change is happening below a certain critical level. But sometimes you’re called to actually make a big change, because the hospital is going to close, and you’re supposed to move your residency to a new place, or you name it. Or lo and behold, the President of the United States has just said, we’re going to take Medicare, and it’s going to drop 5%. Oh, we’re actually going to go from our 5% positive down to 5% negative, and I’m going to have to let go of some people and cancel out this part of the program and all that kind of stuff.

But the point is, when you’re thinking about doing change, you have to understand the status of your organization. Are they capable of doing it?  If they’re not capable of rising up to that change, you are signing up for failure. So, it’s really stepping back and having a deeper sense of the system and being able to, as a leader, be able to sometimes step back rather than step forward.

Gay

I think that many leaders are very intellectually driven, and they’re great at where they’re going and adapting, like you’re talking about, right, adapting to change in the platform.

I think one thing that’s really central when I think about leadership and adaptive leadership is connection. So, being authentic with your staff and connecting with them, not on a cerebral level, but on a humanistic level with regard to whatever change is about to come up. And I think that perspective gets lost in a lot of us because we’re so busy trying to cerebrally make the change happen or get through the change or look at the change in a different way that we forget to drop into being human and connecting with the team.

Walt

Well said. And that’s speaking to the mind-body-spirit aspects of it. I mean, the mental exchange and all that, yeah, it’s important to get the details. One-on-one should try to make that equal too.  But there’s a deeper, deeper level to managing change. And you alluded to where love is in that. Well, this brings up a whole lot of stuff for me.