Leadership Is Worthless, But Leading Is Priceless, with Dr. Thom Mayer – Episode 468 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Author, speaker, and physician Dr. Thom Mayer explains how a magical series of serendipitous circumstances took him west, the tragic event that led him (back) to the NFL, putting relationships over resumes, finding where your joy intersects the world’s needs, leading the NFL through the concussion crisis, sucking down vs. sucking up, working at the burning Pentagon on 9/11, the Boss vs. the Leader, innovation at the speed of trust, making failure your fuel, and the virtue in thinking of yourself less.

About Dr. Mayer:

Doctor Thom Mayer has been a leader in times of crisis for over 25 years, navigating some of the most significant challenges imaginable. He is the Medical Director for the NFL Players Association, as well as an emergency physician-sports medicine leader of international renown.  He served as the Command Physician at the Pentagon Rescue/Recovery Operation on 9/11, Incident Commander for the inhalational anthrax outbreak in Washington, DC that same year, and led a Team Rubicon Mobile Emergency Team in Ukraine following the outbreak of war. He is among the most widely respected leaders in times of crisis and is a highly sought after speaker and consultant across many businesses and industries.

He was recently nominated to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio and is a member of the Indiana Football Hall of Fame and the Hanover College Athletic Hall of Fame. USA Today named him one of the “100 Most Important People in the NFL.” Tom Peters, the internationally acclaimed expert on leading, referred to his work as “gaspworthy.” His books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and won numerous awards.

Dr. Mayer’s work on leading in times of crisis and battling burnout in all businesses and industries is universally respected as both unique and inspirational.  He has been featured in national and international media, including CNN, BBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, ESPN, the LA Times, the Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, Fox News, Freakonomics podcast, and many others.

He is one of the most widely sought speakers on leading in crisis, innovation,  customer experience, hardwiring flow, trauma and emergency care, pediatric emergency care, EMS/disaster medicine, and sports medicine. His work in each of these areas has resulted in changing the very fabric of patient care. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles, 100 book chapters, and has edited or written 25 textbooks.

Dr. Mayer was the originator of the entire NFL Concussion Guidelines program, and thus has changed the nature of the management of concussions world-wide.  He gives many examples of his NFL experiences in his talks.

On September 11, 2001 Dr. Mayer served as one of the Command Physicians at the Pentagon Rescue Operation, coordinating medical assets at the site.  The BestPractices physicians at Inova Fairfax Hospital were the first to successfully diagnose and treat inhalational anthrax victims during the fall 2001 anthrax crises, and Dr. Mayer has served on the Department of Defense Science Board Task Forces on Bioterrorism, Homeland Security and Consequences of Weapons of Mass Destruction. 

Despite these many accomplishments, he continues to push the envelope of innovation in emergency medicine, sports medicine, and indeed healthcare business itself, and has been awarded the highest honor of the American College of Emergency Physicians.

Learn more at ThomMayerMD.com.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

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(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Adam Outland
Today’s guest is Dr. Thom Mayer, an author and keynote speaker who’s been a leader in times of crisis for over 25 years. He’s the medical director for the NFL Players Association, served as a command physician at the Pentagon on 9/11, led a mobile emergency team in Ukraine, and has authored the new book Leadership is Worthless, But Leading is Priceless. It’s my pleasure to introduce Dr. Thom Mayer. Thom, great to meet you.

Dr. Thom Mayer
Good to see ya.

Adam Outland
I actually want to know a little bit of your backstory like where did you grow up? And then how did you end up where you are now?

Dr. Thom Mayer
Well, I grew up in a small town Indiana Midwestern classic Midwest way to be raised to one of those factory towns that feeds are fed General Motors 70 miles northeast of Indianapolis, and football player A lot of people played football in order to go to college I went to college in order to continue playing football and dreams of playing in the NFL and aside from I did play in college was all conference linebacker and you know, the old saying is you know, the longer go we played the better we were didn’t have a chance I had broken my leg my or I didn’t break it somebody broke up for me in my junior year a pretty bad fracture. So I couldn’t play my senior year. But I was invited to training camps with the Vikings and the bears and I thought hey, let’s give this a shot and discovered that What did they tell me? They said aside from my side speed, strength and talent. They said I had talent other than that I would have been a perfect linebacker in the NFL.

Adam Outland
Oh, how nice.

Dr. Thom Mayer
Yeah, I decided to go to I was in at Dukes medical school and I thought no matter how nasty the professors at Duke were they couldn’t be any worse than the guys trying to take my head off with the Vikings and the bears so became an emergency physician. I trained in surgery at Salt Lake City and we worked a deal out so that the surgical residents covered the park Doctor role at Yellowstone National Park. Oh, and we’ve been going back ever since. So 25 years ago we we bit the bullet and bought a place and have enjoyed it ever since it’s still a small town atmosphere a lot more people have moved in from other places, but we love it.

Adam Outland
How did you… that’s a big reevaluation right? When you switch gears from thinking I’m going to be a professional athlete to you obviously had another trajectory in mind to even be considering Duke Medical.

Dr. Thom Mayer
Well I was actually a theology major when I was in college, and it wasn’t that I was particularly cerebral or reflective. It was because you didn’t have to take tests. You just wrote papers at the end of my sophomore year. My two professors my theology professor and a biology professor name was Dr. Pray, you can’t make that stuff up, said if ever thought about going into medicine instead of being a theology professor after duke i was very clear I wanted to go west, but decided I was either gonna go to Colorado or Utah. So I read Salt Lake number one and loved it met my wife Maureen there she was a newborn ICU flight nurse. I was a pediatric trauma fellow, just a magical series of serendipitous circumstances.

Adam Outland
And then how did you decide to reengage with the NFL or how did they decide to re engage with you?

Dr. Thom Mayer
The people ask me all the time, how do you build How do I build my resume to get a job like yours? Just the Medical Director of the NFL Players Association in my answer is, I became the medical director on August 1 2001. Korey Stringer, a tackle for the Vikings died inexplicably of heatstroke. And I got a phone call. The phone call was from Gene Upshaw, then the executive director of the NFLPA and he called me not because he had done a resume search, but he called me because we were best friends. And we were best friends because his youngest and my youngest were best friends. Our family said had countless dinners, we coach T ball together. We coached football together. And so he called me because he knew me and he trusted me. So I always tell people don’t build resumes, build relationships. And I think that’s the key, particularly as we move forward. And so I’ve been doing that for the last 23 plus years, and it’s been an honor and a privilege to be a part of guiding the health and safety of our 2500 players per year.

Adam Outland
But it’s a huge responsibility. What are just one or two challenges that you ran into?

Dr. Thom Mayer
Sure. You know, when our boys were younger, I used to take them to school every day I was entailed. When I dropped them off. I always said precisely the same thing. One more step in the journey of discovering where your deep joy intersects the world’s deep needs. I swear I said this to them, you have to start with your deep joy, not the world’s deep needs, the world’s deep needs are infinite unfathomable. There’s no bottom to that well, but if you start with your deep joy, with passion that drives you why you do what you do. And that has been a constant in the job because you know, Lord Acton said, as you know, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. NFL is now was then in 2001, the most powerful sports organization in our business in the world, and keeping in mind that the deep joy of representing the health and safety needs of our 2500 player patients. That’s not the same interests as as the NFL, which represents the interests of 32 billionaires who are the owners of the clubs. And so you just have to be willing to stay constant to that it was true in the concussion crisis, when we recognize there was a problem that had to be fixed. We we the NFLPA, Sean sands, very our attorney at the time, and I wrote the original concussion protocols. And there were significant pushback from the NFL, different commissioner and different medical director and chair of what was then called the mTBI. Committee, we stayed constant to that. And now, you know, we’re at a place where the league takes great pride in the calling of the NFL concussion protocols. That’s great, as long as it’s for the good of my player patients. But having the courage, the integrity to stand up and say, No, we are going to have guidelines. And these are the scientific protocols that are our best knowledge at this time.

Adam Outland
This leads us to actually something you write about, which is sucking down, instead of sucking up.

Dr. Thom Mayer
The book, as you know, is kind of a litany very brief, 176 pages of contrarian types of statements, starting with the title leadership is worthless. But leading is priceless. What I learned 911, the NFL and Ukraine, you know, when I was called to the Pentagon on 911, I was a command physician at the Pentagon. And I got there, first of all, you you fly in and think Oh, my God, these are the gates of hell. I mean, you see the Pentagon of all things burning, you know, I couldn’t even see that there was any remnants of a plane in the southwest wall was completely on fire. But the gates of Hell take you to some pretty interesting places. And so what I learned was that, first of all, is a civilian operation, I was the Medical Director of the local EMS agency, and the chairman of the emergency department. But we had, I had 32 generals standing behind me, facing the Pentagon willing to help in any way good men, good women, who were there to help me any way they could. But I realized, I’m not gonna get anywhere. By sucking up to these generals, I have to suck down to the people actually doing the work, to the structural engineers, to the Army Corps of Engineers, to the paramedics, to the firefighters, to the suppressant folks to the FBI evidence recovery team, in order to secure that building, so we could safely they could safely get into the building, to help rescue those who are in there and recover those who had not made it through the horrific crash. And I think that’s true in all of our lives, we kind of suck up guests, I always say the boss is someone who thinks that he’s the most important person in the room. Whereas the leader knows that she’s her job is to make sure that everyone else feels that they’re the most important person in the room, no need to suck up. We need to suck down and discover the answers within us.

Adam Outland
It is hard, right? You you step into a leadership role at times if you are the leader, and you have people reporting and sometimes they’re sucking up to you, though, when you reframe and say, it really is about hey, I’m not here to be the most important person. I’m here to serve the people that pay my salary really, that that actually put me in this position to begin with.

Dr. Thom Mayer
Yeah, when I shortly after I first started my job, I had a very difficult issue with the NFL and I laid the issue out and I knew that you can’t just say Hey, boss, solve this problem for me. I had to come in with solution. So I had three solutions. And I laid out the solutions and said Here they are 123 some What do you want me to do? And he said he thought for a second he looked at me and he said just go be Tom mayor. That’s why you are Tom mayor. That’s why are down mayor, I realized what he was saying is, I trust you trust yourself to be able to make the right this decision. And I’ll support you all the way. You know, the leader, we’re looking for the leader you’re looking for as you. You are the one.

Adam Outland
I feel that you operate probably at very highly autonomous level to when you’re taking on these roles. And I mean, not in the way that you don’t work with a team. But it’s the position you’re often put in as, here’s the football, you got to figure out how to get the rest of the way down the finish line, that that ends up being a big strength of your stat. And I feel like you have very high risk tolerance.

Dr. Thom Mayer
Well, that’s true. Definitely. You know, I always talk about innovation at the speed of not genius, intelligence, creativity, but of cost. Because if people don’t trust you, they’re not going to step outside the lines and try something that might fail. And we have to make failure fuel, we have to understand that if you’re not failing, you’re not innovating. You know, you’re only adopting best practices, adopting what has already been identified maybe as the next phase. But something that’s clearly there, you know, we want people to be able to think we’re really completely outside the box, most of the time when the boss says, think outside the box, they are box, they don’t mean that they mean think inside my box, the way I’m thinking Guess what I’m thinking. So that’s like sucking up. So the answers are not in the you know, they’re not the C suite, they’re in the We suite. They do the work, that team of people who do the work in the trenches on a daily basis. And that’s where innovation should come from.

Adam Outland
The challenge in leadership is getting honest feedback. From that we sweet that you have, do you have any thoughts or tips or like personal anecdotes on how you created an evolved a culture where people would tell you sometimes what you didn’t want to hear and felt okay, doing that?

Dr. Thom Mayer
Well, first of all, I always heard people not only who were better than me, but were much better than me. People would say, What’s it like working for you? And the answer is I have zero idea. Because no one’s ever worked for me, they work with me, I started almost every statement that I made to my folks, my team by saying two things. One is, I need your help. Now, instead of you’ve got a problem already with I need your help. I mean, even if the person you’re working with is a difficult person, you know, egocentric whatever it might be locked into the boss mentality, instead of the leader mentality. You when you say I need your help, most people are going to say, Okay, I’m going to try to help you, too, is I like saying what would have to be true. My point being what would have to be true. In order for us as a team to be able to deliver what it is, you’ve just told me is something a desired state we need, you know, here’s where we are, here’s where we want to be, what would have to be true. In order to get there. There’s a difference. There’s a fundamental paradox between a team of experts, a very smart, talented group of people. And that’s not the same as an expert team, people who work seamlessly across boundaries, who understand what the goal is the ability to trust each other, to come up with ideas. The Kansas City Chiefs, you know, famously are a very innovative team. Well, that starts at the top with Andy Reid, who sits down with his entire staff, his entire team on the whiteboard, and looks at ideas about different plays that they could run, how could we exploit in this situation this down in distance, they’re going to uncover one this, they’re going to be uncovered three, that’s an expert team, a group of people saying, let’s take Creative Chemistry.

Adam Outland
You know, I know what you think of when you think of the antithesis a lot of these principles, but it might help us move into this other part of your life. You know, I read all these anecdotes and news articles about Russia, and at Putin’s leadership and this whole affair with Ukraine, and it seems almost completely countered everything we talked about, I mean it, you get the sense that the generals, pander to Putin and tell him what he wants to hear instead of what he doesn’t, which might be the reality on the ground. When you got a phone call to go help Ukraine at the start of this war? What went through your mind? Were you concerned? What How did you make this decision?

Dr. Thom Mayer
That’s a great question. First of all, I didn’t get a phone call, I made a phone call. Well, I picked up the phone, and I saw what was happening. I thought, you know, I’ve been very fortunate, as you know, to have bled in in some of the most prominent crises of our generation. It’s an honor to serve others in the in the course of that and to have been asked to have done so. But to me, I thought this is an injustice that that can’t stand. I’m an emergency physician. So I’m uniquely trained in Have a mentality, you know, we have this weird thing of, you know, explosions fire, you know, gunfire, we run into that, not away from it, they’re, you know, we’re just not normal. And so I made phone calls connected with Team Rubicon, a group of former Marines. And so literally, within three weeks of the invasion, we were there boots on the ground and in Ukraine, in order to take care of patients. So having been at the tip of that spear, exposed to air raids of literally every day, and every night, you know, I saw the results, people are blown out of their homes blown out of their apartments, in the middle of the night, having to get on a train and go 900 miles west and hope someone would be there to take care of him. But you see, it’s hard not to think about what kind of mentality results in men doing that. I think your point is extremely well taken that authoritarian way of dealing with things does not in my opinion, have the right results.

Adam Outland
No. And not to be too contrarian. But I also think like in times of crisis, I mean, you’re shaking Team Rubicon over there. And I imagine it’s a all hands on deck, a pretty intense experience. And there’s there’s got to be some motivation, sometimes to be a little authoritarian, because there’s the speed element that if you are the one making all the decisions, you can make them so much quicker, right?

Dr. Thom Mayer
You know, how does a team operate as an expert team? Certainly, you recruit smart people. But you know, Bill Belichick said, talent sets the floor of a team, but character sets the ceiling of a team. And I think that’s true in any t. So, you know, our group came together and bonded, I mean, serious badass is, and that’s the highest compliment I can give somebody. And in an emergency situation, you quickly develop those bonds of trust, you talk about team, how are we going to react in this situation, I can tell you, when I was dealing with those patients, they’re right there working with me. And I never, almost never had to ask them to do anything. You know, it’s like in the midst of an emergency resuscitation, I put my hand out when the nurse puts a chest tube in because she knows what I’m thinking. The same thing occurred there. So you know, from great teamwork comes great preparation, great trust, a great sense of the ability of people to work across boundaries. And you develop that very quickly. And I think the more we understand that the work begins within, but it turns very quickly towards teamwork.

Adam Outland
It’s almost like that expression, leadership is assumed before it’s assigned, right?

Dr. Thom Mayer
Wherever we’re leading, whether we’re leading our family, our kids, you know, whether we’re leading a large organization, we have to learn to tell the story of the people we serve. Tell a story about the people that you represent. In too many organizations, too many teams are so bogged down in statistics and data, instead of telling the story of the people that we serve. Mark Twain was very good at this as most things when he said, If you want to rise to the meteoric heights of literary greatness, don’t write about man, write about a man tell the story of the person who’s doing it.

Adam Outland
Curiosity has had to have played a role in your life, because of your well read and well study. How much importance do you put on curiosity and being a person that asked questions?

Dr. Thom Mayer
Yeah, obviously, I think failure has to be our fuel. But driving failure is curiosity, that that wonder why why why not? Why did we do it this way? And why not do it a different way? Why are we doing it this way? We hear that all the time. And the most common answer to that, because we’ve always done it that way. Because we’ve always done it that way. That doesn’t show curiosity that doesn’t show, you know, hey, why couldn’t it be done another way? So the question, you know, why should be it adds value to the people we serve. But the bigger question is, why not? Why couldn’t we do it another way? Because I asked people to think about leading in a radically different way to act on those thoughts within a week, because if the people who listen to this don’t, in some small way, do something differently, if they don’t act on it within a week, they’re not going to add in the third is to innovate, think, act and innovate, and to innovate takes that curiosity to say, what I couldn’t have been done another way, why couldn’t this the play that we drew up? Why couldn’t that have been done in a different way? Why the strategic plan that we laid out how did it fail? How did it to what extent did it fail? Sure. It’s nice to have stats to show data to show the you know, the delta between what we aspired to, and that which we achieved, but again, that human story that’s behind that. So to me, it’s read Tilly read to lead read the lives of great men Right women, those who’ve been through it, I just got back from Normandy, had the great privilege working with Donnie Edwards, a former NFL player, Best Defense Foundation, we took 60 World War Two veterans back to the Normandy beaches. Wow. Unbelievable cold chills just thinking talking about, you know, listening to those men, what they went through how they faced it, you know it, you can’t do better than to see the people who’ve been through it before and hear their experiences, read their lives, how did they make decisions? What guided what went right, what went wrong? It’s just that curiosity, as you so correctly says, is the only thing we can do to fuel our failure to understand how did we fail?

Adam Outland
Failure, you know, you talk about it as a lesson in a learning experience. And I don’t know if you’ve got a good story for this. But sometimes we learn our lessons life, not because we did it, right, because we did it wrong, and learn from it. What’s the a personal example, where either you didn’t follow your own advice, and it cost you something?

Dr. Thom Mayer
Anytime I put myself in front of those I serve, I feel like you know, I’m too old to be making that mistake, I made that mistake so many times. And I just made it over again. And whenever I’ve you know, answered a reporter, given a talk or been in a meeting, and I’ve let my ego get in the way, as opposed to thinking first, last and always in between, about the people I serve, then then I’ve regretted it. You know, I give you a great example of what I said once and there was a shooting at the CIA, and I was the chairman of the emergency department at the time. And I tell the story of permission to the patient and his family. He’s got a nick star worked at the CIA waiting to turn in was shot at close range with a ak 47. And he came into our trauma center, flown in by by my police paramedics that that are the police helicopter unit got 28 units of O negative blood. For some reason, they determined that I was the only person that was going to talk to the press through the national story. So I walk outside the emergency department for reporters are all there. And as you know, often you can hear the question go into their earpiece, lightly but before they asked the question, so they’re peppering me with questions. And Dr. Mayer, everybody was interested in donating blood to help because they knew he had so much blood. They said, you know, patient had 28 units of O negative blood, what blood type? Is he in before I could think I said, I don’t know what he was before. But he’s Oh, negative now. And I thought, Oh, my God, I can’t believe I just said that. And I thought, Well, this has been a good job, you know, I’ll pick up a neck up the office, got a phone call from the chief of police. And I thought, well, this is it, you know, and he said, Doc, I just want to tell you, that’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard of you real human being say. So, you know, just trust your heart, as I said earlier, you know, keep the patient in fraud, the people we serve in front of the team, and yourself way, way back. CS Lewis, as you know, said, you know, humility consists not of thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less. Don’t be so humble. You’re not that great. Good advice to keep in mind.

Adam Outland
That’s good advice. Quick round of questions. These are just kind of quick answers. But we have a lot of guests who’ve had a lot of different forms of success. And something that’s caused us to ask is, hey, you know, success isn’t quite universal in its definition. I’m kind of curious for you, how you define success, and how you know when you’ve achieved it?

Dr. Thom Mayer
Well, it’s a corollary question deeply related to, you know, the joy of which my deep joy is helping others find and fully express their deep joy. So understandably, my definition of success is the extent to which I’ve been able to help them understand they are all leading, because leadership is worthless, because it’s just what you say. And anybody can say anything. But leading is priceless, because it’s what you do all day, every day. And are you in the course of what you do all day, every day, consistent to your deep joy. That to me is success.

Adam Outland
The last thing I guess I love asking would be you know, there’s there’s a young man, somewhere in the state of Indiana, thought he was going to be a professional football player. If you went through a portal in time and happened to bump into this young man, what advice might you have given yourself in that stage of life if you had the opportunity?

Dr. Thom Mayer
Well, the first thing I’d probably say goes, I couldn’t restrain myself. It’d be Are you out of your mind. But when I was 11, I was on an all star baseball team at Meadowbrook Little League. And ended up winning the city title, which, in effect was the county title, the regional title at that time was a big deal. We had two things that happened to us as a result of that. The first of which I thought was the best thing that could ever happen to a person in their life, which is they put us on the top of fire engines, sirens, blazing, lights flashing, and drove us all around the town with people waving. And I thought it just doesn’t get any better than that, you know, just put put me to sleep. This is not going to get any better. Well, it turned out I was wrong. Because we had a banquet at the banquet, a guy named Carl Erskine. Carl was for Anderson, Indiana, and he had played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and was the World Series strikeout record holder until Sandy Kofax broke it. And he said something I’ll never ever forget, which was gentlemen, you can’t do everything in life. No one can. But he paused for a fact. And I can see him saying it and hear the tone in his voice. He said, but any of you can do any thing you choose to do. And I never forgot that, you know, particularly when failure was looming when, you know, it was like, okay, it can be done, you know, and that’s why I say, you know, read to lead. Curiosity, as you so correctly said, that ability to see Yeah, it can be done. You know, it’s awesome. But Mandela said, it’s always impossible until it’s done. The one great Mandela line of many is being resentful about failing or being resentful towards other blaming failure on others. He said, resentment is like drinking poison, and hoping it’ll kill your enemies. Yeah, shocker. Doesn’t work, it kills you.

Adam Outland
Yeah. Wow, this has been an amazing interview with a lot of good lessons. And you’ve managed to pack quite a few those in the book that you’ve published as well. So where can folks go at Tom just to track yourself and anything else that you have?

Dr. Thom Mayer
The book is in leadership is worthless, but meeting is priceless is available on Amazon or all major sites. If you enjoy it, then please leave a review. Untold that helps. If you don’t enjoy it, read it, reach out to me, because you can reach me at THONMYER. MD. So Tom Mayer [email protected]. If I can help you in any way, I will need a phone call. We need to zoom happy to do that. My deep joy is helping others find their deep joy and fully express that. If there’s anything I can do to be helpful in that regard. It would be an honor.

Adam Outland
Right? And if they really really enjoy your book, they can send you a bottle of Silver Oak.

Dr. Thom Mayer
Hahaha, well played, well played.

Adam Outland
Really appreciate your time today. Lots of wisdom and picked a lot of good anecdotes as well. So appreciate that.

Dr. Thom Mayer
Thanks so much. It’s been my honor entirely.