Evolving Mindset Series: A Surgeon’s Mindset Transformation

I met Dr. Victor Trastek through a mutual friend who is a sales representative at a medical device company. We had a pleasant initial conversation, and Vic even invited me to Phoenix to give surgical Grand Rounds at Mayo Clinic Scottsdale, where he had been the hospital's inaugural CEO for the first ten years it was in existence.

Vic is a thoracic and cardiovascular surgeon, and he shared his story with me about how he evolved his mindset from a lower-brain to a higher-brain type of thinking. He credits his mindset shift with his opportunity to be recruited into leadership positions and eventually to become the first CEO of Mayo Clinic Scottsdale. Vic helped establish and build the clinic's presence in Arizona and eventually became the Director of the Arizona State University School of Science of Healthcare Delivery in the College of Health Solutions.

When Vic first showed me the video produced to tell his story, he called it "The Jerk Surgeon." Earlier in his career, Vic was like many surgeons, somewhat arrogant and believing the system should be focused on serving him to better care for his patients. His expectations of everyone were high, and he would not allow slack because his patients always deserved the best.

When he would see his patients in the hospital, he expected the nurses to be attentive and respond appropriately and promptly to all of his orders. But to the regularly overworked and understaffed nurses, dropping all other duties to serve one surgeon was not realistic. To them, he was a jerk surgeon.

Over time, when Vic would come to the floor to see his patients, nurses would avoid him, and he wondered why he had trouble finding his patients’ nurses. One day, as he saw patients on the hospital floor, the nurses were nowhere to be seen, but there were cups of water and other drinks outside some of the patients' rooms. Vic thought that this was unprofessional, and the nurses should clean-up these items.

Vic decided to call for Shelly Olsen, a relatively young nurse who was the new floor supervisor, to complain about the situation. In a raised voice, Vic complained about the messy condition with cups outside the patients' rooms. Instead of just agreeing and apologizing for the nurses, the courageous young charge nurse spoke up. She said, "Dr. Trastek, these nurses are so overworked, they don't have time to take breaks. They have drinks outside the patients' rooms, so they don't become dehydrated. They choose to not take breaks so they can better care for their patients. They are not camels. And by the way, the reason they are never here when you round is because they are afraid of you."

Then Vic began to understand – he was not achieving better care for his patients with his demanding behavior; he was a jerk surgeon and making everything worse. That "Aha!" moment changed his life and his career. Shelly even changed Vic's name from The Jerk Surgeon and began to call him Dr. Transformation. I wish I had had a moment like that. Instead, for me, shifting my mindset to higher-brain thinking and behavior was a long and painful, many-year process that I'll describe in more detail in upcoming blog posts.

You can see Vic and Shelly’s story in this video on YouTube called "Dr. Victor Trastek on Leadership Lessons Learned from a Nurse."