Lead the People #40: Leadership as a Lifeline with Dr. Susan Landers
Dr. Susan Landers has thirty-four years of experience in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). She practiced in academic medicine (on the faculty of two medical schools) and in private practice. She authored over thirty peer-reviewed academic papers. She found her work in the demanding environment of the NICU rewarding & managed to postpone burnout until the end of her career.
Susan and her physician husband raised three children (now all young adults) while they practiced medicine full time. She’s the author of a memoir titled So Many Babies: My Life Balancing a Busy Medical Career and Motherhood. Susan enjoys recounting some of her best, and worst, life experiences, and how she managed to stay resilient. She likes to share with other professionals what she learned along her journey as an ambitious, successful doctor.
Top 3 Takeaways
- Leadership can be high-stakes. Dr. Landers’ experiences in the NICU may be unrelatable for those of us outside of medicine, but our leadership outcomes are incredibly meaningful in their own right. We need to match that intensity.
- Get personal. People handle stressful situations differently. Get to know your team members well and work hard to meet their needs while helping them perform at their best under the circumstances.
- Be the home team. Your spouse, partner, or family members may not come to work with you, but your work comes to them. Stay close to one another and co-develop strategies to meet all the demands you face together.
From the Source
“I enjoyed working with the babies and the moms and dads because they were sort of imagining what their children could be. It was an emotionally raw time, especially for parents who had an unexpectedly preterm or sick baby, and that drew me to that field.“
“It's a place where there's lots of heartbreak that usually gets healed. Most of the babies recover and grow and thrive and go home. For some people—a smaller percent of the tiniest preemies and the sickest babies—the heartbreak doesn't mend and they lose their child.”
“I liked the blend of surgical and medical. I liked getting to know the families. I loved working on a team.” “The public doesn't realize that it's not just the doctors and the nurses, it's all the support staff.”
“I loved the way when a baby was really, really sick, everybody jumped in. Very few words were spoken, and we all did our jobs, did our jobs well, and hopefully at the end we were rewarded.”
“Most people were so fearful that they hung back psychologically until they either understood what was going on or felt more comfortable and could ask questions. Most people got quiet and introspective.”
“[Dads] were great about asking questions and writing things down and taking instruction. The mothers really needed to be allowed to touch and talk to and sing to their baby. That was the thing that would always take them from fear or grief or terror to being a mom.”
“It's very, very challenging for a leader to draw out what's going on with the team members and how that person's attitude affects the product or the service that you're delivering.”
“The first 10 years of being a mother, I had to learn how to be a good enough mother and leave my work at work and not bring all the stresses of the NICU home with me.”
“Two full-time jobs in medicine are not compatible with having a normal family life. We didn't have a normal family life.” “For parents today who are both professionals, both working full-time, I wanna just say it is not easy if you and your spouse are juggling childcare work, maybe sick parents, not to mention a pandemic.”
“The communication has to be clear. The support systems have to be there. There has to be a way for the couple to maintain their relationship because the family dies if the couple doesn't stay together.”
“Over the years, the whole practice became family friendly. I mean, not all the time, but because men and women have different priorities. Most of the time they learn to accommodate wives and mothers because we're different. We just think about things differently. We carry our children's problems to work with us.”
Connect with Dr. Landers
Website: http://www.susanlandersmd.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susan-landersmd/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drsusanlanders