Amid mounting financial pressures, workforce shortages and rapid technological change, healthcare leaders are turning their attention toward building the next generation of leadership now, not later.
“There’s going to be a lot of change no matter what,” Greg Damron, CFO of Columbia, Mo.-based University of Missouri Health Care, said during Becker’s 16th Annual Meeting panel, “Leadership in the Next Era of Healthcare.” “Getting comfortable with the uncomfortable and leading your people through that is going to be key,” he said.
Mr. Damron pointed to mounting financial challenges like Medicaid funding pressures, post-COVID state budget pullbacks and MU Health Care’s 100-day out-of-network dispute with Anthem last year.
He said navigating pressures requires strong change management skills above anything else.
“From a leadership perspective, previously I would’ve thought of myself as more servant leadership,” he said. “I do think being a good change manager is a good servant leader because it’s about bringing people along with you on the journey, trying to set the vision ahead … and not shying away from difficult decisions that are going to have to be made.”
Brenda Rocha, DNP, RN, chief nursing officer at Springfield, Mass.-based Baystate Medical Center, said the shifting demands on nurse leaders are profound, with a need to get more in the boardrooms for larger organizational discussions.
“We need more nurses making decisions,” she said. “How do they get there? They have to be acclimated into the new landscape that they’re not familiar with.”
To combat this, Dr. Rocha said Baystate Health’s four CNOs helped launch the Healthy Nurse Practice Environment in March 2025. Under the initiative, the leaders connected with 800 nurses across the system to find industry pain points and co-develop solutions to ensure a healthy environment.
The nurses came with 14 separate, yet repeated themes, including issues around nurse flotation, preceptorships, incentive pay, wanting to be coached and learning succession planning frameworks. Also among the challenges: teaching nurses basic finance concepts to help them understand staffing models.
“The four CNOs sat the nurses down and taught them what basic finance 101 meant,” she said. “When we started doing the homework and … interacting with them, they started saying, ‘Wow, I didn’t realize that’s what that meant.'”
S. Kalyan Katakam, MD, regional vice president for St. Louis-based SSM Health’s St. Louis and Southern Illinois region, also said that physician leadership development remains underdeveloped.
“We take excellent clinicians, star researchers, and we tell them, ‘Now, you’re going to do a leadership role,'” he said, adding that without intentional leadership pipelines, many feel unprepared, burned out and retreat to clinical work.
Dr. Katakam cited SSM Health’s deployment of AI-enabled retinopathy screening cameras across 100 sites as a model for how a clinical voice improves technology adoption. By involving physicians and medical assistants in workflow design, the system improved diabetic retinopathy screening rates by 20%.
“When you have decision making and you arrive at a decision, if you don’t have involvement of key people like physicians and nurses, change management becomes much more difficult,” he said.
The panelists agreed the path forward requires breaking down silos among clinical, nursing and financial leadership — and building the next generation of leaders with a much broader set of tools than their predecessors were given.
“We want to do the best job we can, but sometimes people just have different needs,” Dr. Rocha said. “At the end of the day, our goal is to hire the right people, and you do that by aligning them to your mission, vision and values. Our values are to make sure that we can provide the best care.”
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