My Dad's Back in the Hospital (Part 2)
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Hello Friend!
Two of the last three weeks. That’s how much time I’ve spent in hospital rooms.
If you’ve been with me for a while, you might remember the newsletter I wrote a few months ago when my dad was first admitted. That experience broke my heart and fascinated my brain at the same time.
Complications sent my dad to the hospital again. And me with him.
I won’t spend much time on the personal part, except to say: he’s on the mend, and we’re grateful.
This experience thrust me back into deep observations of dysfunctional teams. Some would say it’s an occupational hazard at this point to intently watch what I was watching.
But given what I do for a living in the world of organizational health, I was essentially sitting inside one of the most pressure-tested organizational systems on earth.
High stakes. Deep expertise. And still… the same things break.
Hospitals are high-stakes environments where collaboration isn’t optional. When communication breaks down or egos get in the way, people suffer. Sometimes fatally.
What I saw this time around gave me four more things I can’t stop thinking about.
1. Specialists Are Brilliant But Dangerous in Silos.
My dad had a kidney doctor, a GI doctor, a hospitalist, and a surgeon. Every one of them was excellent. Credentialed. Confident. Exceptional at what they do.
But ask one of them a question outside their lane? Good luck. And more troubling, the medications that helped one organ often wreaked havoc on another. The kidney doctor prescribed something. The GI doctor had to clean up the mess. Nobody was standing at 30,000 feet asking, “Are all the parts working together?”
This happens in business constantly. You hire great engineers, great marketers, great finance people. But if no one is zooming out, looking at how the pieces connect and interact… you end up with teams optimizing for themselves while the customer pays the price.
Try this: Assign someone, or make it your job, to be the connective tissue in your next big initiative. Not to own the decisions, but to ask the question no one else is asking: “What does this mean for the department next to us?”
2. The People Closest to the Work Know the Most. Do You Ask Them?
Here’s what I learned about nurses: they know everything.
Hour-by-hour. Minute-by-minute. They’re observing the patient, fielding family questions, and noticing the trends. I noticed doctors would enter the room without acknowledging the nurse present, sometimes interrupting mid-sentence, and never once asking, “What have you been seeing?”
I found myself politely filling in the gaps. “This is what the care team has noticed while working with my dad.” Meaning: the doctor had just missed something the nurse already knew.
The people closest to the ground floor of your business see what the dashboards don’t. Your frontline reps, your customer support team, your field operators. If you’re not actively asking them what they’re noticing, you’re making decisions half-blind.
Try this: In your next team meeting, before the updates and the metrics, ask the people closest to the customer or the work: “What are you seeing that I'm probably not seeing?” Then actually listen.
3. Great Metrics Can Mask a Terrible Reality.
The head ICU doctor came in with the energy of a halftime locker room speech. Dad’s vitals were improving. Numbers trending up. He looked at me and said, with a big smile, “My goal is to get you to smile.”
I was sitting there watching my father struggle to string sentences together. His cognitive decline was real and frightening. Something no monitor was measuring.
I didn’t smile.
I’ve sat across from a lot of business leaders doing the exact same thing. Revenue up. Churn down. NPS holding steady. And meanwhile, the team is burning out, the culture is eroding, and the best people are secretly updating their résumés.
The numbers are a rearview mirror, not a windshield.
Try this: Pick one thing this week that your metrics don’t measure and go find out how it’s actually doing. Morale, momentum, interpersonal trust. Walk the floor. Make a call. Sit down with someone you haven’t talked to in a while. The number is a lagging indicator. The feeling is leading.
4. In a World of Automation, Feeling Seen Is Your Competitive Advantage.
We’ve built systems that can do almost anything. Except make people feel like they matter.
In my new book Unignorable, I write about a trip to the DMV where I spent twenty minutes being treated like ticket #102. Not a person. A problem to process. And I had to ask myself: how many times have I made someone feel exactly that way?
In healthcare, the stakes are obvious. But in business, the opportunity is just as real. We’re in an era of automated everything. Emails, onboarding, support queues, scripted responses. That means the moment a human actually shows up for someone — genuinely, unhurriedly, making them feel seen — it’s remarkable. Because it’s rare.
You don't have to redesign the whole system. You just have to stop letting the system run on autopilot while you’re still in the building.
Try this: Think about one touchpoint in your work, like a client check-in, a team update, or a deliverable you hand off, and ask: Are we designing this for our convenience or theirs? Then change one thing.
Your Unignorable Move
In healthcare, failing to zoom out is a life or death matter.
In business, it’s not. But there’s still an important human toll. It's the talent you lose. The trust you erode. The customer who stops coming back and never tells you why.
You don’t need another specialist. You might just need someone willing to stand back and ask, “Are the parts working together?”
That’s the move.
Your coach, Chris
P.S. If this hit home and your team is struggling with any of the dysfunction you just read about, let’s talk. I work with leaders on exactly this.
