Becker’s Healthcare Podcast recently featured an interview with Peter Banko, the president & CEO of Baystate Health and an MHA Board of Trustees member, discussing his thoughts on workforce and leadership.

Banko’s new book – The Necessary Goodbye: How Great Leaders Fire with Clarity, Confidence, and Compassion – is about, as Becker’s notes in an article, “the full arc of leadership: who you hire, how you develop them, whether you show up in a way that makes people want to stay and when all of that fails, the courage to act without equivocating.”

“People don’t quit organizations. They quit their leader and their team,” Banko said in the podcast. “Bad leadership, dysfunctional teams is why people are miserable at work. We’ve got to do something about that and make sure we’ve got the right people in the right seats on the team … Leadership’s not a popularity contest. You lean into doing it with compassion, clarity and confidence.”

He went on to note in response to a question about the turnover in healthcare leadership, “Yes, our environment’s challenging. Yes, it’s tough at work. You’re going to have to fight a fire today. But at the same time, there’s so many opportunities in healthcare and in every other organization in the United States. You can hold the challenges and opportunities in equal measure and truth, and choose to embrace the opportunities during the course of the day and not get thrown by the challenges. Just get comfortable with being uncomfortable. That’s the leader’s job. That’s the CEO’s job.”