475 Leading Under Pressure: Lessons from 9/11, the NFL, and the World's Toughest Decisions with Thom Mayer

Welcome to Partnering Leadership, a top global leadership podcast for purpose-driven leaders with a growth mindset. Seeking to learn from the leadership journey of change makers and business insights from leading global thinkers. For additional leadership insights and bonus content, visit us at partneringleadership.com. Now here's your host, Mahan Tavakouli.

Tom Mayer, welcome to Partnering Leadership. I am thrilled to have you in this conversation with me.

I've been looking forward to it a great deal. I've listened to your podcast. I love the format and the wisdom you bring to it. So this will be fun. Thanks for having me on.

Before we get to your book, Leadership is worthless, but leading is priceless. What I learned from 9-11, the NFL, and Ukraine would love to know a little bit more about you, Tom. Whereabouts did you grow up and how did your upbringing help contribute to who you've become?

I grew up a child of the Midwest. My father was a World War II vet. My mother didn't serve in the service, but did work in the support aspects of World War II as well. So very much a child of World War II and loved being in the Midwest. It's a chance to focus on people, focus on the folks that you're working with. I was an athlete, three-sport athlete, football, wrestling, and baseball. All my buddies were teammates, and it helps you understand the importance of not just exercise, being outdoors, but teammates, learning what it's like to succeed, learning what it's like to fail, and all the lessons in between. So very proud to have been born and raised as a Midwesterner, but now live split our time between Wyoming and Virginia.

Outstanding. And you mentioned your experience in team sports. We were chatting before we got started. You're right now in Virginia, you split your time. I'm in Maryland, and it happens that your son, I think, lives only a few houses away from me. You have grandchildren and you've had kids. Have you encouraged any of them to participate in team sports to gain some of the lessons that you gain growing up? They're not growing up in the Midwest, but the sports experience.

Yeah, very much because it really gives you such an opportunity to be physical, to learn new things, to learn to adapt for success and failure. So they're all involved in sports of different types. Our oldest granddaughter is a highly accomplished figure skater. Our second granddaughter, Audra, is an Irish dancer of some talent. Clara is a volleyball player this time of year and soccer player in the fall. And Ryan, who's the youngest, just loves soccer, T-ball, a game which my father invented, as it turns out. So it's always a joy to see him doing those things.

Oh, that's incredible. Tell me about that. How did your father get involved in T-ball?

Pop was a tanker in Patton's Third Army and tank maintenance, kept them running and put them back in service, and came back and owned an automobile business. And he was the president of the little league that I played in, but you'll enjoy this. He refused to do that until I was out of little league, so that no one could accuse him of playing favorites or anything like that. And in those days we had major leagues and minor leagues, but the little kids didn't have anything to do, and yet they were hanging out at the ballpark all the time. So he literally took a piece of stainless steel tube, welded it to a triangular plate, took a radiator hose, heated it up, and flanged it out so that it would hold a ball. And that's how T-Ball got started. The first game was supposed to have three teams, and word spread through the neighborhood. So everyone was, all the little kids were coming up, pulling on his pants, going, Mr. Mayor, can I play? Mr. Mayor, can I play? So before the first game even got played that day, there were seven teams, and that's just gone from there. Now he didn't patent it or anything like that. But there is an exhibit at Little League World Series Hall of Fame in Williamsport that includes him and several other guys who did it in different parts of the country.

Oh, outstanding. What an amazing story. We could spend an entire podcast talking about that experience. Now, Tom, you titled the book and also open up with leadership is worthless, but leading is priceless. How do you differentiate between leadership and leading?

It came to me through the course of having led from the front lines. And so it wasn't book learning, it was practical aspects. That said, I read a tremendous amount. Like you, I'm a voracious leader, a reader. But what struck me was there's over 50,000 books on Amazon alone that have leadership in the title. If you ask ChatGPT about leadership, it blows its electronic mind because it says there's tens of millions of articles about leadership. And yet, if I ask an audience, I do a lot of speaking, if I ask an audience, how many of you have read a book on leadership? Everyone raises their hand. If I say what did it say, I get a blank look a lot of the times. So it led me to the understanding that leadership is worthless because it's just what you say. And anyone can say anything, and they often do, ad nausea. And yet, leading is priceless because it's what we do all day, every day, every single person. So when I talked to an audience, I spoke a couple weeks ago to about a thousand CEOs from different places, and I said to them, every single mother is every bit as much a leader as you are. And they got that. They understood it wasn't offensive to them in any way because we really need teams of leaders, we need armies of leaders, we need organizations, we need neighborhoods full of leaders. And for people to understand that has some pretty significant downstream implications.

I really appreciate that perspective, Tom. What you were saying is that in every role you play, you can be a leader, and that is through the actions, not through the words.

Not to wordsmith, but it's not that they can be. They are already a leader. So three insights, if they are insights, every team member of every team is a leader. Lead yourself, lead your team. Number two, every team member is a performance athlete, no different than my 2,500 athletes in the National Football League, involved in a cycle of performance, rest, and recovery. Performance, rest, and recovery. And we've neglected rest and recovery too much in our lives. And the third is the work begins with them. And we have to start within ourselves to understand that the leader you're looking for is you. Just look in the mirror. The term, in my estimation, we have to abandon the worthless, wispful word someday. Someday I'll be a leader. No, today you are a leader. That's not a question. When you swing your legs out in the morning and touch terra firm ground on which we walk, you say to yourself, today I am a leader. The only question is how will I be? Will I be true to my mission, vision, and values? The core purposes that we've identified ourselves for ourselves, not just in our companies and our teams and our organizations, but individually. Because when you begin to look at it that way, the leader you're looking for is you. And the answers are not above us, they're within and among us. And too few people realize how important that is and how meaningful it can be for their lives.

It is a powerful point, and you make that point through a lot of beautiful experiences and stories in the book as well. You talk about arriving at the Pentagon on September 11th and being handed a vest that was labeled command physician. What did that teach you on what leading is all about?

You can't hide when you've got an orange fluorescent vest that has command physician in bright letters. And everyone is looking to you for answers to questions that have never been raised before, meaning there's no notebook. I couldn't go to one of those 50,000 books and look up what do you do as the command physician? They want to know is it safe for me to go in that building? How can we get in there and take care of the people who were injured, the people who and to recover those who were killed in the So you have to be able to have an incredible amount of confidence and yet humility at the same time. C.S. Lewis said humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less. And so I think that helps. There's also a great gold of my air quote, uh, former Prime Minister of Israel, one of her cabinet members was proclaiming his humility. And she said, Don't be so humble. You're not that great. So always a good thing, always a good thing to remember. And yet you have to make decisions and you have to make them as quickly as you can to be able to do it. So you learn, I hope this gives no offense to anyone in your audience, but I also learned that we spent too much time in our lives sucking up to people. There were 32 generals, uh, three-star or two-star or above that were behind the Jersey. I was not a military person. That was a civilian operation. I was the medical director for Fairfax County Fire and Rescue at the time. Those great people wanted to help any way they could. And I could have spent the entire time sucking up, if you will, to all those people, many of whom on TV today, they've been chairman of the Joy Chiefs. What I needed to do, and again, I don't mean to give offense, is to learn to suck down to the people that technically were below me on an org chart. But those were the structural engineers, the firefighters, the paramedics, the FBI evidence recovery team, the urban search and rescue teams that were going in there, because I needed their unique and individual knowledge to be able to synthesize that all together to say, is it safe or not safe? Or is it safe in this area, but not in another room? And I think there's lessons for all of us that listening to the people technically below us goes a lot further than trying to spend our time sucking up all the time. Marshall Goldsmith says, well, Marshall's a friend. And he says, we all despise it when we see it in other people, but why is it that we can't see ourselves when we're sucking up to others? And a lot of wisdom in that.

What I wonder though is why is that not the case in most organizations, Tom, and in most environments? What you're saying makes perfect sense. However, over the years, I have been involved with organizations across the world, lots of them here in the U.S. When I talk to the executives, they would say this is what they want. They would nod as you're speaking. However, when you actually look at how people are communicating and how people are operating inside the organization, that's not the way they do it.

Yeah, it's a very wise question. And typically I think there's several reasons for that. People, I go on site to speak or consult, or I do a lot of coaching as well. And people will say, we'll show you our culture, our mission, vision, values, and our org chart. And politely I say, absolutely happy to send if you want to send that, but I'm going to tell you after about a half an hour what your org chart really is. I'll tell you what your real mission and vision values are, because I always say that it's not the words on the walls that matter, it's the happenings in the halls. It's what really happens, particularly when there's crisis. And as we live in crisis from crisis to crisis these days. But there's also, and I learned this, I was both a football player, a linebacker when I was in college, and a theology major. But I learned that there's a psychological safety in an org chart. There's a psychological safety to, hey, if I keep going, I'll get to the top one of these days. I wrote a newsletter recently. I post uh those newsletters come up on LinkedIn and Substack, but the title was The Terrible Toxicity of I'm just. I'm just an emergency physician in my case. I'm just a podcaster. I'm just a nurse. I'm just a teller in this bank. And that is, it leads so fast to a victim's mentality that something's always happening to us instead of, no, today I am a leader. And when you embrace today I am a leader, how will I lead? Victim's mentality of necessity has to go away. I gave a talk at a conference, and I insist on talking to the planning committee before I go. In this case, I couldn't because it was too close to the time they wanted me to do it. And I got up and a thousand people, click lights are up, and I flipped up a slide I often use that says that never call someone a future leader. It's demonic, it's demeaning, it's it's demoralizing. And right about that time, the cleague lights went down slightly, and I could see a banner in the back of the room that said, future leaders conference. Yeah, Mahan, I know now. I know now. Don't you think they should have told me that ahead of time? But interestingly enough, they changed the whole title of the conference as a result of that, because that idea that you have to stand in a line to be a leader is just not true, number one. And yet there is that psychological safety to it. There is that various religions in the world have what I call their prescriptions, thou shalt, and their proscriptions, thou shalt not. And if only it were that easy. But life is lived in the margins and in the gray areas in between, the prescriptions and the proscriptions, which makes it more confusing, but a hell of a lot more fun. Now, do I believe in emerging leaders, developing leaders? I hope that's what I but the idea of a future leader, again, that it doesn't work for me. And my experience has been it doesn't work for anything. And I speak not just to healthcare, but to large financial management companies and wealth management companies and sales forces and things like that, because it applies across the board no matter what place we are. Because the idea of an org chart, who's in charge, is really just designating your location, where your office is. Is it a corner office? It's not who you are in any way. I always tell people the boss, all in capitals, is someone who's convinced that he's the most important person in the room. But the leader is someone who knows that it's her job to make sure that everyone else in the room feels that they're the most important person in the room. So don't be the boss, be the leader.

You also have a great story, Tom, based on your experience at the NFL Players Association, on how you became the medical director of the association. How did that come about?

August 1st, 2001, Corey Stringer, a tackle for the Vikings, died of heat stroke on the Vikings practice field. I got a phone, and people say to me all the time, hey Doc, how do I build my resume to get a job like yours as the medical director of the NFL PA? I got a call literally within minutes of the time that Corey died from Gene Upshaw, who was the executive director of the NFLPA, but also the best left guard in the history of the game. He's in the Hall of Fame, he's got the yellow jacket. But he was also my best friend. And so he called me. He didn't call a search firm and have a search firm figure out what do we do and who do we hire. He didn't go to Chat GPT for resumes because it didn't exist then. He called me because he trusted me. And he trusted me because we were best friends. And his youngest, our youngest, were close friends at school or families that had dinners when the kids got sick. Who got to call? Me. And he'd say, Should I go to the emergency room? My answer is no, I'll be over in a few minutes and take care of, because we lived in the same neighborhood in Great Falls. So my point is that's why he called me of all people to step up and take a job. And there'd never been a medical director before, and I'm still the only one. So my point is don't build resumes, build relationships. If you build relationships through the course of your career, then everything will turn out fine and the resume will take care of itself.

Yeah, you have referenced Chat GPT a couple of times, Tom. I've had lots of conversations with brilliant people on AI and where it's all headed. And one of the things that I believe will become even more important is the relationships you're talking about, because through the use of AI, access to knowledge and generating the most beautiful resumes is accessible to everyone. Those relationships and deep human connection is not and will not necessarily be unless you invest effort and time developing it.

Yeah, it will never go away and it has to be invested. As it turns out, two hours ago, I had a call with Scott Diring, and Scott is Dean of Innovation at Duke's Fuqua School of Business. And the reason we had the conversation is he wrote, as you may have seen, an editorial for Wall Street Journal titled How I Killed and Revived Teamwork with AI. Brilliant guy, but humble, straightforward, and all that. It may take some jobs and make them different, but the thing that it will never replace, in my view, and I'm not trying to be old coot, a Luddite, or anything like that, is the fundamental importance of the ability to trust each other. Because I always say we have to think about leadership and leading in a radically different way. We have to act on those thoughts within a week, because if you don't, you're not going to do it. That's just human nature. But the third is we have to innovate. Why do we have to innovate? Because the way we're working isn't working. And in order for it to work better or to work as well as it could, it's got to be innovative. But innovation, of course, does not occur at the speed of genius, intelligence, or creativity. It occurs at the speed of trust. Because if people don't trust each other, they won't step outside the lines. It's critical. And when the boss, we talked about that, says think outside the box, they almost never mean that. What they mean, what they really mean, is think inside my box. Think the way I'm thinking. Guess what I'm thinking. And that's no way to run a company, it's no way to have a team, and it's certainly no way to have a family. It's just not, in my opinion, a good way to live life.

You also had to, when you were at the NFL Players Association, navigate the politics of the concussion crisis, where I imagine there were lots of different forces pushing for lots of different things. How were you able to handle that?

When you hear the term trust, I think if you hear it in your right ear, what your left ear should hear is responsibility. Because if people trust you, then you have to be responsive and responsible to that trust. So when I started in 2001, by NFL mandate, if you had a concussion diagnosed, you got sent back in the game. And that was a written policy, if you can imagine that. Not only that, they purported that you actually had a better outcome if you went back in the game with a concussion, with a brain injury, with a whole bunch of guys smashing into each other at extraordinarily high rates of speed. And so you look at that stark situation and realize, okay, we have to change this culture. The entire culture has to change. Yes, it's a violent game, and yes, these are big men. Yes, force equals mass times acceleration. And our guys in 2001, and even more so now, are bigger and faster than they've ever been. So it was critical to help turn that tide. And how do I do that? I have no power, but I have a lot of influence. And I would say to your listeners, if you ever have the choice to choose between power and influence, choose influence. And the influence, where does it come from? It comes from those you serve, whoever you serve, however you serve them, not just in medicine, healthcare, or the NFL PA. And in my case, instead of speaking with the voice of Tom Mayer, I spoke with the voice of the player, patient, because all my players are patients as well. There's over 7,000 injuries in the NFL and only 20 per year, and only 2,500 players. Concussions went up 30% last year. No one's going to listen to me, much less do anything, lead by action, by the verb, if I it's about me. But if it's about my player patients and their wives, their kids, their families, then you've got the power to do it. So we, I say we, Sean Zanziberry, my the attorney I worked with at the time, wrote the concussion guidelines. And so they they now say NFL guidelines, but we wrote them. The Players Association did. And using the voice of the player patient to influence the owners, the team doctors, the trainers, and the press, the public, to say, oh, it doesn't have to be this way. We could have guidelines. We could examine players, and if they have a concussion, take them out. And if the concussion is diagnosed, then they have to have a graduated return to participation. So I'm it's not, I'm trying to keep my humility in mind, as we talked about earlier. What a gift to be able to speak for the player patient.

And what a powerful example of what you said, Tom, which is if you have a choice between influence and power, take influence in that it took a lot of influence, as you mentioned, in representing the player patients to also bring the public around and then convince the owners that this would be the right thing to do in the process. So influence is what enabled you to shift this entire narrative and therefore the contract and the results.

Yeah, and Ishmahan, we hear a lot about speaking truth to power. It's a very popular term these days. For whatever reason, I can confidently say I spoke truth to power. And I didn't do it on behalf of me. It was we spoke truth to power, number one. And number two, it was that that leveraged it. There was no playbook. There was no way to look this up somewhere. Quick story: I shortly after I started, I'd made an appointment to go down to Gene's office instead of running over to his house and met in his office, and there was a very difficult issue. I was smart enough to know that Gene didn't want me to just walk in and say, What do you want me to do? He wanted to hear solutions. So I framed the issue very tersely, quickly, succinctly. And I hear, here's three ways that we can handle this. What are your thoughts? And he said, just go be Tom Mayer. That's why you are Tom Mayor. That's why I hired Tom Mayer. And I walked out of the office, Mahan, and I called my wife, and she said, What did Gene say? And I said, I don't have a clue. I have no idea what he said. But of course I did. He was just saying, I trust you. That's why I hired you. So you go do the right thing. Thanks for letting me know. And I think that's what most CEOs want is a team of people that are an army of leaders, an organization of leaders that are willing to go out there. Now, the corollary is I always like to talk about making failure your fuel. My guys break down the 162 plays that happen in the National Football League on average, game on average, and break the film down. It's a fascinating concept. Break the film down. Not build the film up, but break the film down. And they're looking for mistakes. They're looking for, yeah, they're going to celebrate when they touchdown or a great tackle or break up on a pass that was looked like it was going to be complete. But they're spending most of the times, oh, I should have had my left hand a little further out. That first step backwards for the left tackle, he didn't get around me, but he almost got around me. So the near-miss phenomenon, if you will. And I think that's what we have to do in our lives is understand failure is going to happen. That's not a question. It's how do you make failure your fuel? Quick question for your audience. In the 2000 NFL draft, the 199th player was taken in that draft. And that person could have said, wow, 199th. There's only 264 in the whole draft. Oh my gosh. They looked in six people at his position were taken ahead of him. And you're nodding your head and smiling, so you know that person did okay. Five Super Bowl MVPs and seven Super Bowl trophies, and his name, of course, is Tom Brady. And he used failure as his fuel. And he can tell you every quarterback taken ahead of him. He can tell you the first time he kicked his butt in a game. He can tell you the head coach and the quarterback's coach that didn't draft him in order and passed him over. That's how you make failure your fuel. Now, we're not all going to go to the Super Bowl, but we're going to the Super Bowls of our parts of our lives. Yeah.

What a beautiful example because you also talk about the fact that people aren't really leading until something breaks. This is whether breakage or setbacks as fuel for becoming better. Now, what I wonder, Tom, is over the years you work with thousands of elite athletes in the NFL. These are the best of the best in the sport. What did they teach you, or what did you learn from them about what it takes to lead under pressure?

Well, it's a lesson that I tried to give to my boys when they were younger. I always had to travel a lot in my various jobs that I've had. But every day that I was home, I would drive them to school. And when I dropped them off at the school, because they all went to the same school, Potomac School, or right across the river from you, I always said the same thing as they got out of the truck. One more step in the journey of discovering where your deep joy intersects the world's deep needs. I swear I said this to them. They preferred to take the bus, as you might guess. They don't want to hear that stuff. But you got to start with the deep joy. Becoming a doctor in my case because my parents wanted me to? No, that makes no sense whatsoever. If I've got passion for serving others and passion for the work, the hard work, the disciplines of being a physician, not just the technical side, but the service side, the compassion side, then hey, it's a perfect job for me. But how many people do you know in your life that they took a job for somebody else's reasons? And to circle back what you said about the players, they had a deep joy. That is to play in the National Football League. They've lived their entire life on the right end of the belt-shaped curve, meaning they were always able to exceed expectations. And they heard all along the way, yeah, you're a great Pee-wee football player, but wait till you get to high school. Yeah, you're pretty good in high school, but wait till you get to college. Yeah, you're pretty good in college, but you'll never make it in the NFL. And they were always able to exceed those expectations because of their passion and their deep joy to play in the league. But now there's 300 players going to come up in the draft total. If you take the 264 that are drafted and the free agents that get signed that are not drafted. What does that mean? In this case, I don't often think life is a is a zero-sum game, but there's only 53 people on the roster. So if 300 men are coming into the league, 300 men are going out of the league every single year. Now, some of them retire, but a lot of my guys are get retired. They're told, hey, clean up your locker, give me your playbook, and don't ever come back again. And so what my point is they then have to switch their deep joy. The arc of their life, the arc of their career switches from playing in the National Football League to whatever is going to lead them to the rest of their life because they're going to be a player much longer than they were ever a player. So that ability I've learned from them how they change. And it's always enormously gratifying when these guys that I served when they were in the league will call me up and say, hey, Doc, could you help me out? Give me your opinion. What do you think? Where does it go? Tell you a quick story. Julius Thomas, tight end, very talented guy. And I said, Julius, you know, when you decided to retire, why'd you do that? And he said, Doc, twice in the same year, I'd give ideas to the coaches about plays we could run or what we could do. And twice a different coach has said to me, Julius, I'm not paying you to think. I'm paying you to run. I'll demean that's like future leader or something like that. And he said, That's it. Now, punchline is Julius Thomas now has not only his master's in counseling in psychology, he's got his PhD. And he has his own practice of elite performance enhancement uh strategies psychologically for folks. So, what a beautiful uh example, I think, of that arc of deep joy changing. And he's going to influence many more people in the course of his counseling career than he ever did on the national footballing playing field.

It is a beautiful and powerful example, Tom. So I wonder how can we find our own deep joy?

Well, the first step I think is self-awareness. And I don't mean focusing too much on the self, but simply paying attention to what am I thinking, what am I feeling, what brings me joy, and what doesn't. And a simple example I use all the time when I'm on site with teams or working with teams or coaching, which is the love, hate, tolerate exercise. What do you love? Write it down in detail. And what is it about that you love? What do you hate? It might be AI. It could be, I hate dealing with a computer, hate dealing with the electronic medical record, I hate budgeting or whatever it might be. And then what do you tolerate? The things that are just there. And so once you understand that, you can start to say, how do I maximize what I love to the extent I can eliminate what I hate and minimize what I tolerate? So to start with that, there's a couple other exercises, which is get a picture of yourself any point in your life, whatever you could be two years ago, could be when you're in grade school, could be in high school, whatever. And sit down and look at that person and say, what was your deep joy? What was it that brought you to where you are? Are you living that? Are you embodying that? If not, why not? And if not, how do I get back to my deep joy? Others uh write a letter, write a but write a letter, not an email, from yourself to talk about where was it and how did I go right? I'm working with a former Army Ranger, duple across player, an Army Ranger, highly decorated, a special operations guy, and he's in business now, in a business field. And yet he feels that he's drifted away a bit from his deep joy. So what an honor that he would even ask me, after all his service to our country, to talk to him about that. But even more of an honor to be able to help in some small incremental inflection point way to say, let's rediscover it together.

One of the things that brings me deep joy, Tom, is the chance to learn from people who have had such magnificent experience making a difference on other people's lives and learning lessons from them. So it has been a deep joy getting a chance to learn from you and hear some of your experiences that you also share in your book. For the audience to follow your work, you mentioned LinkedIn, mentioned Substack and the book. Where would you send them to, Tom?

I actually have a website, but there's nothing for sale on the website. Hopefully, I've got things to give to you that you might have find helpful. The website is just www.tommayor, t-h o m-a y e-r-md.com. My email is Tom Mayer M D at Gmail. My phone number, text call is 703-403-4147. And my point is if I can help your listeners, I will. Period. When my phone rings and I don't know who it is, I always answer it the same way. This is Dr. Mayer. The answer is yes. Now let's figure out what the question is. So if I can help your listeners, I will. Period. Full stop. And trust me, you're very kind to put me among the luminaries you've had on your podcast. So thank you for having done that.

What a beautiful perspective to have to life, to being a leader, and to making a difference in other people's lives. It's been such a joy, Tom, to learn from you and your book. Leadership is worthless, but leading is priceless. What I learned from 9-11, the NFL, and Ukraine. Thank you so much, Dr. Tom Mayer. Thanks, brother. I appreciate you.

You have been listening to Partnering Leadership with your host, Mahan Tavakoli. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating and review of the podcast on your favorite podcasting app and forward the conversation to a friend or colleague so you can help more people discover their purpose, grow professionally with meaning, and have a greater impact. For additional leadership insights and bonus content, visit us at partneringleadership.com.