Lauren welcomes three special guests for this episode exploring leadership and building successful teams: Fran McCaffrey, the head coach of the University of Iowa men’s basketball team; Dr. Matt Howard, Chief of Neurosurgery at the University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics; and Jon Darsee, Chief Innovation Officer at the University of Iowa and president of the Research Park Corporation.

Lauren Lavin:

Welcome to Plugged in to Public Health. I’m your host, Lauren Lavin, and while we typically focus on public health issues, today’s episode takes a slight detour. We’re diving into the broader themes of leadership, teamwork, and personal growth, elements essential to building resilient and effective leaders in all areas. We’re thrilled to have three extraordinary guests with us today whose expertise and experiences offer valuable lessons for aspiring leaders in any field.

First, we’re joined by Fran McCaffrey, the head coach of the University of Iowa men’s basketball team. With decades of experience on the court, Fran has guided his teams to incredible achievements, including multiple NCAA tournament appearances. His leadership extends far beyond the game, shaping young athletes into future leaders. Next, we have Dr. Matt Howard, chief of neurosurgery at the University of Iowa Hospital and Clinics. With 23 years in this prestigious role, Dr. Howard has not only advanced the field of neurosurgery, but also built a culture of excellence and mentorship within his team. Finally, we welcome Jon Darsee, Chief Innovation Officer at the University of Iowa and president of the Research Park Corporation.

A former basketball player for the University of Iowa himself, Jon combines his experience in sports and startups having helped launch six companies, including a billion dollar unicorn to drive innovation and collaboration and academia and beyond. Today we’ll explore the common threads of leadership, the world trust in high functioning teams, and how humility shapes success in diverse fields. Let’s get started and get plugged in to today’s episode. Thank you guys so much for being here today. I’m sitting in the lovely Iowa Public Radio podcasting room with three gentlemen, so I’d love it if you guys could all introduce yourselves to our listeners. We’ll start with you, Fran.

Fran McCaffrey:

I’m Fran McCaffrey, head basketball coach for the men’s team here at the University of Iowa.

Lauren Lavin:

And fresh off a win from last night.

Fran McCaffrey:

Yeah, we won the Kenny Arnold Classic, it’s something we’re very proud of. Most importantly to remember Kenny and his teammates. Probably the greatest example of brotherhood I’ve ever seen.

Lauren Lavin:

That kind of feeds into our conversation, a little foreshadowing, if you will. Dr. Howard?

Matt Howard:

Yeah, I’m Matt Howard and I’m chief of neurosurgery at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics in the College of Medicine.

Lauren Lavin:

And how long have you been chief?

Matt Howard:

I’ve been chief for 23 years.

Lauren Lavin:

Wow. So, you have a lot of experience you’re bringing to the table today.

Matt Howard:

I have a lot of experience.

Lauren Lavin:

And Jon.

Jon Darsee:

Hi, good morning. I’m Jon Darsee, chief Innovation Officer at the University of Iowa and president of the Research Park Corporation. I was a member of that Kenny Arnold team that Fran just spoke about, and I was teammates with Kenny for three years.

Lauren Lavin:

Maybe some background for our listeners. You played basketball here at the University of Iowa?

Jon Darsee:

I did. I did. I mean, Fran set it up so well. But that really is sort of the impetus of this session, teamwork, leadership, trust, and how you develop that because I had the opportunity to play on a really highly functional team in college led by Lute Olsen with folks like Kenny Arnold, and you learn when you are on a highly functional team like that, you carry those lessons on throughout life and it influences the way you perform and it gives you a natural edge when it comes to things like teamwork, leadership, et cetera. What I’ve noticed in business, and I’ve been at six different startups, so a lot of people get promoted into roles that they’ve never really been taught how to be leaders.

And if they haven’t been lucky enough to be on a really highly functional team as a kid, they really don’t have the skill set unless they have a really good mentor that can move them through the process and teach them. I think we see the same thing at the university in academia where people, researchers and clinicians that are exceptional at their job get elevated into roles of leadership, but they again may not have those skills to really lead a highly functional team. I think folks think that teams, you just throw them together and everyone throws the word team around all the time, and yet it’s not intuitive. It’s not that simple. And that’s the emphasis we want to focus on today.

Lauren Lavin:

And we’ll be talking about that a lot. I’m changing my mind. I do want to know how you guys made it to Iowa. So, my first question is actually going to be how did you end up here at the University of Iowa? Give a little brief synopsis, just some background.

Fran McCaffrey:

Well, for me, I was very familiar with the Iowa program. I had actually watched Jon’s team play in Philadelphia when they went to the Final Four. I was a fan at that game. What a great team that was. They came in to the East coast, they won the Eastern Regional Championship and Maryland, Georgetown, those were teams that most people back east were familiar with. Here were the big 10 champs and they came in and took care of business. It was a fun team to watch. And I agree with Jon. That team was really connected in so many ways. Later on when I got into coaching, I coached at the University of Iowa in a tournament. I did it twice, once when I was at Lehigh and once when I was at University of North Carolina in Greensboro. So, I brought my team out here to Iowa to participate in what was called the Amana Hawkeye Classic, if I remember.

And so I saw the crowd, I saw the campus, obviously was very familiar with the Big 10, hoped and aspired to one day have an opportunity to coach there. So, I had a chance to interview and we had some success at my previous location and I had a chance to interview for the job. And I made it clear to Gary Barta and Fred Mims and President Mason at the time that this is where I wanted to be, not only professionally, but where I wanted to raise my family. So, it couldn’t have worked out better for us.

Lauren Lavin:

I love that. And I think a lot of people resonate with the sentiment about this is where you want to have a family and grow up. Iowa’s a good place to live, right?

Fran McCaffrey:

Great place to live.

Lauren Lavin:

And Dr. Howard, how did you end up here?

Matt Howard:

So, the way career paths in my discipline progresses is that after you graduate from medical school, you do a residency. And in neurosurgery it’s about seven years long. And I did my residency out in Seattle, which was the University of Washington. It a fantastic place. And during the residency I crystallized what I wanted to do professionally within neurosurgery. And then at the end of the residency you have to find a job. So, you’re searching, you’re interviewing, you’re looking. And I had never been to the University of Iowa before, but as I did my research on the institution, they had remarkable strengths in the key areas that I needed to have in order to build my team, particularly with hearing research and also access to patients. So, this at the time was the biggest university owned hospital in the United States. When I came to visit, it was just unbelievable.

Lauren Lavin:

Wow.

Matt Howard:

So, I was thankful Dr. Van Gelder hired me.

Lauren Lavin:

Great. And Jon, do you want to give a little background on how you ended up here?

Jon Darsee:

Yeah, well of course, as we already stated, I grew up in Iowa. I went to school here and of course played basketball here. But I left for 35 years and I was lucky enough to be part of a very successful start-up out of Stanford University that went public and became a unicorn. And at that time, President Harold reached out to me and said, “Hey, would you come back to Iowa?” And we were thinking at the time we lived in Austin, Texas and we were thinking about moving around and my mother was getting older, and so it seemed like an interesting fit for us. So, we moved up here and then they created this position, chief innovation officer, it’s the first time they’d had this kind of role and really a specific focus on economic development that they hadn’t had. And with all my background in the medical device field, it was just a natural fit.

Lauren Lavin:

Can you explain to the listeners what a unicorn is?

Jon Darsee:

Oh, sorry.

Matt Howard:

I can, it’s a horse with a thing that the stick comes [inaudible 00:07:38]-

Lauren Lavin:

Exactly. That’s what it turned into.

Jon Darsee:

Besides the horse with a thing and a stick, it is a company that has a valuation, a start-up, that goes through a process and has a valuation of greater than a billion dollars. So, this company that we started, there were four of us that founded it and we grew it to a hundred million dollars in revenue and about 600 employees at the time. And then we had an IPO and went public in NASDAQ. And today I think the market cap is roughly $3 billion.

Lauren Lavin:

So, it’s safe to say it was successful.

Jon Darsee:

It was very successful. We took an old idea, a Holter monitor that’s a box and a lot of wires, and we transformed that into a Band-aid basically that you can wear for two weeks. So, we took a complex challenging diagnostic tool that was very inefficient and made it super efficient.

Lauren Lavin:

So, everyone’s been in charge of some pretty important teams. So, my first question is, do you think that leadership is naturally born or is it something that you have to learn and develop over time?

Fran McCaffrey:

I think it’s a little bit of both. When you grow up in sports, you learn competition. So, some of it will be what is your personality? Can you be a leader if you’re an introvert?

Lauren Lavin:

What’s the answer to that? Yeah, okay.

Fran McCaffrey:

You can, it’s harder. Typically your leaders are very vocal, but what is the message you’re sending? How do you prepare? How do you work? How do you perform under pressure? If you don’t do those things, you can’t be a leader. Your best leaders are your hardest workers for us. So, there have been times in my career where I have tried to help someone become a leader. That’s really hard. It’s in many ways innate, but you can improve in that area, especially when you have mentors when you arrive. So, for example, Payton Sandfort’s a great example for our team. He comes in as a freshman, he just wants to contribute. He’s on a really good team, but he’s got really talented leaders.

Connor McCaffery, Jordan Bohannon and Kris Murray. I mean, we had really, Keegan Murray, I mean we had really good players, but the leaders on that team, because Kris and Keegan were young, were Connor and Jordan. So, he watched those guys lead. So, he learned from that and then now it’s his team. Now he’s a senior. And that’s kind of how it works in our business, in our arena. You don’t come in as a freshman and lead. You might be able to do that if you’re an incredibly talented point guard, because you have the ball and you’re orchestrating an engineering victory. So, you can do that a little bit. But the guys that control the locker room are typically the veterans.

Lauren Lavin:

There’s a hierarchy. And as you progress through that, you should learn some of those skills.

Fran McCaffrey:

You learn those skills and you perfect them, and you do. It’s like you reach back and pull the next group forward with your knowledge and expertise.

Lauren Lavin:

Do you ever feel like that doesn’t happen on a team?

Fran McCaffrey:

Yeah, and those teams lose.

Lauren Lavin:

There you go.

Fran McCaffrey:

It couldn’t make it any simpler than that.

Lauren Lavin:

How does that kind of contrast or is similar to your view of natural-born or is it something that kind of grows?

Matt Howard:

Yeah, I think clearly it’s both. You can’t become a real high level leader unless you see someone before you doing exactly the same thing. So, in my case, I was blessed when I was at the University of Washington to have a boss, a chairman named Dr. Winn, and he brought that program to number one in the United States in NIH funding, which is a very, very difficult thing to do. And he recruited so many star new faculty members that went on to become chiefs of neurosurgery all over the United States. So, I saw him in action. So, that’s a high level and you see him every day, little snippets. The next level down is the operational.

Ours is more like a military organization, so the operational management of the team is with the chief resident. So, here you are seven years into your training out of medical school and you’ve acquired a lot of management skills, but you’re there for seven years because of very highest level operations require that much time to … but the management, the leadership you should learn, you should be very, very good as a chief resident. And when you’re in the trenches as a young person, they call them, it’s R1, R2.

So, when you’re in an R1, R2, R3, your life is really impacted by your chief resident. Whether they control the schedule, they’re the ones who you’re reporting to and they’re organizing operations and the team. And if you’ve got a great chief resident, it’s just a wonderful experience. If you’ve got a bad one, it’s bad. And for us, the losses are casualties is if your team’s not functioning really well, avoidable mistakes happen and people get hurt.

Lauren Lavin:

Can you describe what a bad versus a good chief resident would look like? What skills do they possess or not?

Matt Howard:

Yeah, so I mean there’s a whole bunch of them and I’m fascinated by the subject. I kind of read up on it constantly, but what I do is try to, because in charge of the chief residence and I try to simplify it and say, okay, here’s what you need to do. And there are things I can check very easily, show up, be there on time.

Lauren Lavin:

That’s like the bottom line. Yeah.

Matt Howard:

Now it’s a little tricky because you’re rounding at 5:30. If you’re there, that shows respect for the team and you’re ready to launch and check on all these patients. If you’re late, how can you expect the other people to be there on time? So, it’s show up and be absolutely honest. You say if you do that, I can help you through the rest of it. Those are the fundamentals.

Lauren Lavin:

Anyone can take that away. I think we can all show up and be honest.

Matt Howard:

And it’s diagnostic. When I see someone starting to show up late that is oftentimes correlate with their, at least in my line of work, is they’re struggling. Because they knew that’s what they’re supposed to do. They’re not doing it. I got a problem on my hands.

Lauren Lavin:

That’s a great tip. Jon, do you have anything to add on this?

Jon Darsee:

I think what they’ve said is absolutely right. You may have innate leadership skills, but you don’t really develop that unless you have a mentor to watch and to grow beneath as you go through your time. Back to the basketball analogy on our team, we had a leader by the name of Ronnie Lester who was the quietest guy in the room. And yet his effort and the way he prepared and the way he approached the game, I mean he was almost head and shoulders better than the rest of us in some ways. And so nobody wanted to disappoint him. So, it made all of us work that much harder even though he was not a vocal leader, he was quite quiet. Well, let me throw back a question to you guys. So, what happens? Do you ever get a sense, sometimes highly functional people are also prima donna like and are difficult to work with others and their expectations are so high that they don’t have these soft skills to help bring the team up? Do you find that, has that been an issue in either one of your teams?

Fran McCaffrey:

Occasionally we’ll have a player that just has a bite to them. They snap at the other players, because their expectation is higher than what they’re performing. Initially I will address that. We are not having that. Okay, if anybody is going to get on these guys, it’s going to be the coaching staff. You’re not going to be getting on each other. Now you can challenge each other, but it better be done in a professional way. So, we will put a stop to that immediately. So, it’s never become a serious problem because it’s happened, it’s brief, it’s addressed and it’s taken care of. Everything in my world is about culture and that word is thrown around a lot. Everybody says we have culture. It’s actually rare that you have a great culture and you have great culture if you have players of character. So, that’s the number one thing that we look at when we recruit a student-athlete at the University of Iowa is their character.

Yeah, talent’s important, athletic ability’s important. They have to be academically qualified. But will they fit in with 12 other guys? Will they be able to perform with four other guys on the court at the same time? Will they put winning above personal statistics? Which in a world where they’re all trying to make the pros and trying to make money, and in order to do that they have to put stats on the board. And now everybody has agents. So, now the agents are telling them, you have to do this, you have to do this, you have to do this. So, we have to deal with that component of it. So, we’ve got to get a group of guys that no one understand how to play together and put winning above everything else. And that’s character. And that requires great leadership in the locker room.

Lauren Lavin:

How do you assess character from afar or do you get up close and personal and that’s how you figure that out?

Fran McCaffrey:

We get up close and personal. Before we would sign a player, we can recruit. We see a guy play plays really well. We start recruiting him and we hear about him. Somebody calls and says, “Hey, check this kid out.” You look at him on film, he looks really good. But then you get to know them personally. You get to know their parents. You talk to their AU coach, you talk to their high school coach, you talk to them. Used to be we would call the house, well now you’re calling his cell phone. Okay, he’s picking up. If he’s not picking up, he’s not coming here. Okay. Because he’s answering the phone for somebody else.

So, it’s lengthy conversations, not, “Hey, you should come here for this and this reason.” You ask them about their family, you ask them, they have homework, what are you doing? What are you studying? What do you want to study? And you see if there’s depth in that individual’s personality because, and Jon will tell you, it’s a long season and there’s ups and downs and there’s pressures on these kids unlike ever before. Social media is brutal. The fan base can be brutal when you’re not playing well or your team’s not playing well. So, you have to be this band of brothers. And the only way you do that is if you truly love each other and care about each other and strive together because every day is not a bowl of cherries in this world that I live in. So, it’s a lot simpler if everybody is enjoying coming to practice every day because they know they’re going to get better.

They’re playing with people that they love, they’re playing for coaches that they respect, who respect them. I mean, I recruited these guys, of course I respect them, of course I love them and I’m going to stick with them. I’m going to keep working with them. And some guys takes them a little longer. And we had a situation last night, it’s Riley Mulvey, big kid. We recruited him, wonderful kid, hard worker and it’s just taking him a little bit longer. He comes off the bench last night and was a main factor in our winning that game. Our starting center was sick, couldn’t be there, had 102 fever. This kid comes off the bench with two dunks and five rebounds and was just tremendous. And the whole team was thrilled for him. And that as a coach is one of the greatest feelings you have.

Lauren Lavin:

Absolutely. And how do you deal with egos or are there none over in medicine?

Matt Howard:

Well, neurosurgery suffers more than other specialty.

Lauren Lavin:

Why is that?

Matt Howard:

That’s highly competitive and highly reimbursed, prestigious. So, we can attract some people who are in it for the wrong reason if you’re not careful. So, with the residency, we have about 300 people apply for two slots. So, the academic credentials are impeccable. And then when they come in and we can’t do the due diligence that we do that for the faculty, because we can. With the residents, it’s a match and a short interval. So, your chance of making a mistake is a lot higher for the residency than it is for the faculty.

Lauren Lavin:

You don’t get to see that character maybe quite as much.

Matt Howard:

Not really. I mean during the interview those secretaries might say there’s something off with this person and that’s it. But once they come in, put a huge emphasis, I meet with them every Saturday morning. It’s the culture. We got to have this culture. Again, simplification, respect. It’s not about you, it’s about the team. It’s about taking care of patients. Everyone here is a superstar. You’re never going to see me lose my cool ever. And I don’t want you to lose your cool. You got to be professional at all times. And it was interesting, my previous experiences of previous boss and then different people, particularly back in the day, there used to be a lot of flamboyant yelling and screaming and all that kind of stuff, but they didn’t fire too many people.

Whereas my approach, particularly in the beginning where I was trying to get my moves down, I was making too many mistakes is just I’d say, here’s what you need to do. Here’s a performance improvement plan. If it doesn’t work, you’re gone and people were gone. Or just say it’s not working. And the thing is, you’re the only person who can do it as the boss. If you can’t get rid of this bad apple, then it’s terrible for the team. And that wrecks the culture.

Lauren Lavin:

Do you think that people get too many chances or not enough?

Matt Howard:

The people that I have let go, and this is kind of a standard thing, I think probably should have done it earlier. I’ve been involved with startups too. And it wasn’t even necessarily a performance thing. It was just like you’re short on funding and we’ve just got to cut 20% of our workforce and you had no hard feelings. But-

Jon Darsee:

Yeah, if you don’t have time, you don’t have enough money. It’s all about time.

Matt Howard:

We’d have a board meeting the weekend, Monday, the guy gets the announcement, they’re shh.

Jon Darsee:

Yeah, some of the biggest mistakes that we made in business were hiring people on paper that had the great pedigree, but we get so enamored with that pedigree from a distance that we don’t vet them the same way. We don’t go through the same diligence to understand their soft skills, their leadership skills, their teamwork, and some of the worst mistakes we ever made in business were hiring people based on the paper and we just assumed that they could do all these other things and it didn’t work out. One time I was at a company where there was a, so we had a small management team and three of the people disagreed with the direction we were having a lot of stress and we didn’t have any trust on this team. It hadn’t built, it was young. We were coming together at the last minute. So, a part of the team went around the rest of our backs to the board of directors that were venture capital people and they were the funders to try to get the rest of us fired and to go in a different direction. So, it was-

Matt Howard:

That didn’t help with trust did it?

Jon Darsee:

Didn’t help. So, in the end they all got fired and all of us stayed, but the new CEO came in and made a point of, we did quarterly offsite meetings where the leadership team for two years went off and did something completely outside the realm of our business just so that we could better understand each other, how to work together and develop a sense of trust. Know how to address people when you have the difficult … How do you have the difficult conversations? And the more trust you have, the easier it is to call someone out and saying, “Hey, you’re not getting it done. You need to up your game”, without them getting really defensive and moving back. And that was a big lesson for me because trust is very hard to develop. It really takes effort and time. I think people just assume that you’re working together and it’s just going to happen, but it doesn’t. You have to be very intentional.

Lauren Lavin:

So, what methods do you think are good for building trust in a business setting for example?

Jon Darsee:

I think you need to understand how people make decisions. You need to understand some people need a lot of direction and a lot of specificity around their role and what they’re doing. Other people hate that and don’t want that at all and really want to have the freedom to operate and can excel that way. So, you really have to recognize these different kind of personality types and you’ve got to adapt your style to understand how best to approach them. Do you guys find that?

Matt Howard:

Absolutely.

Fran McCaffrey:

There’s no question. In our world, trust is earned by how you treat people. Okay, so you see coaches yell sometimes they might yell at the officials, they might yell at the players.

Jon Darsee:

You mean like you?

Fran McCaffrey:

I don’t yell at the players nearly as much as I yell at those guys with striped shirts and I probably should do that less and I had been better. But the key in coaching young people is you can never make it personal. We’re not doing this. You call the team out. Now maybe if they’re not playing hard enough, you can challenge them on that. Okay, you got to play harder, you’re better than that. So, trust is a two-way street. I’ve got to trust them, they’ve got to trust me. So, how do I earn their trust? It’s the intensity and complexity of our preparation. These guys are working for us, they’re helping us. Okay, we got to go on the road or we got to try to beat Indiana and they’re ranked in the top 10 and there’s going to be 18,000 people there going crazy.

And you can’t hear yourself. So, you have to again be this band of brothers on the floor. You’ve got to be connected. But we’ve got to have a game plan that makes sense to them that they understand and then we have to make adjustments when the game goes on. So, you’ve got to be smart enough to understand, okay, why are we … there’s a great game plan seemingly, well guess what? It didn’t work, but we still got 26 minutes to go. So, we’re going to change defenses, we’re going to change the offense, we’re going to tweak personnel. Everybody’s got to stay locked in. And when you do that, we’re all in this thing together. And that’s where the trust and respect comes from. And that’s when, as I said before, players want to come to practice, they want to compete, they want to compete together. And that’s when you have success. There’s anything short of that, you won’t.

Matt Howard:

I think it’s key to be predictable and that’s through where the members of the team who are reporting to you, they have confidence in the way you’re going to behave. It’s not erratic, it’s very predictable and it gives them confidence so they can focus on their thing. They’re not looking up all the time trying to say, oh, what’s the boss think? No, they know what their assignment is and they know the boss is going to back them up and that’s when the magic happens.

Fran McCaffrey:

I think that’s a great point. One thing I really try to pride myself in is a lot of coaches in my profession are micromanagers. Basketball is a game that’s continuous. You push the ball down the floor, you move it, move it, move it. Somebody’s shoots, you go to the glass, you come back, we’re pick up man to man, okay, we’re picking up a different guy in transition. Play might go on for four minutes without a whistle. And so the amount of decisions that you have to make in that four minutes is astronomical. So, what I want is for our guys to think for themselves. And so many coaches, they hold up a board and call a play or they put their hands up, stop, stop, stop. Okay, run this play. Basketball is not a game of plays, it’s a game of players making plays and they’re only going to be at their best is if they know that I have complete confidence in them to trust their talent and go make plays. It’s feel.

Matt Howard:

I think it’s important to have structured events that drive home that trust concept. So, for us, probably the most important forum for that is called Morbidity Mortality conference. And we had our monthly Morbidity Mortality conference yesterday morning, so it’s seven o’clock and the whole team’s there, the residents, the faculty, and we go through, you took care of many, many hundreds of patients and there are always complications and some are fatal. And you go through those complications and you need everybody to be dialed in and taking responsibility and you can show people how you ought to do that. So, my vice chairman, phenomenal brain tumor surgeon, Dr. Greenlee. If you have a family member who needs brain … he is the guy, his complications are so low, but it’s not zero. So, he took on a really tough case. There was a hemorrhage afterwards. The patient did not do well at all.

So, we go through all that. Now in a dysfunctional culture, what they’ll do is say, “Well I don’t know how that happened or that was somebody else. I think the nurse might’ve given them too much this and that.” No, he just says, “This is on me. I thought that I had good hemostasis, I got to think about this and it’s on me.” And then as the chief with all those people there, I go, “Well this is a extremely tough case. And I had the same thing happen to me last year on the other hemisphere in a different patient.” So, these things happen, but you model for the no blaming, take responsibility. And then when you know that your teammate is not going to throw you under the bus, you just, okay, you know what? I’m ready for that next really high-risk case. There’s 15% chance it’s going to be a disaster, but someone’s got to do it and we’re going to get after it.

Jon Darsee:

I think your willingness to be vulnerable is really important. That’s what you’re speaking to.

Matt Howard:

Essential.

Jon Darsee:

We all have to because then other people can model that too. And they realize it’s okay to make mistakes. In fact, we’re all going to make mistakes. Let’s turn the conversation to the people at the end of the bench that don’t get in the game, the managers, et cetera. And for you, Dr. Howard about the nurses, the other staff around you guys that are essential to what you do, how do you pull them in and make them constantly feel like they’re a part of that team?

Matt Howard:

So, I have a really interesting perspective on that, because I was on the bench. I played sports through college at the college level pine, sitting on the pine. It gave me an appreciation. I love my teammates. It’s hard to say who was the most valuable player, for sure I was the least valuable player. So, you’re on the bus going these games and you’re kind of having fun, but you’re not good. You’re on the bench.

Jon Darsee:

This was baseball.

Matt Howard:

Baseball and football. So, it gave me this perspective. And we only have 12 faculty surgeons, maybe 16 trainee neurosurgeons, but we have hundreds of team members and if they make mistakes, bad things happen. They’re really important players.

Fran McCaffrey:

Well for us, we have our scout team and last night we get a big win. We commend the scout team. They have to learn the other team’s offense in basically an hour and execute it against us for two days, then do it again again, again and again over 30 times. That takes great pride. They have fun doing it, but they also know that they’re making a difference. So, they’re recognized for that, not only by us but by the guys that are playing ahead of them. So, I think from that standpoint, it’s very important. Here we have some of the greatest managers. I mean I feel blessed because when I got into the business, you were lucky if you had one person that would carry the equipment, do the stats, and now we have 10 guys, but they are part of the family. They’re available, they code games on the computer, they handle travel and meal arrangements, they order their equipment and handle equipment.

They are there when our coaches work the players out. Sometimes the players will call them, “Hey, can you come rebound for me at 10 o’clock at night?” Those guys are there. So, they get unbelievable respect from the guys that are on the team and they’re critical to our ability to be successful. And they know that and they know that they’re recognized as such and they know that we’re all counting on them. So, it’s all part of the same team. It’s something I take great pride in because I realize how blessed we are at the University of Iowa to have this many guys that want to consistently work that hard to help us be great.

Jon Darsee:

Do you have to model that behavior like allied health professionals for example, is it natural for the residents to come in and recognize the value of all those people? Is it natural for your guys that you just recruited that could be a superstar? Do they recognize the values [inaudible 00:33:25]-

Matt Howard:

That’s an early stage cultural thing is like, “Hey, don’t get that into your head that you’re important and the other person isn’t. That’s not going to work.” And I’ll give you, here’s a specific example. So, we have a phenomenal secretary. She’s much more than the secretary. Mary Joe Piper, she’s been with us for 40 years and she’s in charge of OR scheduling. Really difficult, all these moving parts because 40% of our cases are urgent emergent and you’re doing [inaudible 00:33:51] and there’s a shortage of OR access. So, Mary Joe and Elizabeth, several times during the day they’ll knock on my door, get me in the clinic and say, “Hey, are you willing to do this or that to move?” That’s the thing they mastered, they’re great at, I am working for them regarding that because it’s for the good of the team. And we have to have that.

Lauren Lavin:

Understanding that everyone has a very specific skill to bring to the table. It should equal the playing field a little bit more.

Matt Howard:

And you should marvel at the skill of some of these people who can do things I can’t do. They’re doing much better than me.

Fran McCaffrey:

Yeah, I’ve been here 15 years and I’ve never had a situation where I had to address a player being disrespectful to a support staff person. I think it’s understood that will not be tolerated. But it goes back to the character piece we talked about earlier. They wouldn’t think about acting that way. So, we’ve not had to deal with it. And everybody recognizes that we need everybody to be able to go on the road and win in this league. It’s really hard to do. And the other way we do it is if we’re all to together, and again it goes back to it’s fun for all of us to come to work because we know we have a lot of people fighting for the same things.

Jon Darsee:

Well, on that final four team, I was on the bench too, Matt and I was the scout team leader and we took terrific pride in that role. It does come with some humility and it does actually.

Matt Howard:

It’s good for you.

Jon Darsee:

You learn humility-

Matt Howard:

It is good for you.

Jon Darsee:

… through that process. And sitting on the bench, nobody wants to sit on the bench. Nobody does. And yet you know you have an important role. And the scout team, we often beat the starters when we were practicing and we took tremendous pride. We never let them not know that we would be very pointed about the fact that we had just beat you guys and you better beat them, because we did our job. But I think for me going into my career, there was always an added element of humility that I took with me, hopefully, because I’d had that experience.

Lauren Lavin:

And we’ve talked a lot about how you build leadership capacity in people, but what about humility? How do you make people more humble? What kind of experiences do you give them in your respective setting?

Matt Howard:

[inaudible 00:36:15]. In our field, they’re very objective accomplishments that kind of sort of very clearly sit where you are in the pecking order. And when the people at the very top of the pecking order display humility, I mean it’s just kind of ridiculous for somebody lower down to be [inaudible 00:36:31], none of that.

Fran McCaffrey:

We had the national player of the year a few years ago, Luka Garza, I mean the most humble person you’ll ever meet in your life. Keegan Murray, fourth pick in the draft. I mean just couldn’t be a better teammate. When that happens, the rest of it falls into place.

Jon Darsee:

One of the things I noticed as I grew up through sales in the medical field and I would occasionally get to meet one of those people at the very pinnacle of their field and I was in cardiology, so you would get a chance to go to an Ivy League and meet one of these guys and you’re very excited about it. And almost always those folks at the very pinnacle were also the most humble and approachable. That really stuck with me.

Matt Howard:

Because they had to be good team leaders to get where they were. It’s not an individual sport.

Jon Darsee:

Right.

Matt Howard:

That’s right.

Lauren Lavin:

Have you met leaders that aren’t humble and still end up there?

Jon Darsee:

Yes, unfortunately it does happen. Yes.

Matt Howard:

We’re not going to mention any names, are we, Jon?

Jon Darsee:

No names. But yes, it does happen.

Lauren Lavin:

And it probably really affects the culture.

Jon Darsee:

Absolutely. I’ve worked with a few of those folks and it’s painful and you take away scars. Iowa people are typically conflict diverse I would say. You grow up this Iowa nice thing we always talk about. It’s hard to go head-to-head with people that are doing the wrong thing. So, I had to learn to maneuver and how to address that with people that were beneath me or people above me. And it takes time and it’s very difficult to do.

Matt Howard:

On an Iowa specific note, I think that’s one of the great things about being here. This place is not for sharp elbowed, big feeling, alligator skin wearing shoe kind of people. It’s not for them, which I’m happy they’re not here to tell you the truth. The whole community has this special culture.

Lauren Lavin:

And it draws people in.

Matt Howard:

Of certain personality.

Jon Darsee:

I think when we’ve had these situations, which do come up periodically, and Matt, you and I, we’ve talked about this before, is that when we see a situation like that with someone beneath, we try to bring in an outside entity, somebody that has a lot of skills and we use one particular person in town that is a physician and a psychiatrist and has great skills. Sometimes you can just sit down and you can maneuver that person and you can get them to understand where they’re screwing up and how they can get better and you can have miraculous outcomes.

Matt Howard:

Yeah, I think that speaks to two issues that we’ve already touched on. One is experience. So, that person who I use a lot, I didn’t know about that person when I was first chair. I kind of learned about her and now gosh, she is so valuable. And then the other thing is humility. I see somebody who’s not acting right when I was younger. I say, oh, I know why that guy’s not acting right and I can fix them. Sometimes that’s true. Other times I don’t get it. Now I asked and that’s her thing. She is a true world-class professional at getting inside people’s heads. I’m just [inaudible 00:39:44] it doesn’t make any sense to me. She can figure out and come up with. So, it’s like, “Hey, here’s the playbook. Now that I’m experienced, I know I’m going to bring her in to help us.”

Jon Darsee:

I think Fran, you must run into this too, because you’ve got kids that, I mean they’re kids, right? They’re 18 to 22 and they can have family issues going on that nobody else knows about. I mean they could be acting up only because there’s something outside of your domain that you would never know about.

Fran McCaffrey:

You know how you know about it, you know them. I can tell you a story, I’m not going to get into all the particulars. We had a player, I’m going to say five, six years ago, and he was about as bad as you could be for two days in practice. He was a good player so I could rip his face off and make him run till he throws up and all that crazy stuff that coaches used to do. So, I brought him in, I said, “What’s going on?” He says, “I’m good coach. Everything’s straight.” Which is they’re never straight when they say that. And I said, “Okay, everything going okay in school?” “Yeah, I’m doing okay.” And I’d already checked and he was. I said, “Everything okay at home.” A couple things going on at home and he confided in me. There was two particular things going on at home and I’m thinking how did he even show up at practice? It was that bad.

So, we have to support him. So, we get our mental health people, we provide him whatever he needs and just continually work with him, talk with him. Is there anything we can do to help? And you bring him back to where he can perform at the level that he wants to. You can’t fix what happened at home, but you can address it and you can let him know that you’re compassionate about it and you understand what he’s going through. And he was terrific the rest of the season and he appreciated that. And those things happen.

Player breaks up with his girlfriend, toughen up. It’s a lot harder than that sometimes. It just is. And it might be for a short period of time, it might linger. There could be something going on, some competition with two of your guys. Sometimes with the same girl, that’s an issue. And I try not to get into their personal business, but when their personal business affects my business, then I get into it and I have direct conversation and sometimes they’re surprised how much we know and how much we understand. We went through all those same things and they need to know that I’m there for them, but I also have their backs because the way that our players are attacked on social media, it’s beyond horrible. And they have to know that I am right there with them. We had a situation a few years ago where the media was all over one of my guys, I fought with everybody, people you don’t fight with.

And he knew I had his back and I said, “I’m not tolerating this.” And then what happened was it was actually a thing of beauty because it became about me fighting with them, which took the pressure off of him. They stopped talking about him. Why is Fran fighting with this guy? Because I don’t like him. Can’t stand the guy. He’s not professional. You go there, that becomes the story. Well, I did that on purpose. You know what, you attack my guy, that’s a fight. You attacked my family. It’s what you did. This is my family. You don’t do that. We’re coming for you. And anything short of that, you won’t have the culture we talked about.

Lauren Lavin:

How in medicine do you create space for personal things to affect your team? Is there a way to create space for that vulnerability in the healthcare field?

Matt Howard:

Yeah, very similar. Bad things happen to doctors too. Some legal problem, this problem, that problem, family problem. And my approach is to make … Because I need to have situational awareness. If I were to wait for them to tell me, there’s a delay that could be a problem. I need to know as soon as possible. So, I do something that’s a little unusual for our departments and I can do this part because this is a small department is I meet with every junior faculty member every week. And today at three o’clock I’ll be meeting with Saul Wilson. Terrific pediatric neurosurgeon. It might be five minutes, but I need to see him kind of take a read on him, see what’s going on. And then there’s almost always something I can do to help when they say I’m kind of stuck on this and that. I go, I know so-and-so who could help you follow up.

With that I got a finger on the pulse. And another metric for us is turnover. Faculty turnover. If you have a good faculty member and they leave for no good reason, that’s bad. We had during a twenty-year epoch recently, there was a high-end surgical service similar to neurosurgery. They had 12 people come and go. We had 20 years, we had one person go. And that’s a combination of careful recruiting. And anytime someone leaves [inaudible 00:45:30] it’s on me, I made a recruiting error. But I need to know exactly what’s happening with these people otherwise … And Delia, my wife just would say, “You’re tuned out. You’re not checking on anything.” It’s like I just got to show. But at work, I’m checking on those people all the time.

Lauren Lavin:

And I think that’s the mark of a really good leader. Even five minutes, like you said, can make a really big difference. Eyes on people. And if you know them and you’ve created that culture, you can suss out a lot in just those five minutes.

Matt Howard:

And if you see that things are going the wrong way, you pick it up early, you try interventions, you don’t get surprised by it and you can start planning. So, this person, I’ve seen this thing before. I think this person’s on the way out. I need to get another player in to cover this.

Jon Darsee:

I think you’re talking a lot about, well one, curiosity, because if you don’t have a natural curiosity about people, you’re not going to do what you just described. You’re going to do your own day job and you’re going to just expect them to do theirs. And then empathy, you both talked about it, empathy is a huge component to be able to understand-

Matt Howard:

You got to care about them.

Jon Darsee:

And read people and care about them, which comes across. And I think people perceive it for sure when you have it.

Lauren Lavin:

Yeah, you can tell an empathetic leader from a mile away, because you can tell if someone really cares pass the curiosity point. You can check a box of like, oh, are you okay? But it’s a different thing to take the step after.

Matt Howard:

And some of our smaller group meetings, I do tactical things and it kind of struck the other guys too. Pretend there’s a clock there that is counting off how much of the conversation you’re talking versus the other person’s talking. If that meter shows that you’re talking a whole lot, that ain’t good. But when you’re talking, you’re not learning so much, you want to hear what the other person’s got to say.

Lauren Lavin:

Absolutely. It’s a great practical tip.

Jon Darsee:

I think one of the hardest things for me coming into academia from business was that in business you are moving really fast as we talked about earlier. And if you need to make a change or let somebody go, you do it and you do it quickly. But in this environment, being a state employee and working in academic environment, it’s a little bit different. It’s a lot harder to move people around. And you also have to coax people to participate. Like in the office of innovation we work with people across campus and to be able to help them and support them, we also need things from them too. And so it’s more about building a rapport and then motivating them to support you when they have a million other things they could be doing with their time. And so that’s a really delicate balance that I’ve had to learn here.

Matt Howard:

But the fundamentals aren’t different in the sense of I enjoyed a lot of my MedTech startup stuff is so fun. It’s a different world, Jon’s world, but in academia you can survive and be okay and keep your job, but you’re not going to be good unless you are going just as hard as those venture guys. That sense of urgency, pace, making decisions fast, driving really hard. If you look at all the top units there, their leaders are just like the most successful MedTech leaders.

Jon Darsee:

I’d agree.

Lauren Lavin:

So, how do you motivate teams then? Is it more of a carrot approach or is it a stick when things go out of line?

Fran McCaffrey:

Motivation in our business isn’t hard because it is so public. You think about you’re on national TV every time you take the floor, you’re playing in front of 18 to 20,000 people every time you take the floor. You’re out there in your shorts with your name on the back of your jersey, there’s no helmets, there’s no dugouts, you can’t hide. All right? So, if you don’t prepare and you don’t work, you’re going to get embarrassed. That fire and brimstone speech that everybody thinks coaches give, no, we are very, very practical in how we prepare and they walk out on the floor together confidently and they have to consistently perform. That’s the hardest thing is how do you consistently perform not only in terms of effort but execution. And that’s the challenge to us as coaches and to those guys in terms of playing together.

Jon Darsee:

I think it comes back to this concept of team. You need to get everyone thinking about how their role and their position is going to enhance the effort of the entire team. And then when you do have successes as a team, you need to make sure everybody all the way down understands that they participated in that. I think that helps build this. People start feeling there’s something here that’s bigger than just me and people are dependent on me and I’m dependent on them. And if I do my job well, they’re going to be able to do theirs better. And if I have an issue, I know I can go to someone else on this team that’s going to help me get through it. And when you build that sort of cohesion, then you get over sort of this malaise that can happen in this academic environment.

Matt Howard:

On the clinical service, you need to put the spotlight on how vital important everyone’s position is. It’s obvious that example I gave earlier is the surgeon doing the super [inaudible 00:50:54], but the second year resident is getting paged by nurses. And most of the time, I mean hundreds in the day, and most of the time it’s not too important. Oh, patient’s got a fever, why don’t we kind of work that up? But other times it’s this needle in the haystack thing where this call turns out to have been really important.

And then you went there quickly, you didn’t stall, you got out like two in the morning, you got out of bed, you went there, you checked on the patient and you had the insight to know this is not a nothing call, this is serious. Get the scan done and save the patient’s [inaudible 00:51:30]. The attending does the surgery and saves the patient’s life, but the patient would’ve been dead if the junior resident had stalled and not done it. So, we just celebrate that stuff and when it doesn’t go well, that’s a serious issue. It’s no joke. I mean, everyone’s job on the team is extremely serious. A lot of responsibility.

Lauren Lavin:

How do you have some of those harder conversations when things don’t go well?

Matt Howard:

I usually frame, I like to have the toughest ones on those Saturday mornings when it’s kind of peaceful and quiet and it’s just me and the residents. And I’ll go and talk about when I’ve had, it happen to me that here’s one disaster I remember from the past. The message has to come through is again, show up, be honest, answer your pages, call for help. If you do that, you’re going to be okay. And when you frame it that way, it says like, “Hey, I can actually do this.” And all that other stuff of learning very, very complicated concepts, that’ll work itself out. But in terms of being safe, those things, if you focus on that, you’re going to be fine.

Jon Darsee:

You brought up a really good point right there. Ask for help. This is something that people learn. It’s not natural. Because a lot of us are just self-motivated and we’re working on our own. Physicians I think in particular, but athletes as well. People have to learn to ask for help often. It’s not innate to a lot of people. And that’s a really important thing, particularly with people that are moving up the chain in management.

Matt Howard:

Do you reach out to other head coaches and talk about stuff or that doesn’t make any sense?

Fran McCaffrey:

No, that definitely happens, because when you’ve been in the business as long as I have, I have really good friends that I trust and respect and know very well. Some of them are now head coaches that previously worked for me. They know how I do things. They know our program, but sometimes it’s coaches I just coached against. You never can ever get to a point where you think you’ve got it all figured out. I’ve been around 42 years now. I’ve worked for great coaches. I’ve coached at seven different institutions, not much I haven’t seen, but I don’t have it all figured out. And you need to, I think a really good leader always knows he’s got to keep growing. He’s got to keep evolving. And you do that with conversation with other coaches and sharing these kinds of experiences that we’ve talked about.

Matt Howard:

I’ve got an example like this afternoon. The thing is, per earlier discussion point, you got to make decisions, you got to move, you got to be really aggressive. On the other hand, if it’s not a straightforward decision, I’ll wait a little bit and reach out to a [inaudible 00:54:21].

Lauren Lavin:

How do highly skilled leaders continue to develop their own leadership skills? So, you talk about conversing with other leaders at your level, but are there other things that you guys do to-

Matt Howard:

I like reading a lot. I get a kick out of these, Delia teases me about this. They’re saying the same thing in every one of these books. I go, well, there’s a little bit of a twist on this one and oh, that’s 90% I’ve heard before. But oh, that’s a cool way that this person runs his style. I like reading sports leaders books. I find it really interesting. And you learn.

Jon Darsee:

And some lesson may not hit you until that right moment in time. You might have, as Delia says, you may have read the same thing 10 years ago and yet it only resonated now for whatever reason.

Matt Howard:

Yeah, I understand what he’s saying now. Yeah.

Fran McCaffrey:

It’s interesting, a couple months ago, John Maxwell spoke over in Coralville. He’s the foremost expert on leadership. He’s written 19 books. He’s spoken in countless foreign countries. And so I went over to listen to him. I wanted to hear what he had to say, and then I met him and talked to him and I was thrilled. His main focus is sort of leading through positivity. In our business, and Jon as you know, when we were kids, you got yelled at. That was how you got coached.

You coached through fear. I better do what the coach says. I’ll run through a wall for him. That kind of thing. Expected to run through the wall. Well, maybe we should go around it or over it. Maybe we should figure out a better way. It’s probably not the smartest. It was just really interesting to listen to someone that essentially his profession is leadership training. He goes all over various companies and there had to be 300 people at this event. And so for me it was validation in terms how we do things. Like I said, you don’t always have the answers, but I’m confident that my staff and I are on the right track there.

Matt Howard:

I really like Jim Collins’ work.

Jon Darsee:

Oh yeah.

Matt Howard:

Yeah. Good to Great. Because it’s real. It’s real data, real examples. That’s what resonates with me that they have some formulation why it works, but it’s true. This unit outperformed their competitor. Why?

Jon Darsee:

Yeah. I think every one of us, I’m sure has had mentors all along the way, and I think mentorship is something that never goes away, and the mentor thing is a very organic thing. And it has to be the right fit between you and that individual, so you can’t really force it, but you can put people in a position that they can have mentorship. I’m constantly looking for mentors, just like what you just described with this guy that teaches leadership, right? You seek those people out and you get a little nugget from them and it motivates you and you move forward, right?

Fran McCaffrey:

I was really lucky. I mean, when I left a head coaching position in 1988 to go be an assistant, which a lot of people wouldn’t do, but I realized, okay, I need to learn more. I was young, I got a head coaching job early, thought I was pretty good, but I had a chance to go work at Notre Dame for Digger Phelps, a legend, and he was brilliant in his approach. He used to say, “White House, that’s how we run this office.” Every piece of correspondence, every conversation, everybody’s briefed on everything from recruiting to game prep, et cetera. Everything is first class, how we travel, how we handle equipment, everything.

Now, he ruled with an iron fist. That was his approach, but I learned so much from him. And then he’s replaced by John McLeod and coach never spoke to anybody louder than I’m speaking right now. Never raised his voice, never yelled at anybody, never belittled anybody. And I asked Coach one time, I said, “How come you coach the way you do? It’s kind of unique.” And he said, “I tried it the other way.” He said, “I used to kick the table over and dump the water cooler and scream and yell, lose my mind. Didn’t work.” He was a very successful head coach in the NBA for 18 years, and so what a great opportunity it was for me to work for two guys that had different approaches, but I learned so much.

Jon Darsee:

I know that when I was a kid, I was probably an average basketball player in the big spectrum, and I could have gone to smaller schools in the Midwest where I could have starred, but I wanted to come to Iowa because I wanted to play for Lute Olson. I wanted to know what it was like to play for a guy that was going to be a future hall of Fame coach and be on a team that had a chance to win a national championship. So, I forego the other opportunities where I know would’ve been a safe place and I would’ve been a star, but I took my chances and I was okay with the fact that I was sitting on the bench because there was so much more that I was getting out of that experience.

Matt Howard:

That’s a good point. I mean, for young people, they have to factor in this mentorship part of the equation. Here’s an example is my brother, he’s retired now from the Air Force, but he was the aide-de-camp to Admiral Fallon who was a four-star admiral, and he was commander-in-chief Pacific and commander-in-chief Central Command. Petraeus reported to him. I got to meet him, but Jon was with him for three years, and I go, “Jon, this is the highest guy in the whole military. I mean, what’s it like working for him?” And he goes, “Oh, it’s just amazing, all the things he does.” What an incredible blessing to be able to work with somebody like that. I said, “Gosh, I wish I could work for that guy. I want to see his moves. He’s got these moves, I want to see him.” But if you’re not working for them, you kind of can’t. But selecting a job where you get to like you just described and you just described, and that’s key. I don’t know anybody at the top of our fields who didn’t have phenomenal mentors. Nobody did it on their own. Nobody.

Jon Darsee:

Yeah. I think that comes back to what you, Fran, when you’re talking about recruiting. I remember when I was 18, 19, got here to the University of Iowa and I’m looking around and there was no transfer portal. You couldn’t do any of that stuff back then. So, a lot of those kids probably made bad decisions about where they’re going because they probably weren’t thinking about that. They were just thinking about the school, the name, the place, and they weren’t going deeper into the coaching, the philosophy, is this a good match for me? And kids at 18 may not even have the skills to do such a thing, so do you-

Fran McCaffrey:

Well, it’s worse now.

Jon Darsee:

It must be.

Fran McCaffrey:

It’s worse now because now it’s about money. So, all the factors that are critical in making a college decision are secondary. When you think about, okay, academic profile, conference, style of play, success, opportunity for growth in terms of becoming an NBA player, reaching your goals athletically, but now it’s how much money? And that’s really sad. I mean, I am blessed with the guys we have. They love each other and they want to stay and compete for the University of Iowa, and that’s where we’re going to keep doing it.

Lauren Lavin:

We’re getting close to the end of our time. My final question to you guys, this is a podcast that’s oftentimes listened to by students. What would be your final couple of tips for students that are listening to develop their own leadership skills and as they move out into the workforce, what should they look for in a team?

Matt Howard:

As was discussed, get on the best team possible. Don’t worry about particularly early in your career, to make a money-based decision is a mistake. The highest quality team with the best leader. That is going to serve you best is prioritize that. Another one thing would be some people get hung up on geography. That’s a mistake. I grew up in a military family. We lived in more than a dozen different places. There are a lot of great places, and if you constrain your search to just a narrow part of the country, that’s not good.

Fran McCaffrey:

I would say just where are you going to learn and grow in the profession, whether it’s legal profession, the healthcare profession, teaching, whatever arena you decide to enter, where can you learn and grow? I couldn’t agree more with Matt. I have a couple of different options. They’re going to pay me a thousand dollars more, so I’m going to go there. Evaluate the circumstances, the situation, the mentors you’re going to have so that you can be the best possible leader, the best possible employee, the best worker, the most productive, and provide a great life for yourself.

Jon Darsee:

I think I would echo what you guys said particularly about money. I think every time I made a move in my career that was based on money and the money people were thrown at me, it ended up being a mistake. It was the wrong thing to do. I think for what I would tell students is to be patient, you have to have the end in mind. I think there was, Anthony Robbins once said this statement that people overestimate what they can achieve in one year’s time, but they severely underestimate what they can achieve in five year’s time. So, I think that patience and hard work and finding mentors that have been there, done that in the place that you want to go and connect with them is super valuable.

Lauren Lavin:

Well, thank you guys so much for being on our podcast today. I really appreciate all the expertise you brought to the room, and I know our listeners do as well. And thank you, Jon, for coordinating all of this and setting it up.

Jon Darsee:

You’re welcome. I’m so motivated now.

Matt Howard:

Thanks for the invitation. Yeah, it’s a lot of fun.

Jon Darsee:

[inaudible 01:04:20] enjoyed it.

Lauren Lavin:

That wraps up another incredible episode of Plugged In to Public Health. A huge thank you to our guest, Fran McCaffrey for sharing his wisdom on building winning teams and fostering brotherhood on and off the court, dr. Matt Howard for his invaluable insights on leadership in high stakes environments and Jon Darsee for bridging the worlds of sports, innovation and mentorship. Their perspectives remind us that whether on the basketball court, in an operating room, the boardroom or a classroom, the foundations of success remain the same. Trust, preparation and the willingness to grow. I know I learned a lot from them, so I hope that you did too. This episode was hosted by Lauren Lavin and edited and produced by Lauren Lavin.

You can learn more about the University of Iowa College of Public Health on Facebook. Our podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to help support the podcast, please share it with your colleagues, friends, or anyone interested in public health. Have a suggestion for our team? You can reach us at cph-gradadambassador@uiowa.edu. This episode is brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Until next week, stay healthy, stay curious, and take care.