Four Women, Four Talks, Ten Minutes Each

Some of the most useful things we learn from each other never make it onto an agenda. They get traded in a hallway between sessions, over a drink at the end of a long day, or on a quick call with the one peer who actually understands the job. 

Rapid Fire: Real Talk from Women Who Lead put that kind of knowledge on the schedule. Four women took the stage one after another, ten minutes each. No warm-up, no scene setting, no slow build toward the point. 

Jana M Foor, MA, FACMPE, of Bellingham Anesthesia Associates, P.S., opened with The Cost of Rescue: Why Carrying Everyone Doesn’t Make You a Better Leader. Her argument was structural. When a leader quietly absorbs risk that belongs somewhere else, the problem does not go away, it just stops being visible. She walked the room through a situation she could have smoothed over privately, along with why she named it precisely instead. A system held together by one person’s effort, she argued, is not a system. 

Leanne Galligan, LSSC, Director of Patient Services at Peachtree Orthopedics, took Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should into more immediate territory. Hers was about the specific discomfort of handing off work to someone who will do it differently, probably slower, when you could finish it yourself before lunch. Most of us know that feeling well enough to recognize it in one sentence. Her position is that the discomfort is the price of developing anyone. 

Amber Harris, Human Resources Director at Suncoast Orthopaedic Institute, made a different case in Beating Burnout Through Boundary Setting: Lessons from Real Practice Life. For years she read her own exhaustion as evidence of commitment, until she did not. She was direct that burnout does not respond to better time management, which is where most of us reach first. It responds to boundaries you actually hold when holding them is inconvenient, built into the schedule rather than into good intentions. 

Shannon Young, CPC, CPPM, closed with Mentoring the Next Generation. Every leader in that room started somewhere, and most started because someone made time for them before they had done anything to earn it. That is a debt, not a kindness, and it gets repaid forward. A few minutes spent listening or advising registers as almost nothing on the giving end and can redirect a career on the receiving end. There is urgency to it now, too. A whole cohort came up through the pandemic without learning that what they have to say matters, and they will not announce that they are missing it. Newer leaders rarely know what to ask for, so the offering has to be deliberate, initiated by the person who already has the seat.