Sean Ryan

What a chaotic ER gets right about leading under pressure The Pitt / Max There’s a scene late in the first season of The Pitt I keep thinking about. (Spoiler alert: this post talks about specific plot points; if you haven’t seen the award-winning medical drama, I highly recommend a binge watch.) After the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center’s ER is flooded with more than 60 casualties of a mass shooting at a music festival, Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, the attending physician who runs the...

Thoughts on Warren Buffett’s Leadership Test, and the 7% I recently read two insightful pieces on leadership that really resonated with our philosophy at WhiteWater: one from Fast Company, the other a Medium post riffing on Warren Buffett. Different authors, different angles, but they point at a shared truth about leadership, the same central belief our team keeps coming back to in our work, especially through our Just Lead program, and in the leadership book we’re writing: leadership isn’t...

The Subtle Impacts of an Unhealthy Workplace Culture, and How to Get It Right I was recently on a panel at an event hosted by our local YMCA. It was an interesting mix of HR leaders, educators, and community voices gathered around a deceptively simple theme: the hidden cost of an unhealthy workplace. What struck me first wasn’t just the diversity of the panel, which included experts in psychiatry, education, and business, but also how much our thinking converged. Despite our different...