High-Performance Medicine: Healthcare’s Lesson for Your Elite Teams

Описание: VIDEO (Audiogram) VERSION
Guest: Brian Ferguson, CEO, Arena Labs
Burnout isn’t happening because workers aren’t strong enough. It’s happening because leadership systems are failing us.

Using the medical industry as an example, Brian Ferguson, a former special ops officer and founder of Arena Labs, breaks down why healthcare leaders demand elite performance but refuse to equip their people to achieve that elite performance.

You’ll hear:
• Why burnout is a leadership and system failure, not a personal one
• What the military and professional sports understand about performance that healthcare doesn’t
• How stress, exhaustion, and silence compound into medical errors and attrition
• Why “powering through” is destroying healthcare teams, and
• What leaders must change if they want sustainable performance under pressure.

COVID exposed these issues, and today’s high burnout rates in the workplace show they’ve not been resolved.

If you lead people in healthcare, business, education, or any high-stakes environment, this conversation will challenge how you think about resilience, responsibility, and leadership when it matters most.

Other episodes you'll enjoy:
Leveraging Tech to Deepen Human Performance with Brian Ferguson
The End of Stability: Leading in a Disrupted World with Robert Bush, Jr.
The End of Control: Leadership Trends for 2026 with Christopher Washington

For daily wisdom from our guests, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn.

RESOURCES:
Brian’s company, Arena Labs, has more information on their high performance work at https://arenalabs.co/.

The company Brian referenced with whom Arena Labs works to help organizations optimize is McChrystal Group: https://www.mcchrystalgroup.com/. The Santa Fe Institute, which developed the concept of consilience, has more information at https://www.santafe.edu/. And the wearables Arena Labs worked with to gather sleep and other health data on hospital staff is Whoop; learn more at https://www.whoop.com/us/en/.

Our host Maureen Metcalf posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8 . The audiobook version is now available at https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.


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OUR PODCAST TEAM:
Host & Executive Producer: Maureen Metcalf
Editor & Executive Producer: Dan Mushalko
Graphics Editor: Stacia Rogan
Sponsorship Sales: Kristine Gross
Theme Music by Pavel Bekirov from Pixabay.

CONNECT WITH US:
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Website: InnovativeLeadershipInstitute.com

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About Our Guest:
Brian Ferguson has spent his career working in high-performance organizations, learning from leaders and decision-makers in national security, the military, and technology. He used those experiences to build Arena Labs, a company pioneering the field of High Performance Medicine®️. Arena Labs uses state-of-the-art training and technology solutions to bring the science of peak performance, creative mastery, and elite teams to modern healthcare and surgical teams.

Before founding Arena Labs, Brian served in the military as a Navy SEAL and as a civilian in national security working on matters of global security policy. He received an MSc from the London School of Economics.

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