214. How do you become a successful leader? (f. Alan Friedman)
Finding it challenging to lead effectively and intrigued by the key ingredients for successful organizations? 🔑 Our guest today is Alan Friedman, founder and CEO of J3P Health, dedicated to transforming individuals into self-aware and effective leaders. In our conversation, Alan shares invaluable tactics for understanding yourself, assembling the right team, fostering strong connections, and living a meaningful life. Join us as we unravel the secrets to leadership with Alan, the ultimate authority on this topic.
Episode transcription
Phil
Struggling to be an effective leader.
lauren
Curious about the secret sauce behind thriving organizations?
phil
Our guest today is Alan Friedman. He is the founder and CEO of J3P Health, transforming individuals into self aware and effective leaders.
lauren
In our conversation, Alan shares invaluable tactics for understanding who you are, assembling the right team, Fostering strong connections and living a meaningful life.
phil
Let's uncover the secrets to leadership. There is absolutely no one else I trust more than Alan for this topic.
I don't like podcasts that have this big formal introduction where someone reads a script that I've given them, and then I listen back to the script that I gave them from them, and it just feels weird. I don't know how else.
Alan
It's all about you Phil, I understand.
Phil
No, it's just, it needs to be, it's, you know, a podcast should be like a casual conversation that a listener gets to listen in on.
Lauren
Yeah.
alan
Totally agree. 100%.
phil
But I also feel like we, Lauren, you have to agree with me, we have the most interesting conversations with Alan. The best. I have never had in my calendar an Alan call that I haven't looked forward to. And he's going to say something now about, oh, you're just saying that. But it's true.
There are some client calls that I see it looming in my calendar all day, and it's just staring at me with dread. It doesn't happen that often because we have control over who our clients are. And luckily, we're not desperate, so we can say no to the ones that give us dread. But I actually, there have been a handful of clients over the years, Judy Stakee is one of them. Alan Friedman is another one. Yeah. I just look for, Simon T. Bailey is another one. There's a lot. We have great people. You're one of those. So welcome to our podcast, Alan.
Alan
Well, thank you. I appreciate the kind words and I was not going to say what you thought I was going to say. So I just want to make sure I corrected that for the record.
Phil
Okay. I predicted wrong. Now you're correcting my prediction.
lauren
I guess a big part of your work, Alan, is helping people understand who they are as leaders and also what unique gifts they have so that they can own those with confidence. And in a way, if you did a self deprecating remark about Phil's prediction that would almost be like contradicting what is that you stand for as a leadership development expert.
alan
Yeah, I think that's true. The other thing that's interesting about what you say, Lauren, is that self deprecation can be used as a really effective tool for relationship building and for leadership, except if it's overdone, because then what ends up happening is that your competency is questioned. So the key is to use it very intentionally and very strategically, but not to overdo it because then it becomes disingenuous and it can undermine the ability to build trus with your audience, with your team, with your stakeholders, constituents, et cetera. So that's something that people often don't understand. So while we preach humility and curiosity and empathy, too much humility can actually be counterproductive.
Lauren
Makes perfect sense.
phil
I think you also incorporate humor really well.We always have like a, a healthy amount of humor, even if we're dealing with serious. Issues. That's another component. I will never forget our intro call. You found us in the footer linked of a website, which to this day I'll say is the best way if you're a branding agency, it's the best way to get noticed and get high quality referrals is when someone sees a website you made and they want one just like it.
But our introductory call with you, Alan. Like Lauren, it has to be one of the most memorable intro calls we've had because it was so complimentary. So we remember it because you said a lot of nice things. You loved our process and you talked about just, you could tell the depth of our work from what we had created for someone else, but you in turn, so masterfully gave us so much of you while complimenting us or while telling us things that you knew we would receive well. I think a lot about that because you navigated that so masterfully.
alan
Well, I appreciate that. I mean, I think, you know, listen, the people on my team, clients that we work with, you know, they would say that I'm very expressive. I'm very direct. And I'm not afraid to kind of have tough conversations. With that being said, it's also important that if I recognize greatness, whether it be at the individual or system or organizational level, which I clearly recognized during that first call was a couple of years ago at this point, where just the way the efficiency and the, which the way we even got on the call was masterful, right?
But it was not in person. It was efficient. It was appropriate, but it was not impersonal. That's a balance, right? So that's part one.
Phil
Definitely a balance. Yeah.
alan
And I think the other thing you mentioned about humor. So one of the things that we consistently hear from our clients outside of the technical competency, the work, and to your point, the seriousness is worthwhile.
And the way that I look at it is, you know, the work is the work if you can have fun while doing the work, then why not do it? Because you're going to have to do the work anyway. So you might as well have fun doing it while you're doing it, which often is not the case, especially in healthcare, which is primarily where we do our work, which is the stakes are so high and there's so many serious consequences. But if we start losing our humor and that's a lost opportunity to at least find some humanity in the seriousness of the work.
phil
It's so important. I was on a university campus yesterday giving a lecture and one of the students at the end, their questions were so good by the way. But one of the questions at the end was, what do you think is the most important quality that someone who's wanting to work for a particular company, what's the most important quality that they have?
And I said, be likable. Be someone that I would want to hang out with, obviously professionally and in the context of work. But like, it's a good thing. Lauren and I like each other. We're friends. So we're actually friends before we worked together. Yeah. There's days. But we joked about with our own clients even in this recording already, I was like, you know, we can tell you the clients that we have professional conversations with, but we actually enjoy their company.
Sometimes people forget, it's like, sometimes that's more important than the skills, skill can be learned and skills can be acquired. They're important. But like just being someone that people want to be around is so important because we got to do the work. Might as well make the best of it.
alan
Well, you bring up an excellent point in the sense that, and this ties into what Lauren had said earlier, which is, it's this concept of self awareness, which is really esoteric. You know, what does it mean? What it means is if the goal is to be likable or to be relatable, to what end, right? Because we don't think about that in the context of professionally getting things done, et cetera.
But the reality is, is for some people being likable, being relatable, being easy to be around is really, really difficult. Now, the problem is, is most people, that's not how they want to be perceived. The problem is that they don't know what is getting in their way, which increases the level of frustration, then causes more negative behavior so it becomes this vicious cycle of things that are really not productive. When if we acknowledge that we want to be likable, we want to be relatable, and we understand that there are certain parts of who we are, whether it be our personality or different life experiences that may be getting in the way of that, and we call it out and we just acknowledge that in the service of getting to that being likable, it becomes a much more efficient process with a lot less frustration, a lot less wasted time, and frankly, a lot less baggage that people have to carry on their backs as they progress through their life, personally and or professionally.
lauren
Now, I would argue that there are some overlaps in the work that we do. Granted, you're helping people who are working in life or death scenarios, so I need to point out that elephant in the room that our clients, for the most part, are not, there's no such thing as like a branding emergency, for example.
phil
Oh, sometimes we have to remind people that that is the truth.
lauren
Oh, yeah.
phil
Sometimes we need to remind people. Sometimes people push their emergencies. Okay. If a website goes down, that's an emergency. If emails stop working, that's an emergency. But like a social media profile photo change on a Saturday, not an emergency, Quoted from Lauren's LinkedIn post.
lauren
Yes, my controversial LinkedIn post. But anyway, as part of our work, Alan, like, and you know, because you've gone through this yourself and you've gone through this with J3P, we describe it as holding up a mirror to you and telling you what we see. I feel like you do that, but from a human development and a professional development standpoint, too.
And I, at least for us, a lot of that comes down to really isolating and witnessing the gifts of that individual so that we can figure out how to translate that into like visuals essentially and words that we use. But for you, I think that you know how to translate that so they can use it as a tool and help them really be more effective at work.
So I'm curious to know, just with that, first of all, do you agree with that given that you've gone through our branding process twice? And then I just want to know your expertise and your approach to helping people understand what it is that makes them great.
alan
So first of all, I do think that there are tremendous parallels between what you do and what we do.
And I think for you, what you have done very effectively for me and for us is, to take the message that's trying to be projected and putting it into a medium and a mechanism that will resonate with the audience and accomplish the outcome. And a great example of that, just in terms of our process with J3P was when we were working on the copy for our website and we were speaking in very J3P terminology and some of the language.
And what you came back to us with based on that mirror statement was, we understand this, this is who you are. But in order to get people to actually get to your site so that you can actually influence a much broader audience, we're going to need to change the narrative so that it's more resonant to a broader population.
That required two things. One, receptivity on our end an number two, your awareness of what we were trying to accomplish. So that's exactly what we try and do at the individual level. And back to your question about kind of identifying one's individual greatness, if you will. I'm paraphrasing, there's not enough conversation about that.
My view is specifically within healthcare, but there's not a lot of conversation about what makes you a great human being. We don't have those conversations. And that doesn't mean we shouldn't Pollyanna. And we've both, there's a lot of assessments out there that talk about, you know, what are your strengths?
They're great assessments. I don't want to disparage them. But knowing what your strengths are, what makes you great without understanding the things that can get in your way is counterproductive. However, the common individualized narrative is that let me focus on what I need to do better, what I need to change about myself to constantly be improving instead of just acknowledging that 80 percent of who we are as human beings is great.
20 percent may be developmental or a challenge. So that narrative is what we do in terms of putting a mirror up to people and not just to show them what they're not doing well, but frankly, it's the opposite. Here's what makes you great. You need to own that, double down on that, and not spend all your energy trying to change something about yourself that you can't change anyway, and that's counterproductive.
So it's really, it's an energy coefficient, but it's very similar to, you know, final point, in terms of the way that you go about messaging, and branding, and projecting what people do at the more broad level and what we do is we do that at the individual level and then in the service of those people then going out and leading their organizations and then transmitting that knowledge so that they can be more effective in the service of their individualized culture that they're trying to create for their organizations.
lauren
I suspect that you are really, really good at meeting with someone and instantly connecting with them. I suspect that is your superpower. Do you feel that way about yourself? Can you? naturally connect with almost anyone that you meet.
alan
I would say that's true.
phil
I think it's your superpower.
Lauren
Yeah. That you make people feel honestly safe to be themselves. Is that how you would think of it? That's how I think of it at least. Yeah, I think that's true.
alan
I think that, and I've had this conversation, I just had this conversation with a friend of mine that, especially with men. And this is as for Alan, as a coach, as an organizational psychologist, not necessarily for J3P writ large, but I'm a very masculine guy, right?
So I'm a man, if you will. The way that I carry myself and the way that I communicate, I have a lot of effeminate qualities, if you will, that are not typically seen with a manly man or really frank, direct So especially working with male surgeons, I've heard this from wives and partners of male surgeons that I work with.
The reason why I connect with them so easily is because I have an opening because I'm not a threat because I'm not something that they would view as not relatable, but then once I become relatable, I'm able to open them up and be able to have them express themselves in a way that they've never been able to do before professionally, because they've never had that open.
So I think that to your statement about superpower, I don't know if I would call it a superpower. I think it's just a unique gift that I have that I'm able to leverage in the service of helping people in a really unique way.
Phil
That is so interesting.
lauren
Yeah. I mean, Phil, I think you have this too.
phil
I think we're kind of, so you should have seen Alan and I together at breakfast.
lauren
It was like, that was great. Yeah. But I guess sort of Alan, why, why I asked that is because in our area of work, a lot of people are focused on the other, the competitors, how they're perceived and putting themselves into a box that they think people expect and want. Yeah. And I imagine that in health care, it's probably the same thing where you're ranked and you're liked and you're promoted based on your skill set, not necessarily who you are as a person.
And so I would just be so interested to hear your thoughts on that balance between like fitting into that box with what's normal in quotations and expected of you versus actually like being yourself and doing things differently and in your way.
alan
That's a really great point. Great question. Really timely, because when we think about academic medicine and we think about an academic department chair, chair of a sort of a department, pick any university or school of medicine. The way that person is chosen based upon the prevailing mindset of deans of medical schools is I want to know how many publications you have, I want to know how clinically productive you've been, I want to know how many pudding presentations you've had.
But in terms of assessing and really hiring. For the people skills that are really foundational for the work that they do. Is an implement to them. They don't do that. So why do I know that? It's because we're brought in after the fact, whether it be with a department share to be achieved for some other departmental leader, and then we're on the reactive side, we have to fix people if you will, right.
Instead of being a part of that selection conversation, which is let's look at the criteria in which we're selecting people and not put them in a box just because they may have certain accomplishments. Right. And so when we think about the statement that you made about, you know, being in a box, if you do this, you get that. Part of the reason why our healthcare system in the United States is just being upended is because we do not have the appropriate leadership skills in place because of the fact that these leaders that we have by and large in these really large prominent organizations have been chosen through no fault of their own, with criteria that is not commensurate with what is really needed, which is not being in a box and actually being relatable and likable to those points from earlier and actually spending time building relationships with people recognizing that there's a huge change effort happening within healthcare right now and that is destabilizing for a lot of people.
The skill set is not a technical skill set. It's a relational skill set. And that's, people are in that box though. And that's part of what we do is try and take them out of the ass.
lauren
So how do you take them out of that?
alan
It's hard. It's really hard because the point is, is that many of the incentives that are currently in place do not incentivize the kind of things that we're suggesting.
So what we're saying, you need to have coffee with, you know, your leadership team, you need to, you know, have a dinner with them once a quarter. Am I going to generate RV news, which is kind of, you know, and how people are reimbursed, et cetera. You know, is that going to help us get more research funding? So the incentives are perverse.
So how we do that is by asking some really simple questions. What's important to you as a chair, as a dean, as a CEO of a hospital, and then whatever the answer is, whatever those outcomes and the things that they're being evaluated on, we then link the kinds of behaviors that we need from them to achieve their set outcomes.
Most of the time, there's a line. So the way this works is what's important to you. Well, I want to have more big microphones. Like we were making fun of you earlier, Lauren, right, exactly. Right.
lauren
I don't want big microphones. Phil does.
phil
You have to, it's your brand. I know.
alan
So if we want more big microphones for, for you've identified that you want to be more big microphones.
And now that we understand that, then whatever I want you to do behaviorally, I can say, listen, we spoke about your desire to have more big microphones. I'm going to need you to work with Phil on making sure that he gets a big microphone so that we can get more big microphones for you, et cetera, whenever, bad example, maybe.
But the idea is to link whatever is important to the individuals that we're serving and we're leading, to what we're trying to get them to do on behalf of the department, the organization, the system, whatever that is. And not enough questions are being asked to get information to them like we're trying to get people to do and understand that's the secret sauce.
Lauren
You raise such an interesting point because. How often do we take time to ask ourselves what do I want here? Like, what do I really want, big picture? I don't know about you, but I'm just trying to like, get through my inbox and put out whatever fire is being thrown at me that morning. And I imagine that part of the reason why the sessions that you do with people are so important is because it actually kind of pauses time for a bit.
And they can actually just focus on really exploring and discussing what is important to them as a person.
alan
Another great point. And I just had a conversation with a cardiothoracic surgeon this morning about that very topic. And the statement that I made to her is she is in the right seat from a flying a plane metaphor of her life and she needs to be in the left seat. The only way that you can be in the left seat, really piloting the plane and understanding where you're going. You see, you'll understand how you want to be living your life as a human being and not because this is what you're supposed to be doing. Or else you're going to wake up one day and be dead and realize that you did what you had to do, not what you wanted to do.
Right? So to your other point, one of the things that we do, not just myself, but the other people that we have working in a coaching and a leadership advisory capacity within our company is that the hour that we spend with people every week, every other week, et cetera, that's the hour for that person.
That's the hour that they are allowed to put the oxygen on themselves and not have it be about everybody else. And that's really important because if we don't nourish the people that are leading all these other people, then we're going to have a real big problem because if the people at the top are so burned out that they can't do their jobs effectively, then the ripple effect is what you have in the current system right now with burnout, turnover and healthcare, at least in the U S being in chaos.
phil
How do you look at acquiring the knowledge to be able to do your job so well. I bring this up because I think about, I know you've got tools and software that you use and license, and you've been so kind to put us through those exercises, and we've learned a ton about ourselves. But also, Alan, if you add up all the years and degrees and college, like, in books and all that stuff, it probably equals a thousand years of education.
Maybe that's an exaggeration, but it probably isn't. You have learned so much, you're a perpetual learner. I guess I'm just looking for your thoughts on that. I think, I literally think of all of our clients, you have the most degrees and the most I remember Lauren saying that when we looked at your LinkedIn profile.
Do you remember that, Lauren? You were like, he has, he's like gone to every Ivy League school. I know.
lauren
I was like, holy shit, this guy is qualified. Why are, why is he contacting us? Like, why? That's, that's what I said. I was like, I was like, we're not worthy. Jesus.
alan
Well, you know, it's interesting. So to your question about the thousand years and stuff, I think curiosity is really, what drives me and, and the reality is, is even though I have a master's degree and I have all this education, et cetera, the bottom line is it's not about the degree, it's more about the pursuit of knowledge and understanding kind of what makes people tick. And it was really interesting because I used to think it was more of the business part of things that really interested me. And so I was actually pursuing an MBA and while I was midstream and then pursuing an MBA is when I realized that I wasn't really into the business piece of it, I was understanding in the psychological piece, the people piece, the understanding how the people intersect with the system. And that's why I transferred to Columbia. And that's where I earned my master's in organizational psychology. And for me, that's when kind of the, the light was ignited, if you will, or the fire was ignited, which is the integration of people, how people tick as individuals and how that intersects with what we're trying to accomplish as a race, as it is human beings.
And so I think that that's really important. The other thing that you bring up, and this happens all the time with the people that we work with, is that just because I have all this education, the day that I stop asking questions and wanting to learn more about what I don't know, kill me, right? And the problem is, is people that we work with are so learned, but the reality is, is that once they stop learning, they become failures, in my opinion. I was out to dinner with a client who's also a good friend, and her partner happens to be, you know, an engineer. And he started to talk about quantum physics, and he started to talk about, you know, Albert Einstein's theories, and my colleague was like elbowing him, like, stop, you're boring, Alan, kind of thing.
I was like, no, no, no, I want to learn this. It's a double slit theory of quantum physics, right? Like who knew, right? But listening to him explain it, it was so great because normally I'm the one who's explaining things and I'm the one who is educating people. So anytime that I can be in a situation where I can learn from other people, just like I've done with both of you, you both have taught me and continue to teach me and my team so much about so many different things.
Like, selfishly, that's what I want to be spending my time doing. If I can help other people after I take in that knowledge, I catalyze it and I'm able to operationalize it in the service of the people we work with, great. But it's a selfish activity for me, which is wanting to obtain more knowledge.
Lauren
I love it.
phil
Me too.
lauren
Okay, so I know that you think it's important to know what you're good at, but also understand what obstacles are in your way. And J3P does the Hogan assessment, which I love. I love any kind of assessment, honestly.
phil
You love any kind of assessment. You love every assessment. Just put a whole list of assessments and you'll just be assessed all day. And I'll be assessed too.
Lauren
You'll be, yeah, I'll be, yeah. If I'm going down, you're coming down with me. But the reason why I love them is because I really think that my blind spot is seeing what people's strengths are. I can see what sets them apart competitively, but when it comes to working with people as individuals, I'm kind of of the mindset, like, figure it out and be good at everything.
It's really, really tough for me as an overachiever to understand when people don't figure things out sometimes. And I'm aware of that, and I'm trying to work with that. I tried to, Alan just did like quotation marks, air quotes. So I guess my question for you is. If someone knows what they're good at, and they also know what they're not so great at, how can they build a team that complements what they're not so great at?
alan
Let me go back to what you said about the Hogan assessment. So for us, we're really assessment agnostic with the following qualifiers to that. We do use the Hogan assessment, and we have tremendous experience using that assessment, publishing with that assessment, but we have customized reports. Why that's important is that you can have the best assessment in the world, but if the reporting that you have is not face valid and doesn't resonate with the audience or the participant, you're dead in the water.
So that's why for us at J3P, it's not just about the Hogan being a phenomenal psychometric assessment while validated, but it's the meeting of that assessment engine with the reporting output. Really, really important. That's number one.
Number two, to your question about how did you understand what your strengths and your challenges or obstacles, which by the way, I still appreciate you not wording the word weaknesses. I actually threatened a female surgeon that I work with that I was going to break a laptop over her head. If I ever heard her refer to herself as having any weaknesses, that's a true story last week. So don't repeat that. But the easy answer to the question is this is what I've done I think really effectively at J3PU with surrounding myself with people who are smarter and better than I am in so many ways, in terms of our core team.
I have people on my team who are better leaders than I am. I have people on my team who are more organized than I am. I have people on my team that are nicer than I am. I'm good at making two or three things. That's kind of all I got. But the things that I'm really good at, I'm really, really good at, and no one else on my team has that skill set.
So the goal is to surround myself with people who are really, really good at the stuff that I'm not good at, which is the majority of things, but allow me to focus my time and my energy on my core of competency and my skill set, my expertise, which I am extremely competent and capable of. And that's really where my energy needs to focus because that's where the greatest return for my time, for the clients and for the companies.
lauren
Yeah, I mean, it makes so much sense, logically, that it's like hire people who are better than you are at a specific thing like that. It makes a lot of sense, but it's challenging as well to do that.
alan
Well, you got to check your ego at the door, right? And this ties into whether it be anxiety, insecurity, ego, et cetera.
But the reality is, is that tying back to where we started, which is the more that people can truly understand who they are, and then it becomes almost a, just an expectation of a set of behaviors. So if the three of us work together on a regular basis as a part of the same team, and we understand what our strengths are, what our obstacles are, we understand that Alan's really good at X, Lauren's good at Y, Phil's good at, you know, whatever fill in the blank, whatever it Phil’s good at. There's a lot of things that Phil’s good at, but if we all know that there's different skills and the two of you do this magically with each other, right? Like Lauren, you're really good at very specific things.
Phil's really good at other things that you may not be good at. The two of you partner together and lever off of one another, and it's a good balance of synergy there. So the more that we can assume good intent, which by the way, begets self awareness, which begets trust. Once there's trust, that is the currency in which relationships are formed.
And the relationship is actually what allows the stuff to get done, the work to get done, the clients to come on board, you know, the sharing of knowledge, the positive impact that the two of you and your broader team have on the world. That's what it's about. It's exactly what it's about. The two of you demonstrate that masterfully.
phil
Why, thank you.
phil
Yeah.
lauren
So, you'll probably agree with this, but with us, like, Phil and I, we've known each other for over half of our lives. We, we go way back. So I think naturally, we just know how the other one works. Like, I don't even really think about it that often. We just know where to fit in.
phil
We just operate.
lauren
We just operate. With new people on the team, that can be really, it can be really tough to get to know people. And it can also, at least for me, it can be really tough to, again, see what someone's specialty is or what their strength is. And so, what are your recommendations? You're like smirking, the listener can't see this, you're like laughing.
alan
I'm biting my fist, I'm not even laughing. I'm just biting my fist. lauren
lauren
Yeah. So my Hogan assessments pulled up here and my affiliation is like at zero.
alan
Well, I'm not going to speak about your individualized data because that's none of anyone's business. But what I can tell you is this, you bring up a good point that you've just shared.
And that is, if we just talk about your value that you place on interacting with people, you won't see a lot of value in just interacting with people to interact with people. However, if there's a specified purpose, whether it be helping having an impact, whatever those things are that you can link to why it would justify you actually getting along and building a relationship with someone, now all of a sudden we have your attention. So going back to your question about you have new members of the team you don't know for 20 years or however long it's been. How do you do that? And how do you do that specifically in a remote environment, right? Which is how a lot of people are working these days.
It's about investing the time to build relationships. And if you're, you have the ability to do that person and you're the manager or the boss, the leader, the CEO, whatever it is, your job is to be a chief people officer, which means if someone's new on your team, make the investment, take them for a cup of coffee, take them for a meal or her or other, and ask the questions.
I want to get to know who you are as a human being, make that investment. The excuse that people could say, well, I'd love to, Alan, but you know, I'm a Canada. Phil's in Florida. You know, this other person is in Montana. I'm so glad that you brought up that excuse. It's great. Great objection. How I would counter that rather is I would say, well, that's great.
If you can basically say to someone, I'm going to send you a gift card to DoorDash and I want to have a virtual dinner with you from six to seven your time. I'll send out a link and I want to buy your mail and I want to get to know you because I care about our professional connection and it's, it's an investment in the service of our working together.
So there's a lot of ways around this, but we can't do a shortcut by going from A to B in the shortest path because that's what's efficient and that's what's going to save us the most time and money. It's more esoteric and it's more ambiguous, but the sustainable data that we have is that the more people invest in these kind of things over time results in more sustainable outcomes that matter to any organization, not just to health.
LAUREN
How do your doctors find time to do that?
alan
That's a really great point and a great counter, if you will, they don't have time. And that is part of the problem is that when we think about how doctors are compensated, you know, specifically in the surgical and the procedural fields, which is where we do a lot of work, it's, it's how many Harvey News, relative value units, you know, how many patients have you seen? How many procedures have you done? And the problem is, is that their compensation is tied to their productivity. So it's almost as though we've taken these highly trained, really smart people and we've turned them into either salespeople or factory workers, right?
And then when we think about this, now there's a division chief in some academic department. So 80 percent of their time and their compensation is tied to their clinical job. 20 percent of their time is actually allocated to leadership. So if you're just trying to be clinically productive and make enough money to support yourself, how much time are we really allocating for that 20%?
And then if we combine that with the faculty are a hundred percent, they'll get into the operating room or do the cases or see these patients. We don't value this. We value what we pay for. So should the insurance company say, well, we want to put in 10 percent of time so that you can build relationships?
No. What malpractice insurers, what they do is they fund 360 assessments because there's a risk management value proposition for them. But that's on the period of side, not the positive side, back to your original point, Lauren. We don't spend enough time talking about things for the right reasons. We talk about how is this going to prevent something, or how is this going to basically be something to mitigate a negative outcome.
lauren
And so that's why you help people get back to the bigger questions of what kind of life do you want to lead as a human being? So it goes beyond your compensation and is more about fulfillment.
alan
Yeah, and both have to coexist, right? It's easy for me or for us to say, Oh, focus on you want to be a fishing boat captain in the keys in Florida., that's great. But you have bills to pay. Right. That's a whole other issue. But the point is, is that, and I think that's also in the way that we approach the work that's really unique, is that this isn't about, let's have a group hug and let's all be Pollyanna. I'm not that nice. What it is about is it's about honoring who people are as people in the service of the work that needs to be done instead of honoring the work and then shoehorning in the people conversation.
It's the opposite. That's it.
phil
I love that perspective. You've given us so many fascinating things to think about. You always teach me something new, also. I feel like sometimes if people have conversations with me a whole bunch of times, then they'll hear the same soundbites. But I never get the same soundbites from you.
You're always, maybe it's the years, the thousands of years of education, Alan!
alan
Amazing I'm still alive.
phil
Where can people go to learn more from you to learn more about J3P? Where should we send them?
alan
Well, you guys did a great, two great sites for us. So my personal site, www.alanfriedmanma.com, so A-L-A-N-F-R-I-E-D-M-A-N ma.com.
And then our company site is www.j3p.health, not.com, but.health based upon your guidance. So that's very unique in terms of the way that our URL is not a.com., it's health, so it's www.j3p.health.
phil
A little branding moment there. I love a custom domain. It's just cool and it's memorable. I also love that you also see the similarities between your worlds and ours and it goes without saying, we just love any conversation with you, including a podcast interview where we get to bring other people in to listen. So thank you for hanging out with us on Brand Therapy.
alan
Well, thanks for inviting me. I appreciate the opportunity to share and I appreciate what you all have done for me and for us and for the people that we're working with. It's, uh, it's allowed us to really scale our way of helping people, which is really meaningful for me and for our team.
lauren
Aww. Thank you. Well, we loved working with you so much and, you know, that just really, really makes me happy to hear.
alan
It's all about you, Lauren.
lauren
All about me. All good. I am happy, I am happy, so we can end this episode, okay?
phil
Listen, if she's happy, then I'm happy instantly, okay? So, yes.
alan
Thank you both.
phil
Thank you, Alan.
