Discovering Comfort in Discomfort and Complexity: Gregory Johnson, M.D.

"You need to get comfortable being uncomfortable," Dr. Gregory Johnson, Chief Medical Officer for UnityPoint Health, says about leadership. Through discomfort comes growth.  

Dr. Johnson's career story is replete with occasions where he challenged himself and welcomed discomfort in order to learn and grow. As a family medicine physician (and the son of a doctor), bedside manner has always been important to Dr. Johnson. In the leadership suite, this means staying in touch with the needs of patients, engaging with and trusting clinicians to do their jobs well, and innovating in ways that truly benefit individuals and communities – including those many rural communities served by UnityPoint who can benefit from advances in, for example, virtual care, mobile clinics, and new technologies.  

In this Impactful Leaders Podcast episode with WittKieffer's Vinny Gossain, Dr. Johnson looks back on the reasons he got into medicine ("I was hooked" from an early age, he shares) and how he's grown as a leader as a way of impacting ever-larger numbers of people. "Leadership is complicated," he says, but it is more important than ever.