The Nashville Health Care Council kicked off its Fall 2026 Council Executive Forum with a candid, peer-driven conversation among senior healthcare executives centered on a fundamental principle of change leadership: before leaders can effectively lead others through change, they must first understand how they themselves respond to it.
Titled “Understanding Your Why: Leading Yourself Through Change,” the opening session explored how personal leadership style, communication habits, self-awareness and decision-making shape the way change is experienced throughout an organization.
Led by Council Executive Forum Chair Jeremy Mercer, Vice President of Joint Ventures and Chief Integration Officer at, Ascension Saint Thomas, the discussion brought together executives with experience leading organizations and teams through significant periods of transformation. Rather than focusing on traditional change-management frameworks, participants reflected on their own leadership experiences and examined what it means to lead with clarity, humility and authenticity when expectations are high and the path forward may not always be certain.
Before leaders can effectively lead others through change, they must first understand how they themselves respond to it.
Change leadership is often framed around what organizations need to do: communicate the strategy, align teams, manage resistance and execute the plan.
But some of the most consequential questions are more personal.
How do I respond when the path forward is uncertain? What do I do when people push back? Am I genuinely asking for input, or simply looking for confirmation? How might my own need to have the answer, be liked or move quickly be influencing the way others experience change?
For senior healthcare leaders navigating an environment of constant transformation, these questions are not simply matters of leadership style. They can influence trust, communication, implementation and ultimately how an organization moves through change.
The Nashville Health Care Council recently convened a discussion among senior healthcare executives that surfaced several lessons worth considering for any leader navigating change.
7 Lessons for Leading Through Change
Senior executives are often expected to provide confidence and direction during periods of uncertainty. But leaders are experiencing the change themselves.
How a leader communicates, responds to resistance, receives feedback and manages uncertainty can shape how teams interpret what is happening around them.
That makes self-awareness a practical leadership tool.
Leaders may have tendencies that influence how they show up during difficult moments: wanting to have the answer, wanting to be liked or even wanting to become the “hero” of a change effort. Those instincts are understandable, but they can unintentionally shape decisions and interactions in ways that are not aligned with what the organization or its people need.
The lesson: Before asking how others need to respond to change, leaders should first examine how they are responding themselves.
When organizations are moving quickly, leaders can naturally fall into “telling” mode: here is what is changing, here is what happens next and here is what the organization needs to do.
But asking can uncover concerns, assumptions and implementation challenges that may not be visible from the executive level.
The key is authenticity. Asking for input when a decision has already been made can undermine trust if employees believe they have influence they do not actually have.
Instead, leaders can be explicit about where input is needed. A strategic decision may already be set, while employees can still help determine how it is communicated, implemented and sustained.
Three questions can help:
The lesson: Listening is most effective when people understand what they are actually being asked to influence.
Executive teams may spend months discussing and processing a decision before introducing it to operational leaders or frontline employees. By the time it is communicated, senior leaders may be ready to move into execution while employees are only beginning to process what the change means for them.
That gap matters.
Effective change leadership requires leaders to anticipate questions, prepare managers and explain the reasoning behind a decision. Employees do not have to agree with every decision to move forward, but they need enough clarity around the objective, organizational need and broader “why” to understand the direction they are being asked to follow.
The lesson: A leader’s readiness to move forward does not mean the organization is ready to move forward.
Feedback is often viewed as a way to determine whether a decision should change. It can also help leaders understand how their leadership and decisions are experienced throughout the organization.
That requires humility.
What looks like resistance from the executive level may reveal an issue, concern or implementation challenge that leadership cannot see from its vantage point. And listening does not mean agreeing with everything you hear.
Leaders can close the feedback loop by explaining what they heard, what changed and why certain recommendations were not implemented.
The lesson: Feedback can be valuable even when it does not change the decision. It can change the leader’s understanding of the experience surrounding it.
Trust becomes particularly important during periods of uncertainty, but it is built long before a major change needs to be communicated.
Senior executives can build that trust by spending time with employees throughout their organizations, visiting facilities and talking directly with the people doing the work. Those interactions can challenge assumptions that naturally develop as leaders become further removed from day-to-day operations.
Psychological safety does not mean making everyone happy. It means creating an environment where people can ask why, challenge assumptions and say when something is not working without fearing that candid feedback will negatively affect their standing.
The lesson: Trust is not a communication strategy for moments of change. It is a leadership practice that has to exist before the change arrives.
Healthcare organizations are navigating an increasing number of changes at once, including new processes, evolving responsibilities, pilots and initiatives such as AI.
That creates another leadership challenge: change fatigue.
Leaders may be tempted to reassure employees that things will eventually “settle down.” But when continued disruption is the more realistic expectation, those assurances can weaken trust when stability never arrives.
Leaders cannot always predict what comes next. They can be transparent about what they know, what they do not know and what the organization is working toward.
They can also create greater clarity by establishing priorities, timelines and clear decisions about which pilots and initiatives will move from experimentation into standard operations.
Without that discipline, employees can find themselves constantly adjusting without understanding the larger direction.
The lesson: Clarity does not require certainty. Leaders can acknowledge what remains unknown while still providing direction.
For many employees, the organization is experienced through their immediate supervisor.
Yet frontline supervisors and middle managers are often promoted because they excelled in their previous roles without receiving significant preparation for managing people, communicating strategy or leading teams through uncertainty.
Senior leaders therefore have a responsibility that extends beyond communicating their own vision. They must equip the leaders closest to employees with the context, tools and development necessary to translate enterprise decisions into everyday experiences.
The lesson: Change leadership cannot remain at the executive level. The leaders closest to the work need the context and capability to carry it forward.
The Bigger Leadership Question
Taken together, these lessons point to a broader truth: leading through change is not simply about having the right strategy or communicating the right message.
It is about understanding the leader behind the strategy and the impact that leader has on the people being asked to carry it forward.
It requires self-awareness before communication. Listening alongside direction. Clarity without false certainty. Feedback without defensiveness. Trust before it is needed.
And it requires recognizing that organizational change is experienced differently at different levels of an organization.
Periods of uncertainty can put pressure on leaders to project confidence, provide answers and move organizations forward. But authentic leadership does not require having every answer.
It requires understanding your own tendencies, being clear about what you know and why a decision is being made, remaining open to perspectives you may not see from the executive level and recognizing the impact your leadership has on those around you.
Before leaders can successfully bring an organization through change, they must first understand how they themselves are moving through it.
Creating Space for Better Leadership Conversations
The questions raised through this conversation are not ones that can always be answered through a leadership framework or an executive briefing. They benefit from candid discussion among peers who are navigating similar challenges from different vantage points.
That is where the Nashville Health Care Council’s role becomes particularly valuable.
The Council Executive Forum brings senior healthcare executives together for peer-driven conversations around the leadership challenges facing the industry. The value is not simply in presenting another framework or offering a single answer. It is in creating a trusted environment where leaders can step outside the day-to-day demands of their organizations, compare experiences, challenge assumptions and learn from one another.
The Fall 2026 Council Executive Forum opened with “Understanding Your Why: Leading Yourself Through Change,” led by Council Executive Forum Chair Jeremy Mercer, CEO of Ascension Saint Thomas Behavioral Health. Rather than focusing on traditional change-management frameworks, the conversation created space for executives to examine how self-awareness, communication, humility, feedback and trust influence the way organizations experience change.
That is the opportunity the Nashville Health Care Council is uniquely positioned to create: the room for better leadership conversations.
By convening senior leaders from across the healthcare ecosystem around a neutral table, the Council brings together experiences and perspectives that may not otherwise intersect. Those conversations can challenge assumptions, surface new questions and give leaders the opportunity to learn from others who are navigating many of the same complexities.
Because sometimes the most valuable leadership insight is not another answer.
It is a better question, asked in the right room, with the right people.
Learn more about the Nashville Health Care Council