What Organ Donation Taught Me About Leadership

I've led teams through system migrations, audits, and vendor failures. None of it taught me as much about leadership as being on an operating table, twice, with no guarantee I'd wake up.

In 2007, I crashed on the operating table during a liver transplant. In 2021, I received a transplant replacing my liver, kidney, pancreas, upper and lower intestine, and stomach, all in a single surgery. Between those two events, I learned something most leadership books don't cover: the difference between control and influence.

You don't get to choose what happens to you. You get to choose what you build from it.

When I was on the table the second time, I had no control over the outcome. What I had was a team: surgeons, nurses, my family, people I'd never met who had registered as donors years earlier, all doing their part without needing to see the whole picture. That's the best definition of a functioning team I've ever experienced, and I didn't design it. I depended on it.

Back at work, I think about that constantly. A leader's job isn't to control every outcome. It's to build a team good enough that the outcome doesn't depend on you being the smartest person in the room.

Adversity reveals your actual priorities, not your stated ones.

Everybody says "people first" in a mission statement. Very few find out what that means at 3am in a transplant ICU. I did. The clarity that comes from almost losing everything doesn't fade when you go back to your inbox. It just gets tested differently. Now, when I'm making a call under pressure at work, I ask the same question I asked in that hospital bed: what actually matters here, and what am I just used to worrying about?

Second chances are a leadership tool, not just a personal story.

I don't bring this story to a stage to be inspiring for its own sake. I bring it because every team has someone quietly carrying something: a diagnosis, a loss, a fear they haven't said out loud. Leaders who've been through something themselves create rooms where that's safe to acknowledge. That safety is what turns a group of individuals into a team that actually holds together when it matters.

I didn't choose to become a five-organ transplant survivor. But I chose what came after: using it as the clearest leadership education I've ever had, and passing that on to rooms full of people who are quietly fighting their own version of the same fight.