From Military Service to Healthcare Leadership: Applying I-O Psychology to Organizational Transformation

Note: The author is a veteran and this article is sponsored by SIOP’s Military and Veterans Inclusion, D&I Subcommittee.

From Experience to Evidence-Based Leadership

My career has followed a path outside the traditional boundaries of an industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology role. I served 8 years in the United States Army before transitioning into healthcare, earned a master’s degree in Industrial-Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior from Brooklyn College, and subsequently earned an MBA specializing in Strategic Business Management from Hofstra University. Today, I serve as senior director of Operations for Northwell Health’s Center for Advancing Health for All (from here on referred to as the Center).

Although these experiences span different professional domains, I have come to view them as complementary. Military service provided an early foundation in leadership, accountability, adaptability, teamwork, and mission execution. I-O psychology provided a scientific framework for understanding individual and collective behavior within organizational systems. Business education and operations leadership strengthened my ability to translate those insights into strategy, execution, measurement, and organizational performance. Together, these experiences have shaped not only how I lead but also how I diagnose organizational problems.

I-O psychology has not simply given me additional leadership tools; it has changed the questions I ask before determining what intervention may be appropriate. An operational problem that initially appears to involve technology, governance, or strategy may also involve motivation, trust, role clarity, group processes, organizational design, readiness for change, or the broader environment in which the organization operates. This orientation reflects the scientist–practitioner tradition of I-O psychology: using behavioral science to inform organizational practice while allowing real organizational challenges to sharpen how that science is understood and applied.

Three experiences from my work illustrate this connection: building commitment to a new way of working, redesigning governance to strengthen accountability, and helping an organization adapt to significant changes in its external environment.

From Authority to Influence: Building Trust to Enable Change

One of my most important lessons in translating military leadership into healthcare occurred as I helped the Center transition toward a hybrid working model. Prior to COVID-19, the team primarily worked together in person, and much of our routine communication and coordination occurred through email. As work patterns evolved, I saw an opportunity to create a more flexible and efficient operating model using Microsoft Teams and SharePoint as the foundation for a virtual workspace. From an operational perspective, the technical solution appeared relatively straightforward. The more difficult challenge was behavioral: How could I create commitment to a fundamentally different way of working?

My military experience had reinforced the importance of mission clarity, structure, accountability, and alignment around common objectives. Those principles remained valuable, but their application needed to evolve in a civilian healthcare environment. Military organizations possess explicit rank structures and formal chains of command. Healthcare organizations frequently depend on collaboration among physicians, executives, administrators, operational leaders, and multidisciplinary teams who may not share direct reporting relationships. Positional authority alone is therefore often insufficient for producing the commitment necessary for sustained change. My I-O training helped me consider the transition through the lenses of leadership, motivation, team processes, and change readiness. Rather than interpreting hesitation toward the new model simply as resistance, I sought to understand how employees were experiencing the proposed change.

I met individually with team members to understand their concerns, needs, and perspectives. Those conversations gave me opportunities to explain the rationale for the transition and demonstrate how a more collaborative digital environment could improve the way we worked. More importantly, they allowed me to listen and build relationships. Over time, those relationships helped establish trust. That trust became more consequential than the initial technology transition. Organizational readiness for change involves both commitment to change and confidence in the collective capability to implement it (Weiner, 2009). As team members became more comfortable with Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and hybrid work, they also developed greater confidence in their ability to learn and leverage new technologies.

The team was not simply acquiring proficiency with individual platforms; it was developing greater adaptive capacity around technology-enabled work. That foundation has become increasingly valuable as new digital capabilities, including artificial intelligence, have emerged. The confidence developed through earlier technology transitions has helped position the team to explore how AI and other tools can support day-to-day work, streamline processes, improve access to information, enhance collaboration, and contribute to greater operational efficiency. The experience changed the question I ask when approaching transformation. Rather than asking only: How do we execute this initiative? I also ask, What conditions will cause people to commit to it? I moved from thinking primarily about directing execution toward creating the interpersonal and organizational conditions that make collective execution possible.

Authority may produce compliance; trust creates the conditions for commitment.

From Discussion Forum to Strategic Governance: Designing for Accountability

A second experience demonstrated how I-O principles can be applied beyond individual and team behavior to organizational systems. In 2022, the Center was undergoing organizational restructuring. During this period, several council meetings had been postponed as the department itself evolved. As we rebuilt the team, we also faced the challenge of reestablishing governance mechanisms capable of advancing organizational priorities and scaling projects and programs across the health system. Initially, the challenge appeared to involve reactivating the councils. A deeper assessment suggested that simply restarting the previous model would not necessarily produce the outcomes we needed.

At times, council meetings included more than 100 participants. Broad representation created opportunities for information sharing and diverse perspectives, but it also made it difficult for the council to function as the strategic governance body we needed. Meetings could become discussion forums rather than mechanisms for establishing priorities, clarifying accountability, making strategic decisions, and moving organizational priorities toward execution. The challenge therefore shifted from how do we restart these meetings to a more fundamental set of organizational-design questions: What is the purpose of the council? Who needs to participate? What decisions should occur at this level? Where should accountability reside? And how should enterprise strategy translate into action?

My I-O background helped me approach these questions through an organizational design and systems lens. Instead of viewing governance simply as a collection of meetings, I began to view it as an interconnected system in which membership, roles, decision-making, accountability, communication pathways, and relationships among governance bodies influence organizational behavior and execution. We reassessed the composition of the Executive Council and whether participation aligned with its strategic purpose. Over time, we significantly reduced its size and sharpened its role around enterprise strategy and accountability. The objective was not simply to create a smaller meeting. The objective was to differentiate strategic governance from operational execution.

That distinction became foundational to the broader governance architecture. The Executive Council on Advancing Health for All establishes enterprise strategic direction, priorities, commitments, and accountability. The Physician Council provides clinical leadership and helps translate enterprise strategy into clinical priorities and physician engagement. Clinical service line committees help integrate those priorities into clinical pathways and performance-improvement activities. Market councils translate enterprise priorities into regional objectives and coordinate implementation across sites, whereas site councils and committees provide local multidisciplinary mechanisms for operationalizing priorities. Specialized bodies, including the System Effective Communication Committee and Inclusion Academy Council, provide focused governance around communication access and workforce capability building. Business employee resource groups provide workforce perspectives and a bidirectional channel between employees and organizational leadership.

Viewed through an organizational-design lens, the model creates both differentiation and integration: Governance bodies have distinct functions and accountabilities while operating as components of a larger system connecting enterprise strategy with clinical, regional, local, and workforce execution. Our operational team serves an integrative role within this architecture by helping translate strategic direction into executable initiatives. We also recognized that structural clarity alone would not ensure accountability. Every initiative now operates with a formal charter that clarifies its purpose, scope, ownership, key stakeholders, and intended outcomes. Initiatives are also aligned with clearly defined key performance indicators (KPIs), providing mechanisms for monitoring progress and evaluating outcomes. This approach reflects principles of goal setting and feedback. Research on goal setting demonstrates the importance of clear goals in directing attention and effort toward performance (Locke & Latham, 2002). In practice, charters and KPIs help transform broad strategic priorities into explicit expectations, ownership, and measurable outcomes.

The resulting model creates a strategy-execution feedback loop: Enterprise priorities inform governance direction; governance direction informs initiative charters; charters establish ownership and execution; KPIs provide evidence of progress and outcomes; and performance feedback informs governance review and strategic adjustment. The experience changed how I define effective governance. Effective governance is not determined by how many councils an organization maintains or how frequently they meet. It is better evaluated by whether the system establishes clarity of purpose, aligns participation with that purpose, creates accountability for execution, measures outcomes, and provides feedback that improves decision-making. An operational lens may identify an inefficient meeting or process. An I-O lens can help identify the organizational system and associated behaviors sustaining that process. Structure creates the conditions for accountability.

From Strategic Decision to Organizational Adoption: Adapting While Preserving the Mission

A third experience demonstrated the importance of understanding organizations as open systems that must continually adapt to changes in their external environments. In 2025, changes in the federal policy and regulatory environment created significant implications for work that had historically been communicated through the language of diversity, equity, and inclusion. As a healthcare organization, we needed to evaluate the changing environment, consider organizational risk, and determine how our work should evolve. The challenge was more complex than changing terminology. We needed to examine our portfolio of programs and initiatives and consider how the Center could evolve while continuing to advance high-quality care and better outcomes for the patients and communities we serve. The central strategic question became: How does an organization adapt to significant environmental change without losing sight of its underlying mission? That process contributed to the evolution of the Center for Equity of Care into the Center for Advancing Health for All.

The transition required us to carefully examine how projects and programs were positioned and communicated across the health system. It also challenged us to think more broadly about how our work could advance health and improve care for everyone while recognizing that different populations may encounter different needs and barriers. Inclusion and belonging became important components of how we articulated this work. However, establishing a new name and strategic positioning did not mean organizational adoption had occurred.

I-O psychology helped me recognize the distinction between announcing change and institutionalizing change. A strategic decision establishes direction, but organizational change ultimately depends on whether stakeholders understand that direction, interpret it consistently, and translate it into decisions and behavior. This distinction relates to organizational sensemaking. During strategic change, leaders not only interpret changing circumstances but also engage in “sensegiving” attempting to influence how organizational members understand a new strategic reality (Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991).

Our approach reflected this challenge. We engaged key stakeholders across the health system, including hospital presidents, executive leaders, and members of our Executive Council. We deliberately identified high-visibility leadership meetings and organizational forums where we could communicate the Center’s evolution, explain the rationale for the change, and reinforce the new direction. Our 2025 annual report provided another mechanism for communicating the transition while demonstrating how the Center’s programs, initiatives, and partnerships supported its evolving organizational mission. Communication therefore became part of implementation rather than simply an announcement following a strategic decision.

The objective was to create sufficient shared understanding across a large and complex health system so stakeholders could answer four fundamental questions: What is changing? Why is it changing? What remains constant? And what does the change mean for how we communicate, make decisions, and execute the work? The experience reinforced an open-systems understanding of organizations. Healthcare systems do not operate independently of their environments. Government policy, regulation, technology, workforce expectations, economic conditions, and societal changes continually create new opportunities and constraints. Organizational effectiveness therefore requires both internal alignment and the capacity to adapt to external conditions.

Yet adaptation does not necessarily require abandoning organizational purpose. Leaders must distinguish between organizational elements that need to evolve and those that should remain stable. For us, organizational positioning and language evolved while the underlying commitment to advancing high-quality care and better outcomes remained central. The experience changed another question I ask during organizational transformation. Instead of asking only: Have we communicated the change? I increasingly ask: Have we created enough shared understanding for people throughout the organization to translate that change into their own decisions and actions? Communication transmits information. Sensemaking creates understanding. Organizational adoption requires that understanding to influence behavior. Adaptability creates the conditions for organizational resilience.

Bridging Science and Practice

Taken together, these experiences have shaped how I understand the scientist–practitioner model in my own career. Practical experience may signal that an organizational system is not functioning as intended; I-O psychology provides theories and evidence that can help explain why. Operations provides mechanisms for translating that diagnosis into action, whereas business strategy connects those actions to broader organizational priorities and outcomes. Each case illustrates this process at a different level. In the hybrid-work transition, the visible challenge involved technology and work processes; the deeper questions involved leadership, trust, and change readiness. In the governance redesign, the visible challenge involved large meetings and council structures; the deeper questions involved organizational design, role clarity, accountability, measurement, and feedback. During the Center’s evolution, the visible challenge involved organizational positioning in response to a changing external environment; the deeper questions involved organizational adaptation, sensemaking, stakeholder alignment, and resilience.

The common thread is diagnosis before intervention. This is what applying I-O psychology looks like in my role. It does not require attaching a theoretical label to every leadership decision or suggesting that every intervention began with the deliberate application of a specific academic model. Rather, I-O psychology provides a body of knowledge that helps me interpret organizational dynamics, challenge assumptions about why problems are occurring, and design responses that account for both organizational systems and human behavior. My military experience remains an important component of that approach. Military service taught me mission focus, accountability, adaptability, teamwork, and continuous improvement.

I-O psychology helped me understand how those capabilities can be translated and when they must be modified across organizational contexts. Mission focus can translate into strategic alignment. Command accountability can evolve into shared accountability. After-action learning can support continuous improvement and organizational feedback. Experience leading across military functions can translate into cross-functional leadership. Operating under uncertainty can become an important capability for organizations navigating transformation. The broader lesson is that transferable skills require contextual adaptation. For me, the intersection can be summarized as Experience + Behavioral Science + Business Strategy = Evidence-Based Organizational Leadership.

Expanding Where I-O Psychology Creates Value

Healthcare organizations are confronting workforce shortages, technological disruption, artificial intelligence, changing employee expectations, evolving policy environments, and increasing organizational complexity. These challenges are simultaneously strategic, operational, technological, and behavioral. This creates significant opportunities for I-O psychology. As organizations increasingly adopt AI and other emerging technologies, implementation questions will extend beyond technical capability. Organizations will need to understand employee trust, technology acceptance, work redesign, leadership behavior, skill development, team coordination, and whether new technologies actually improve performance. Similarly, organizational transformation cannot be reduced to project plans and implementation timelines. Sustainable change requires attention to motivation, readiness, leadership, organizational structures, communication, culture, and the conditions influencing whether new behaviors are adopted and maintained.

For veterans considering careers in I-O psychology, military experience can provide a valuable foundation. Veterans frequently enter civilian organizations with experience in leadership, teamwork, accountability, problem solving, coordination, and operating under uncertainty. I-O psychology provides a scientific framework for examining those experiences and translating them into new organizational contexts. The challenge is not to leave military experience behind. It is to translate it thoughtfully.

Conclusion: Leadership Without Boundaries

My career has not followed a traditional I-O psychology pathway, and that has become one of the most valuable aspects of my professional journey. Military service taught me how to lead and execute under demanding conditions. I-O psychology taught me to examine the behavioral and organizational systems underlying performance. Business and operations leadership taught me to connect those insights to strategy, execution, accountability, and measurable outcomes. Across the experiences described here, three practice-based lessons have become increasingly important: trust creates the conditions for commitment; structure creates the conditions for accountability; and adaptability creates the conditions for organizational resilience.

These are not intended as new theories of organizational behavior. They are lessons from practice that help me connect established I-O principles to the organizational challenges I encounter as a healthcare operations leader. I did not leave my military experience behind when I entered civilian healthcare. I learned to translate it. I-O psychology helped me understand when my leadership instincts were useful, when they needed to evolve, and why. For me, this represents one of I-O psychology’s most important contributions to leadership practice: a more rigorous way to understand an organization before attempting to change it. I-O psychology need not be confined to a particular department, function, or job title. Its value can be realized wherever behavioral science is used to improve organizational diagnosis, strengthen leadership and team effectiveness, design better organizational systems, facilitate adaptation, and produce meaningful outcomes for employees, organizations, patients, and communities.

References

Gioia, D. A., & Chittipeddi, K. (1991). Sensemaking and sensegiving in strategic change initiation. Strategic Management Journal, 12(6), 433–448.

Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717.

Weiner, B. J. (2009). A theory of organizational readiness for change. Implementation Science, 4, 67.