Kathryn Colby, MD, PhD, on facing pressure with grace and staying true to your 'why'

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Welcome everyone to our Women in Ophthalmology Healio vlog. I'd like to welcome you all and welcome Dr. Kathy Colby from New York. Can you please introduce yourself, Dr. Colby?

Yes, thanks everyone for the invitation. It's a pleasure to be here and talk to women about leadership, which is an important topic for me. I'm Kathryn Colby. I am the Elizabeth J. Cohen Professor and Chairman of the Department of Ophthalmology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. I am a cornea specialist, and I am the immediate past President of the Cornea Society and sit on a number of society boards. This is my second chairmanship. Prior to this I was chair at the University of Chicago.

Wonderful. Thank you for being with us. I'd like to start off by asking you to share one or a few of your leadership pearls.

Right, I think my most important pearl is true for whether you're a leader or just a regular person trying to survive in your day-to-day life. And that is, you really have to know yourself. You have to know what your “why” is, and once you have that understanding of what it is that makes you tick and what are your guiding principles, everything else follows from that. So it's really developing your internal compass and once you have that, then it doesn't necessarily mean that all decisions are easy to make, but you know which one is the right one because you're guided by this, you know, internal compass or your “why.”

That's great.

Do you feel like your “why,” kind of has changed over the years?

Maybe evolved, definitely, yeah. Because when you're early on in your career your “why” is becoming, you know, the best clinician, the best educator, the best researcher you can be. And really in a shift to a leadership position, the “why” is about the success of other people. So for me, my real satisfaction at this point in my career, you know, I've done plenty of corneal transplants in my life and my “why” comes not from doing more transplants, but empowering my faculty and my residents and my fellows to really be as successful as they can be.

And Kathy, you made such an important point. And thank you, Priyanka, for bringing that up. The “why” does evolve, that was a great word, and it becomes more about others around you than you yourself, just like you noted, Kathy. So thank you for that wonderful leadership pearl. So my question to you, Kathy, is, anybody who has achieved all that you have achieved, along the way encounter some challenges. Can you share with us a particular challenge that you encountered and then how you resolved it or figured out a way to get around it?

Yeah, so I thought about that question and whether I would talk about a small kind of internal challenge or a bigger one. And really, the biggest challenge that I've faced in a leadership situation, is when I got to my first chairmanship, where the department basically was a failed department. The residency was on probation. This is not a common thing in ophthalmology for an ophthalmic residency to be on probation. And, you know, there were a lot of things that had gone on that led the department to that state. And I was brought on to basically revive it. And that was pretty early in my executive leadership career. So, you know, I'm a surgeon, right? So how do surgeons fix things, right? We identify a problem and we cut, right? That doesn't really work that well with people. So I learned during that, that it was really there was a way to do culture change. It's not like taking out a cataract or doing a corneal transplant or taking off a tumor, right? You have to engage people, they have to buy into a shared vision. And it's only through that kind of process that you really can accomplish a culture change. And so we spoke a couple of minutes ago about the outward mindset, meaning that, you know, when you're early in your career, it's about you, your accomplishments, you know, early in your family career, it's about you as a parent, right? But as you get to be a leader, you have to have that outward mindset where it's really about other people. And then the other thing I really learned is that a growth mindset is actually critically important because if you, you know, to grow means to do things that you're uncomfortable with and that you're not going to be good at. And, you know, let's face it, we all like to be good at what we're doing, right? We like that cataract surgery to go perfectly. You know, we like our talk to be perfect. And so that growth mindset, you've got to... The only way to get better is to really attempt things that you're not good at, right? So, you know, through a series of my learning as a leader, and, you know, I had a very good executive coach who really taught me a lot and working with all the people in the department. And we went just in four years from being pretty much the worst department in the institution, to being the best in terms of both a staff and physician engagement in the department. And of course, the residency got off probation too. So that was good.

Well, kudos to you, Kathy, that says a lot. How you were allowing yourself to be pushed and expand and grow, because these were tasks you had never done before. So, thank you for sharing that.

Yeah, and I feel like some of it is kind of what you alluded to, which is releasing that perfectionism, which I think is so pervasive in medicine in general. But then you talk about ophthalmologists or even that next level of perfectionism, and giving yourself the grace, it sounds like to have the grit and move forward. So, thank you for that.

Yeah. I think it's great because, you know, it's hard to fail and it's important to learn how to fail gracefully, I guess. It's really an important lesson and to continue to try and be vulnerable.

Yeah, I mean, there's lots of books. I mean, like Brené Brown writes about the gift of imperfection and things like that. So it is a different kind of mindset than we're normally trained to have as physicians. And I do actually expand this into my personal life. So I try to challenge myself by doing things that I am not good at. So, for example, this year I took up golf and I am not intrinsically an athlete, you know, I'm pretty much kind of a nerdy person. I would sit and read a book, right? That would be my happy day. And so, you know, it's good for your brain and good for aging to actually try physical things that you're not good at. So every time I pick up my golf clubs, I am humbled by how bad I am.

You know, that's interesting, Kathy. I took up tennis and, you know, I work out, but tennis requires a completely different skillset, so I am humbled every time I go out on that court.

That's awesome. Well, I guess I'll round out the questions. So, thank you again for everything you've already spoken about. As someone who's the youngest one in her career right now, what kind of advice would you give to your 20-year younger self?

So again, you know, I was thinking about this. There's lots of advice I can give, but I think that one thing that we're not taught as physicians is to have a quiet mind, right? We're always thinking, we're thinking about what is the next case? What is the next patient? What is my next paper? And so this is actually something I got from Women in Ophthalmology, probably about five years ago. This idea that quieting your mind through meditation or yoga. I also took up yoga and I'm not good at that either. So that's another growth mindset area. But the meditation, you don't have to be good at it. You just keep doing it. And that equanimity that comes from having an inner stillness and being present, I think actually not only makes you a better leader, but it makes you a better physician. It makes you a better partner, friend, parent, right? Not just reacting to things, but being able to sense that they're happening and then have that pause where you can insert some perspective before you respond. So again, I mean, I think that would be a really great thing for us to teach our, probably our children and our residents definitely. That idea that, you know, things go bad in ER, you can't fall apart, you have to know what to do. Same thing if things go badly in a meeting, whether it's with one of your faculty or your residents or your boss, you have to be able to have that grace under pressure. And I really think meditation has been key for me.

Yeah, I have to agree that my meditation practice I feel, has given me so much resilience and I have to thank my parents, because it was just a cultural thing for us. But I feel that it gives me some strength that gets me through those difficult moments when a case, potentially, might be going awry or when there's a difficult conversation, I think that there's something there in that quiet moment that we all learn from.

Well, Kathy, thank you so much for your wonderful, wonderful pearls of wisdom. We really appreciate your contribution to the Women in Ophthalmology vlog series on leadership.

Well, thanks for the invitation, and I think it's a great initiative.