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Most change initiatives don't fail because the strategy was wrong or the tools were missing. They fail because the leader who launched the change was behaving inconsistently with what the change required, and everyone underneath them was reading the inconsistency in real time.
Ritu Ward has been on both sides of that pattern. Earlier in her career, she was a medical technologist watching decisions get made about her work by people who never visited the lab. She wanted a seat at the table so her voice could be heard. She got the seat. And she discovered, not long after, that she had become one of the distant decision-makers she had resented -- now making decisions about other people's work without enough contact to make them well. That recognition is what eventually pulled her toward Lean practice, toward the gemba, and toward a different question about leadership: what behaviors do I need to design and practice in myself, consistently enough that the people around me can trust what they're seeing?
This webinar is her answer to that question. Not as a theoretical framework but as a working system she built for herself, tested against years of leading change in complex healthcare operations. The session is grounded in Edgar Schein's work on humble inquiry, Robert Quinn's "fundamental state of leadership," and Lean management discipline -- but the structure that holds it all together is her own.
Ritu Ward is the Regional Vice President for Mercy Labs in the West Region. She is a medical technologist, a Six Sigma Black Belt, a Certified A3 Problem Solver, and a Fellow with the American College of Healthcare Executives. The session was hosted by Jeff Roussel of KaiNexus.
Ritu opens with a working definition that departs from the textbook version. Leadership, she argues, is about creating a system for people to contribute in -- and, at the same time, a learning environment in which that system engages and maximizes the people inside it. In other words, leadership isn't the act of leading. It's the design and maintenance of conditions in which other people can do their best work.
The pivot from "leadership is what I do to others" to "leadership is the environment I design" is the move that the rest of her session depends on. It also reframes the question of leadership development. If leadership is mostly about behavior, then leadership development is mostly about behavioral consistency -- and behavioral consistency is something you build, not something you inherit from your title.
Her short list of leadership qualities is unflashy, which is part of the point. Gratitude. Discipline. Integrity. Resilience. Positivity. Follow-through. Most readers will recognize these and check off the ones they think they have. Ritu's challenge is sharper: are you practicing them consistently? Even leaders who have all these qualities in some proportion practice them unevenly. The work isn't to acquire new qualities. It's to make the ones you already have more reliable.
She singles out three that don't always come naturally: discipline, resilience, and follow-through. These are the ones the rest of the session is built around, because they're the ones most likely to break under pressure -- and the ones whose breakage your team will notice fastest.
Ritu's career took a turn when she stopped trying to be the person other people thought she should be.
Earlier in her career, she describes years of being told what to fix. Performance reviews that named deficits without offering a path. Mediocre evaluations with no consistent improvement plan. Her favorite line from that period, delivered without affection: "I told you what to fix. I'll let you know when you are fixed." The cumulative effect was that she became a product of what other people thought she needed to be in the moment, which is a different thing from being a leader.
The turn came when she asked herself a different question. Not "what do they want me to be?" but "what do I want to be?" The shift is small in language and large in consequence. The first question puts the locus of control outside. The second puts it inside, and forces an inventory of natural strengths, real values, and the gap between the two.
She lists four questions she made herself answer, and recommends them to anyone serious about leadership development:
Do I have a game plan for personal growth? Am I the creator of the plan? Am I willing to change to keep growing? Is my leadership style an example for others to learn from?
The second one is the most interesting. Many leaders have growth plans -- given to them by HR, by a mentor, by a 360 review process, by a coach. Few have growth plans they themselves designed and own. The distinction matters because external plans are easier to abandon when they get hard. Internal plans built around your own values survive contact with stress.
Self-discipline, in Ritu's framing, is a choice between two kinds of pain. The pain of discipline -- the sacrifice required to practice something consistently -- or the pain of regret, which comes from taking the easy path and missing the opportunity to grow. Either way, you pay. The difference is what you get for it.
Two practical anchors she works from. Emotions are your own individual responsibility -- the team isn't responsible for managing them for you. And time is the one constant; every leader gets the same allotment, and the difference between leaders is what they choose to do with it. Neither is news. Both bear repeating because in any given week, most leaders behave as if neither is true.
For the practice of discipline itself, she leans on Edgar Schein's work on humble inquiry. Schein's argument is that genuine inquiry -- the kind that creates a learning environment for yourself and others -- derives from an attitude of interest and curiosity rather than from technique. Most leaders are taught humble inquiry as something to do with their team. Ritu's twist is to do it with yourself first. Stay curious about your own plan. Notice where you're falling short. Practice the question instead of the answer.
When discipline fails -- and it will -- resilience is what determines whether the practice continues. Her framing of resilience isn't bouncing back. It's bouncing forward. You don't return to where you were. You move past it carrying what you learned. The definition of insanity, in the line usually attributed to Einstein, is doing the same thing and expecting different results. Ritu's correction: reflect, learn, choose differently, and don't pretend the failure didn't happen.
Follow-through is the third block, and the one that closes the loop. The work of leadership behavior is a self-reflective process. You commit to a practice. You attempt it. You fall short. You reflect. You commit again, adjusted by what you learned. It's PDSA applied to your own leadership behavior rather than to a process you're trying to improve. Same cycle. Different target.
The closing line of that section is the one worth keeping. From Catherine McAuley, founder of the Sisters of Mercy: be good today, but commit to be better tomorrow. The model is incremental, not heroic. Each day's standard is to be slightly more consistent than the day before.
This is where Ritu moves from philosophy to construction. The system elements aren't novel -- engage, empower, enable, energize, exemplify -- but the application is unusual. Most leadership training frames these as things you do to your team. She frames them as things you first do to yourself.
How well can you engage yourself in your own journey? This is about emotional connection to your own commitments, not technology or tools. Empowering yourself means letting go of the leadership style you were taught -- not all at once, but in bits and pieces. People may not recognize you. That's the point. Enabling yourself means giving yourself the resources and reminders to keep practicing, including the discipline of humble inquiry pointed inward. Energizing yourself means building a support group of trusted people -- formal or informal -- plus the willingness to give yourself an honest acknowledgment when you've done something well or learned something hard. And exemplifying means walking your own talk. If you've practiced, you can show others. If you haven't, no amount of presentation skill will hide the gap.
The Robert Quinn framework she introduces sharpens the same point. In our normal state, leaders are comfort-centered, externally directed, and operating from what they already know. In what Quinn calls the fundamental state of leadership, the same leaders are results-centered, internally directed, and pursuing ambitious outcomes outside familiar territory. Quinn's research finding is the part most leaders don't want to hear: in the fundamental state, leaders stop copying anyone. They draw on their own values and capabilities. The paradox is that the fundamental state is true to them and simultaneously not their normal state.
Most leadership development tries to install behaviors copied from someone else. Quinn's research suggests that's the wrong direction. The work is to find the version of yourself that operates from values rather than reflex, and to spend more time there.
Late in the session, Ritu shares a story that surprised her when it happened. She had been talking with her team about standard work in their daily improvement practice. One of them asked: shouldn't we also have behavioral goals?
The team built one themselves. What a manager should do during daily gemba. What a director should do. They wrote down specific, observable behaviors: be present; interact with co-workers; ask open-ended questions; ask for ideas; be consistent. For directors specifically: maintain eye contact, away from electronic devices; stay close to where the work is performed; smile; keep an even pace (Ritu admits this one was probably for her -- she tends to walk fast when she has something on her mind); don't interrupt the process. Coaching moments in open places. Five Whys on a clipboard.
What's notable isn't the specific list. It's that the team built behavioral standard work for the leaders -- not the leaders building standard work for the team. The direction of authoring is the lesson. When leaders treat their own behavior as something subject to observation, feedback, and improvement, the same way any process is, two things happen. The behavior gets better. And the team's willingness to participate in their own improvement work increases, because the asymmetry between "improve your process" and "I'm exempt from improving mine" has been removed.
The closing exchange in the session is one of the better leadership origin stories I've heard.
Jeff asked her why she wanted to become a leader. Her answer: she didn't.
She was working in the lab when a decision came down from above about a new instrument. She didn't like it. The decision interfered with her work process. She remembers thinking: somebody made this decision and didn't even ask me, the person doing the work every day. She wanted a seat at the table so her voice could be heard.
She got the seat. And then she became one of the distant decision-makers she had resented -- making decisions about other people's work without the information that comes from being close to it. That recognition was her turning point. It led her to Lean practice, to the gemba, and to a different definition of what leadership was supposed to be. Service to the people doing the work. Better decisions made with better information. A different model of delivering healthcare. The whole arc started with not liking a decision, wanting a voice, getting the voice, and then realizing the voice had to come with proximity.
The story is worth keeping in mind for any leader who has drifted away from the gemba over the course of a career. The original reason for wanting a seat at the table was usually to make sure work-level reality shaped decisions. The leader who loses contact with that reality is making the same mistake they once resented being made about them.
The behavioral standard work Ritu's team built only works if leaders are actually present at the gemba on a consistent enough cadence to be observed. That cadence has to be designed into how leadership works -- daily huddles, gemba walks, structured presence at the work -- not left to whether any individual leader feels like showing up.
KaiNexus makes that structure visible and sustainable across an organization. Daily management and huddle workflows give leaders a consistent place to be present and a consistent set of practices to be observed against. Leader standard work itself becomes a tracked process. Whether leaders are doing their gemba walks, engaging with team observations, responding to ideas, and closing the loop on issues raised -- all of it lives in a single system rather than being scattered across calendars, emails, and individual notebooks.
For the personal leadership system Ritu describes -- the PDSA cycle applied to your own behavior -- KaiNexus also functions as memory. The reflections, intentions, and adjustments you make over months and years can be captured rather than forgotten. The system supports the discipline of follow-through that most leaders intend to maintain and don't.
Ritu Ward is the Regional Vice President for Mercy Labs in the West Region. She is an accomplished executive leader in healthcare operations and system design, with expertise in client relations, strategy development, regulatory compliance, and process improvement. She has spoken at local and national conferences on service as the key driver for delivering healthcare, and has informally mentored young adults entering the profession and mid-level leaders advancing their careers for over fifteen years. Ritu holds a Bachelor in Medical Technology from George Washington University, a Bachelor in Biology from Howard University, and a Master's in Organizational Management from the University of Phoenix. She is a Medical Technologist, a Six Sigma Black Belt, a Certified A3 Problem Solver, and a Fellow with the American College of Healthcare Executives. She serves as chair of Mercy Women in Leadership for the education committee and vice chair on the mentorship committee for the Greater Charlotte Health Care Executives Group.
Why do change initiatives fail when the strategy and tools are sound?
Because leadership behavior is inconsistent with what the change requires, and the people inside the change are reading the inconsistency in real time. Most failures aren't about missing the right framework. They're about leaders who launch a change and then behave in ways that contradict it -- making decisions far from the work, asking for input and not acting on it, modeling urgency when they asked for patience, or modeling certainty when they asked for honesty. The team sees the gap. The change stalls.
What is the difference between "others focused" and "doing what's best for all"?
Others focused means responding to the transaction in front of you to make that one person feel good in the moment. Doing what's best for all means stepping back, scanning the broader situation, and recognizing how your behavior affects the learning environment for everyone you lead. Ritu's example: if asked a question she could answer in the moment to satisfy the person asking, she sometimes does better to be transparent about not knowing and invite exploration together. The first response feels helpful. The second builds a culture where not-knowing is a normal starting point for inquiry.
How can leaders get good feedback on their leadership?
By starting with rigorous self-reflection rather than external assessment alone. External tools and 360 reviews have their place, but Ritu's experience is that feedback only becomes useful when measured against the type of leader you've decided you want to be. Otherwise, the feedback becomes another set of external prescriptions about what to fix. The discipline is to treat yourself as your most rigorous critic -- not in a punitive sense, but in the sense of holding your own behavior against your own stated values and noticing where the gap is real.
What does humble inquiry pointed inward look like in practice?
Edgar Schein's humble inquiry is usually taught as something to do with others -- asking genuine questions to surface what they actually think, rather than prompting them toward an answer you already hold. Ritu's adaptation is to do the same with yourself. Stay curious about your own behavior. Ask what you're actually practicing, what's working, what isn't, and why. The attitude is interest, not judgment. The result is a self-assessment that produces growth rather than defensiveness.
Why is consistency more important than always being positive?
Because consistency is what builds trust. People can adjust to a leader who has bad mornings as long as the leader is reliably themselves about it. They can't adjust to a leader whose behavior varies unpredictably from day to day, because they can't calibrate what to expect. Ritu's framing: if you're going to have a bad attitude between 8 and 10, have the discipline to do so consistently. If you're going to show up with a smile, show up with a smile. Even-keeled is a luxury. Predictable is a baseline.
How do you lead change when people above or below you aren't bought in?
Meet people where they are. Don't try to change their behavior directly -- try to change their thought process. If you tell people what to do or argue the business case, you'll get the 20 percent who agree and the 80 percent who don't. If you start with the question of why, and let people explore their own thinking, you have a chance of changing how they see the problem. The leader Ritu describes asks more questions than she answers, not as a Socratic technique but because she's genuinely trying to find the answers with the people closest to the work.
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