The Leaders Wingman

For first-time C-suite operators in healthcare.

Your first
C-suite seat is a
live aircraft.

The instruments lie. The crew is watching. The deadly is one missed scan away.
You don't need another framework. You need a wingman who's already flown the mission.

Book a 30-minute brief Read the doctrine

We watch your six. Lead your first. Never run.™

Chip Flinn, MBA, LFACHE — Founder, The Leaders Wingman
Chip Flinn, MBA, LFACHE Founder · The Leaders Wingman

The doctrine

Listen. Learn. Lead.

Three movements. In order. Every time. The mistake first-time executives make is starting at Lead — issuing directives before the room has been heard.

01

Listen

The first thirty days are reconnaissance. Not strategy. Not announcements. Not a hundred-day plan paraded through town halls. You listen to what the building tells you — and to what it conspicuously does not.

02

Learn

You map the patterns nobody briefed you on. The quiet board. The high performer who stopped raising her hand. The metric trending the wrong way for two quarters that nobody flagged. Pattern recognition is the executive equivalent of instrument flight.

03

Lead

Then — and only then — you lead. From conviction, not from anxiety. With clarity, not volume. The operators who survive their first year do the first two steps patiently. The ones who don't, skip them.

The exec at the center. The quiet ember at the edge — that's the deadly nobody else has flagged yet. Front of mind. Always.

Who this is for

Three operators we fly with.

The first-time CMO or VPMA

You were the best physician in the room. Now you're the one being watched by every physician in the building. Different mission. Different instruments.

The new chief of staff or COO

You inherited a calendar, a quiet board, and a culture you didn't build. The first 90 days will set the next three years. We help you read the instruments before they read you.

The board chair watching a leader struggle

You hired well. The first months have been harder than expected. We work alongside — not in place of — the executive. Discreet. Anonymized. On their timeline.

The work

What working together looks like.

  1. 01

    The 30-minute brief

    No deck. No pitch. You describe the cockpit. I tell you what I'm hearing and what I'd want to see in your next two weeks. If we're a fit, we go further. If not, you still leave with something usable.

  2. 02

    The 90-day flight plan

    Three Listens, three Learns, three Leads. Mapped to your calendar, your stakeholders, your terrain. We meet weekly. You report what you saw, not what you did.

  3. 03

    The wingman retainer

    For operators in the seat. Weekly cadence, on-call between. You don't pay for hours. You pay for the second set of eyes that has flown this terrain before.

Authority

Earned in the cockpit, not the classroom.

25+ years in healthcare operations
C-suite leadership roles, multiple systems
Lean · Six Sigma certified, with applied operator experience
LFACHE Life Fellow, American College of Healthcare Executives

The kind of experience that comes from sitting in the seat when the radar lit up — and from sitting in it long enough to teach the next operator how to read the screen.

Talk

Thirty minutes. No deck. No pitch.

If you're in the seat — or about to be — let's talk before the radar lights up.

Book the brief chip@leaders-wingman.com