The CONNECT Collaborator Series is an interview series where we host conversations with healthcare professionals and partners with the goal of encouraging deeper collaboration in the healthcare industry.
Watch the full CONNECT Collaborator Series video featuring our Co-Founder, Lorie Spence and Kirsten Schmidtke.
Lorie Spence: Welcome to the Connect Collaborator interview series where we host 10 minute conversations with healthcare professionals and industry partners with the goal of encouraging deeper collaboration in the healthcare industry. Today’s guest is Kirsten Schmidtke, a sales and leadership coach who helps high performing professionals turn potential into performance through intention and strategic action.
With over a decade in corporate tech sales, where she navigated constant change, cursed and understands the real gap in professional development. Most people are trained on knowledge and skills, but not on the identity, mindset and leadership behaviors required to grow. Today, she coaches executives, leaders, and emerging managers through the transition of individual contributor to leader, helping them understand who they need to become before focusing on what they need to do.
Her work blends strengths based development, leadership identity, and practical frameworks that accelerate readiness, improve communication, and build leaders who can influence, inspire, and drive results. Kirsten is known for her warmth but direct approach, her ability to bring clarity into the complex leadership moments, and her belief that sustainable success requires both personal transformation and strategic action. She helps ambitious professionals evolve from doing the work to leading the work, building the strategic discipline and presence required to thrive at the next level.
Welcome, Kirsten, and thank you for joining us.
Kirsten Schmidtke: Yes. Thank you, Lorie, for having me.
Lorie Spence: Excellent. So maybe we can just jump right in, because I know one of the areas of your focus is on transition to leadership, and maybe you can give us a bit of background on how you define transition to leadership.
Kirsten Schmidtke: So I find this to be a really big gap for a lot of people that are moving from maybe more of like an individual contributor capacity to this opportunity to really lead results through others and lead people to deliver. And the biggest thing that I see that helps people to make this transition is an identity shift.
So I really believe that the transition to leadership is actually identity. Leadership itself is an identity, and it can be something that we’ve never really thought of in that way before. We just think about what we might be doing. But you need to shift from being a doer to a director when you’re in a leadership role. And so in my work, we always start with your identity. So, who are you being as a leader, what is that person? Then think, and then as a result, what actions, activities, behaviors come from that place of being?
Lorie Spence: I think that’s excellent. And I know it’s hard to move out of, you know, these roles that we tend to get into and become, I don’t want to say complacent, but comfortable in doing so. That shift in new identity thinking is really going to be an area of focus that people can really benefit from.
When we look at transition, and I know there’s a lot of healthcare practitioners that move into different leadership roles, whether it’s in their institution, whether it’s getting published, maybe they’re having a higher performance in research. What would that look like as a leadership role?
Kirsten Schmidtke: I mean, at first, we always do want to look at, again, that kind of identity of who you’re, you know, how you’re making that transition. And the reason I always start with identity is because it can be really easy to think that leadership is just doing more of what made us successful in the first place, and doing more of the same thing. But when we actually transform our identity, we operate in a completely different way. We approach problems in a different way, we communicate in a different way because we are identifying as a leader and as a result being a different way. I’ll give you an example; in even my coaching practice, helping people make this transition where, out loud, I’ve heard them say, ‘oh, but I’m not really the boss or I don’t really feel like I’m the friend kind of over being the leader.’ And so right there, I can hear just in the words and how they’re expressing their identities, they don’t actually see themselves as being a leader. And that’s why it’s so important that we start first with that identity shift. And, I think one of the biggest challenges I see but opportunities is really having a clear vision for what you want to create in that leadership role.
We’ve been in, you know, a different capacity delivering outcomes and delivering activities, but we need to start to create more of a vision of where we want to take people when we’re responsible for leading people. And so guiding them to a really, really clear vision and enrolling them and getting them excited about what you’re up to can be really, really profound. But it all starts with figuring out exactly what that is.
So when I work with leaders, I do like to work with them in creating, like a three part framework that I take them through. We start by, one, getting really, really clear on the goal, like, what is the North Star? What is the thing that we really want to focus on as a team and make happen? Two, we get really clear on the standards of, like, really the identity of the team. Like, what are the standards that we stand for as a team that are, if we commit to these standards, make the goal just, like, inevitable? And then the third part is the actions, the activity. What are the actions or activities that are going to support those standards so that we know that every day that we’re showing up to work and we’re contributing. We are all like, we are all focused on driving that same result.
Lorie Spence: Thank you for that. I was recently at an event for women leaders in pharma, and it was really interesting because they were starting to highlight how important both mentorship and coaching was for women and for men. I think it was also for leaders evolving. Some companies have this in house, some do not. But what would it look like from somebody moving, you know, from a manager role or to more of a senior director level role? And how could you support somebody on that journey?
Kirsten Schmidtke: Yeah. I mean, when we’re making that transition, we can get very kind of caught up in feeling that we have to do it the way that we’ve, you know, seen other people do it. And I think one of the most powerful ways that you can lead is to really hone in on your own perspective, and your own point of view. And something that coaching can really offer is helping you to see possibility, helping you to see other pathways, helping you to uncover other ideas that can help you deliver on a result, get to a goal, create change, or transformation faster. So while we can really gain a lot of information from our organizations, you know, mentors can be so critical in helping us how to navigate inside organizations. Coaching can really help to create the transformation, the change. Like I said, discover a new possibility and bring that into being so that you can really allow yourself the opportunity to grow in transition to that leadership role while also bringing your team with you. By communicating with clarity, being strategic in your thinking, like discovering new ways of how you can think about problems and solve problems. And then all of a sudden, there’s an alignment between what it is that you’re wanting to build as a leader and the team that’s supporting you to make that happen.
Lorie Spence: Fantastic. What are the top three things people moving into leadership don’t get in current professional development plans? Because I know this is usually something of an area we’ve talked about in the past.
Kirsten Schmidtke: Yeah. I mean, so I would say three things. One is the understanding and clarity of what that identity shift really looks like. Two, I would say alignment on how do we expand on the strengths that are really specific to the individual. And lastly, I would also go back to that goal standards action piece and really getting clarity on vision. So let me maybe break that down a little bit more.
Within organizations, we get so much information, which is wonderful, right? It helps us to really be experts on the service, on the product, whatever it is that we are bringing into the market to help to solve problems. But what happens is, with so much information, we don’t actually find opportunities, or there’s not development opportunities. With organizations to really see that transformation, like I said, that identity shift from individual contributor or possibly manager type of level to that leader, director or higher level within the organization. And that all starts with really understanding who you are and who you want to be in this next level of leadership. And so that’s why I think really, it starts with that identity shift is number one.
Number two is strengths. Right? An individual level, really, identifying and understanding what comes naturally to you. How can you expand on that? How can you maybe identify where there could be opportunities to augment in areas that maybe don’t come as naturally to you? Like, this is a very much more like specific approach to you as an individual and how you operate in the workplace and how we can actually help you to do more of what’s already great and already good about you. Sometimes we can default to what we’ve seen other leaders do or we’ve seen other people do. And while that may have worked for them, it’s not always gonna work for us. So we really wanna focus in on the strengths of that leader, of that individual, and how we can help them to grow from those strengths.
And then, like I said, the last is that clarity of vision and mission. Without that, everything else kind of falls. Apart, everything starts to break down. There’s a lot of ambiguity. Team members aren’t really sure how to interpret messaging or interpret conversations. They start kind of chasing after different priorities. And all of a sudden, this very disintegrated team. And so when we can really sit down and follow a framework that, again, allows you to have that clarity of the goal, the standards and the actions. All of a sudden, everything lines up. People know why they’re showing up to work, how they’re contributing to the team, and you really see momentum start to build through that clarity of the mission and goal that the leader really wants to align the team to deliver.
Lorie Spence: Fantastic. I know in healthcare we always reference precision medicine and these very targeted approaches. How would you say precision medicine approach translates to leadership and coaching? And what’s the value around professional development just beyond someone’s institution?
Kirsten Schmidtke: I talked a little bit about how understanding our strengths and also understanding our thinking patterns and how we respond. To certain situations and really cultivating a level of self awareness, it can have a ripple effect right when we understand why we make decisions in a certain way, or again like how we respond to certain situations, that can really help us at an individual level be able to shift our decision making going forward. Or see two, three, four steps down the line of what our decisions are, like how they’re impacting other areas of the business or other members of the team. And so I think that specific kind of custom curated type of approach, right? Is coaching really helping to solve for that one specific challenge or problem or help that one person to find a way or solution to moving through a problem versus just assuming that everyone’s responding the same way or behaving the same way or thinking in the same way. And so that idea of really taking a step back and getting clear on an individual level, like, how do I cultivate a level of self awareness so that I can be more responsive than reactive. I can again, see kind of like, you know, a few steps past my decision how that’s gonna have a broader impact. And so I think that level of just kind of focusing on the individual can just, I think, relate very much to the field, and like you said, precision medicine. And I think it has a ripple effect because when we have that level of awareness and how we’re making decisions, it just cascades throughout everything that we’re doing. And so it benefits the team members that we’re supporting, possibly the clients, the customers, the patients, anyone. That we’re serving within, like, the broader ecosystem actually benefits from us understanding ourselves better.
Lorie Spence: So, interestingly, coaching can apply to different stages of career, different points in time. How would you respond to that?
Kirsten Schmidtke: Absolutely. I really believe that there’s different coaches for different seasons. For different times in life, work, whatever. It is wherever you want to move faster, where you wanna see results, shift and change. There are coaches. Coaching is such an amazing industry because if it’s health related, maybe you’re looking for a health coach, maybe it’s a business coach, a sales coach, depending on what you’re most focused on, because the power of coaching is it helps to collapse time. When you have a coach in your corner, you’re working with a coach, you’re able to move at a much faster pace towards the goal. That or the result, or even just feeling better about work, feeling better about your health, whatever that is for you. Coaching can help you to get there faster. So I always like to say that, yeah, coaching collapses time and different season. You could definitely, you can always find the coach that is can meet you where you are in that season and help you get where you wanna go faster.
Lorie Spence: I know coaching is very valuable to add to a leadership parent and you know, first hand. I would like to just say thanks for joining us. I think, you know, we look forward to seeing more of what you’re doing and how we can, you know, continue to support leaders in the healthcare industry. Maybe you can tell us before you sign off where people can find you.
Kirsten Schmidtke: Absolutely. So you can always find me on social media. LinkedIn is my preferred platform. It’s just my full name, Kirsten Schmidtke. And for those listening that want to explore more of these themes around leader leadership and that identity shift and identifying what might be, you know, getting you in the way of really creating that transformation in yourself and on your team. I do also offer leader power hours where we sit down, we just get really clear on what’s the goal, what’s in the way, and what’s the one growth lever that you can pull that really could create change across the organization and that you can find on my website. At kirstenshmidtke.com.
Lorie Spence: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Kirsten.
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