Why Emotional Intelligence is the Missing Skill in Surgical Leadership | Gina Catalano

---

Gina Catalano shares how EQ drives elite performance in healthcare and beyond.

This episode shows how emotional intelligence drives better outcomes in high-stakes fields like surgery. It highlights how EQ training reduces risk, improves teamwork, and why thought leadership is key to bringing these skills into expert-driven environments.

How do you grab the attention of the smartest person in the room and introduce an idea that could fundamentally change their approach to leadership?

In this insightful episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, Gina Catalano, President of Central Forza Group and author of The Leadership Wake Up Call, joins Bill Sherman to discuss her pioneering work in developing emotional intelligence (EQ) for surgeon leaders—a skill set largely overlooked in traditional medical training.

Gina shares how her journey from managing medical device teams in Fortune 500 healthcare organizations led her to recognize a critical gap: Surgeons possess extraordinary technical skills but often lack training in emotional intelligence. Her unique insight is transforming how surgeons engage with patients, teams, and even mitigate malpractice risks.

She explains the compelling data behind EQ’s impact, highlighting research correlating higher EQ among surgeons with lower malpractice claims. Gina also details her groundbreaking project with Duke University’s general surgery residency, where she’s building a curriculum to instill essential EQ skills early in surgical training.

Listeners will learn how Gina’s personal experiences and keen observations evolved into a compelling speaking and writing career, all centered around equipping elite performers with the “power skills” needed for true leadership success.

This episode isn’t just about developing better surgeon leaders—it’s about creating profound, measurable changes that enhance patient care and team performance.

Three Key Takeaways

Emotional intelligence is critical for elite performance — Especially in high-pressure fields like surgery, EQ impacts malpractice rates, team dynamics, and patient outcomes.

Thought leadership bridges knowledge gaps — Introducing EQ to surgeon leaders requires translating soft skills into evidence-based, practical tools that resonate with data-driven professionals.

Early intervention creates lasting change — Embedding emotional intelligence training into medical residency programs can shape more effective leaders from the start.

If this episode got you thinking about the power of emotional intelligence in high-performance environments, you’ll want to keep going with our conversation with David Wood: The Effects of Soft Skills in Thought Leadership. Both episodes tackle a common challenge—how to introduce and scale “soft skills” like EQ in expert-driven fields where they’re often undervalued. Gina Catalano and David Wood each show that these so-called soft skills are actually mission-critical for leadership, trust-building, and long-term success.

Listen now and discover how soft skills can create hard results.

---

Transcript

Bill Sherman In thought leadership, your target audience may be the smartest people in the room. So how do you get their attention and show them there’s something they don’t already know, something that could change how they work and improve outcomes? But you have to tell them that they may have overlooked the idea because it doesn’t come from their own field. Gina Catalano, president of Central Forza Group and author of the Leadership Wake Up Call. Is helping surgeon leaders build the emotional intelligence skills that aren’t typically taught in med school classes or in surgical residencies, but are critical for leadership success. In this episode, we explore Gina’s journey from the operating room to the practice of thought leadership, and we explore how thought leadership can be used to bring an established idea to a new audience. I’m Bill Sherman, and you’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Let’s begin. Welcome to the show, Gina.

Gina Catalano Glad to be here, Bill.

Bill Sherman So you have, over the course of your career, focused on a very specific target audience in terms of surgeon leaders. And I wanna set sort of the context for that in your experience both in corporate and now your work in the organization. How did you get to working with them? And what is it like working with that?

Gina Catalano That’s a great question. So I have led five different Fortune 500 teams across healthcare systems, working closely with surgeon leaders, healthcare executives, and that space is very specific. It’s critical environments, it’s very stressful, and it’s extremely complex. And so I’ve worked closely With those individuals for years. Your question about why, right? Is I noticed a theme over time that they are intelligent leaders and the clinical skills that they have get them into the operating room, but the emotional intelligence skills can cause a whole lot of trouble for them when they are not present.

Bill Sherman So you’re bringing emotional intelligence training and skills to an audience that may not have encountered these concepts even though they may be part of the general business lexicon. Am I correct in thinking that you get a response of wait where does this come from and why Have I never heard about this before?

Gina Catalano Correct. I think the words that are used under emotional intelligence, the five pillars, you know, they’ve been discussed about in different ways, but they were known as soft skills. It’s very corporaty, right? But in the healthcare space and surgical leadership spaces, they’re coming up as surgical residents. This is not something they get trained on. And yet it’s critical for their environment professionally and frankly even personally.

Bill Sherman Well, and to build on that, your patient for surgery may be under anesthesia during the procedure, but you have an engagement with them pre and post or their loved ones pre and post. Plus you’re one of a team that will be working in the surgical environment.

Gina Catalano Correct. Yes. And you know, I’m, I’ve working on a project right now. This will support this discussion point, which is building a curriculum for surgical, for general surgically surgical residents to build emotional. Yes. It’s to build their surgical, their skills. And as I was digging up a lot of the studies that have been there, one that just popped up at the top of the list was in regards to… Go ahead. That’s with Duke, right? With the surgical residents? Yes. So we are building a curriculum to weave in their normal, general surgical resident curriculum, which is focused on emotional intelligence. I like to call them power skills. They were known as soft skills and there’s a direct correlation in their Day to day. Operations from a surgery perspective, working with teams, working with patients. And as I looked at different studies to back this up and anchor this training, one popped up which was in regards to malpractice claims. There is a direct relationship with surgeons that have high EQ and lower malpractice claims versus surgeons with lower EQ and higher malpractice claims. And it’s important.

Bill Sherman Especially if you’re the MedBal insurance provider underwriting a surgeon, right? I’m not familiar with the literature, but I could also see that patient SAT scores could also have a correlation. I could see surgical team retention and burnout having an issue. I could see also then. Career success and promotability being a piece as well. And so do you rise through the ranks to go from surgeon to surgeon leader around EI? But I want to circle back and ask you a question because I realized this and I think we assumed something without me asking. So if you’re working with surgeon leaders in Fortune 500 in corporate, You are talking about E I you were probably, and I want to clarify, was it product or was it materials? How did the E I become part of this conversation on that? Cause I think we skipped over a step.

Gina Catalano Yes, so I’ll try to connect the dots. When I led surgical teams from a medical device standpoint, so sales professionals that worked in operating rooms with devices with these surgeons and healthcare executives, and how EQ popped up is just day-to-day. Being in an operating room when something critical was happening, like a surgeon. Working close to a pulmonary vein or artery and noticing how the room got silent because they knew that this was an important moment for them to focus. And when things went a little sideways, also noticing surgeons that remained calm and handled the team well and appropriately moved forward to take care of the patient and others that frankly did not deescalate the situation. And so the theme keeps popping up and up. When you’re working with extremely intelligent individuals, which surgeons are, then you also have egos and they would all tell you that they understand that as well. All of that combined with a lack of self-awareness, sometimes a lack of self regulation of their emotions, social skills, communication skills, and empathy really leads to a fun little complex environment.

Bill Sherman And let’s build on that for a second. I can see where if you’re leading device teams and you have a team member report back and say, Hey, we had an issue and you know, this is something I could see where you look and you go, we have to have a. Team to team conversation. I don’t see. And I want you to dig into is how does that become an area of thought leadership? For you because there’s one thing to say, okay, this is a leadership team management thing that I have to address for my team versus I’m going to take this out to the world. I’m gonna get, write a book, I’m to speak, I am going to teach on these skills. At some point, something switched on in you, or there was an aha moment.

Gina Catalano What was it? You know, I think over time, I would have surgeons, executives, my team say, gosh, why is it so easy for you to handle conflict? Gina, you seem to be so natural in challenging adverse environments, or you handle that really well, can you teach me that? How did you know what to say? How did not offend anyone? And part of it was because I learned through my own failures. And the other part of it was I studied it. I practiced it. So your question was why did I wanna take this out into the world, build a company, and work directly with these frankly elite performers that they need elite level coaching and they do… The almost the hardest jobs in health care. They’re in a very stressful environment. It’s extremely critical because patients’ lives are at stake. I just saw this gap build and it didn’t go away. It was over and over again. So many people missed these skills. And I knew I could make an impact working closely with them. So talk to me about.

Bill Sherman Impact, right? So there’s different motivators. I could see you saying, Hey, there’s a business opportunity here in terms of I can teach this and generate revenue. But I could also see you. Oh, I have a calling to translate this to an audience. What is, or what was the motivator for you? Which sort of thing said, yeah, I’m going to make this jump.

Gina Catalano So the light bulb, I think many people had light bulb moments during COVID. And for me, that definitely was a shift because it really forces you to look at your core values and focus on things that really matter most and what’s your why, okay? And then the second piece was. I found myself in the last company leading teams and working with a leadership environment where a brand new director came in and I was extremely hopeful that she, because of her background, would bring a new culture that is anchored in EQ. And long story short, she missed the mark. As a matter of fact, she was like 180 degrees in the opposite direction. And that was the straw that kind of broke the camel’s back to make me jump and say, okay, I need to be the one to do this. And I did feel a calling. I feel it’s what I’m gifted at, and it means the most to me. And I love being part of that transformation and that shift when I work with people.

Bill Sherman So earlier we jumped to, I think, later in the story, talking about Duke and your working with residents. But that wasn’t your first step in thought leadership. I think your first and thought leadership was speaking. Am I remembering right? Yes. Tell me about that and how you got into speaking and how the speech came together.

Gina Catalano I had a goal at the beginning of the year to do a TEDx talk and it’s still in construction. I’ve applied at many different places and I do feel that that’s going to happen. But while I was pulling that together, I had been asked to start to do some keynotes to come in and to talk to different groups. And it allowed me to pull together. Just stories, examples, things that I’ve been through in my life, which frankly were anchored in emotional intelligence as well. So as I was pulling together these things in a timeline and I saw what worked and frankly what doesn’t work, it allowed me to pull together a topic, which is really the shift that EQ makes in everyone’s lives. And it brought me to be able to speak to different groups, Two. To start to create this whole thing, this whole environment.

Bill Sherman But tell me about that first group you speak in front of, was that a client, was it a relationship that you levered, leveraged? How did the opportunity come out and you, and how did you say, yeah, I’ll do that.

Gina Catalano So yes, it’s one of those things where you say, yes, I’ll do that, and then you have to back into it and do all the preparation to get it done.

Bill Sherman Which we always underestimate how much work that is, right?

Gina Catalano We do. We really do. And you really have to put time in and you pull it together and you rally. And so it started by connecting with a bunch of other female leaders. There’s a workshop in the Raleigh area where women are learning public speaking skills. They want to build their communication. They wanna build their confidence. And I was asked to attend that group and it’s a pretty large group. During that meeting, I bumped into some other. Female leaders and one worked at a financial company that was local to Raleigh and she said, you know, my company brings in outside speakers to do some professional development. And we like to have people come in over lunch and speak on a topic that we can learn from because not only is it important for us, but as we’re leading people in the financial markets and environment, building out their retirements and helping them. We want to grow as individuals. That’s how it all started, is a lunch meeting in front of a group, in front a company.

Bill Sherman And it wasn’t even with surgeon leaders, it was financial services, which might trigger, you know, a coronary issue that requires a surgeon leader, but, you know, so you’re translating this, you’re speaking, you are working and coaching with people, and then there’s another light bulb moment that says, I should write a book, tell me about that. Was this a long term aspiration or did it come out of the blue?

Gina Catalano Now, it was a bit organic as to how that happened. I had a couple of different people say, oh my gosh, if you wrote something, I would so read it. Or my boss needs to read something about this. Or the person that I work with, my team, really needs some EQ lessons. And that started tugging me in the direction to… Write down my stories, which my history, my leading teams over 20 plus years, as I was building out my keynote, some of those stories came to light. As I was getting asked additional questions or people would say those things, it was tugging me in that direction where I said, you know, I wonder how this would all come about if I just sat down focused. And wrote all of the lessons that I had learned, and then started doing some research to back up the things that my gut knew to really solidify it. And that was the journey. So the book is titled The Leadership.

Bill Sherman Wake-up call, right? Correct, correct. Is it targeted specifically to surgeon leaders or is it targeted more broadly? Who’s your reader?

Gina Catalano So. The answer is yes. It is more. Yes, it’s targeted to surgeon leaders. It’s also targeted to healthcare executives because many of the stories come from my history and leading teams, but it also can fit corporate professionals. Someone that is in a leadership role that doesn’t know how to get from A to B or is struggling with their team and doesn’t why it feels so difficult. Having a hard time building a culture, building psychological safety within their team and trust. Those individuals will get a lot out of this book.

Bill Sherman If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a five-star review at ratethispodcast.com forward slash LTL and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as thoughtleadershipleverage.com forward slash podcasts.

Bill Sherman So we’re recording in May of 2025, what’s your release date? The goal is June 1st. Okay, so by the time this is out, this may actually be launched. So you’ve got a manuscript written at this point. Your 30-ish days from launch, plus or minus. Talk to me about your headspace. Where are you now? Cause in some ways the heavy work of writing is done. Yes. And you’re looking at the next step of the journey. What does it feel like right now and where are you focused?

Gina Catalano So I am excited. I’m a little bit nervous, and I can’t wait to get it in the hands of so many people that I know will impact their current environment, personal and professional. And it’s been through final edit. We’re getting ready to have a printed version so I can do my last read and make sure everything is tight and looks good. And then it’s a down.

Bill Sherman And you’re gonna do the unboxing video, I see.

Gina Catalano Oh, yeah.

Bill Sherman Write a passage for an author.

Gina Catalano It comes and you’re like, oh, so excited. I don’t know what that’s gonna feel yet to have it in my hands, but I think that’s going to be a very surreal moment. And then.

Bill Sherman You get to launch, what are you doing to get the book into the hands of your target audience? What does launch look like? Those are probably questions that are percolating right now and decisions being made.

Gina Catalano Absolutely, yes. And I appreciate your earlier feedback, Bill, just with so many of the other leaders that you’ve worked with in that I am taking the time to reach out to COOs, CEOs of a lot of the hospital systems that I know and will provide the book for their insight and their feedback and would love for them to share. Where they see value, not only for themselves, but within their teams. So I’m building out that piece right now, but I am really, really excited to get it in their hands.

Bill Sherman Well, and there’s the difference between a book, which is designed to be sold a mass market versus let me get into the hands of the right people and good things will happen. Right. Yes. And so like we talked about earlier, you could probably build a list of surgeon leaders in North America by name. That’s not a massive- body of people, right? And certainly then when you get to hospital system leaders as well, and those who are really interested in surgical outcomes, you can do some targeted messaging and outreach in a very different way than if this was just another book on leadership.

Gina Catalano Correct. This is very much real-life scenarios, reflection prompts, storytelling backed by studies, which is what usually motivates and is anchored on the clinical side of things anyway.

Bill Sherman Right, because your surgeons are all practicing evidence-based medicine rather than ‘Eh, this feels good’.

Gina Catalano Correct. And the goal is truly for it to resonate. So that they can make an impact almost immediately, right? The starting place with emotional intelligence is self-awareness. And there are things that can be done to bring them up in that space and move forward and then decide to do the work.

Bill Sherman Well, and you reference self-awareness, self-regulation, and then other awareness and other adaptation. I mean, that’s going back to the original work on E.I. By Sullivan and Meyer, right? And as much as you have surgeon scientists who are used to reading the literature, that That’s a literature that they’re not reading, and they just describe as squishy. Versus, no, this is pretty well empirically documented and has been tested again and again. Not only in general populations, but in high performing teams and high stakes situations. Would you be of interest in that?

Gina Catalano Right? They will not take the time. They only have limited time and they will not the time to grow, to professionally grow in an area if they don’t believe that is going to impact them and that it is based, like you said, in science, in studies, and it matters. So it can’t be squishy. It has to be real life, impactful, transformational. It does. Right.

Bill Sherman And so also probably, and I’m generalizing here, many of your physicians, certainly those who went through surgical residency had limited exposure to social sciences, social science research, and the body of literature on organizational development, team effectiveness, et cetera. And therefore go, Oh, that’s that squishy stuff. Like the humanities. I never touched that. I was off in organic chemistry where we dealt with real data and, and quantifiable challenges.

Gina Catalano Yes, absolutely. It’s a new language, Bill. Mm-hmm. It is a new language. And they have to know the value of it and how it will impact their life before they choose to spend any time on it. Well, and you’ve got this technical.

Bill Sherman Sort of challenge as well, where you have highly educated, highly fluent leaders who are probably comfortable reading a journal article and looking at the data in that. And at the same time, you ask them, well, what about this research over here? Oh, no, I don’t touch that. Right? So you have to break it down. Into a 101 sort of entry-level way, and at the same time, respect, these are scientists.

Gina Catalano Mm-hmm. That’s a tough joke. Yeah, they are elite, right? They are elite performers. They are highly intelligent. You want these individuals to take care of your family members. Right, but they also need a straight talking, no fluff guide to get them where they’re able to make the impact that they need to make.

Bill Sherman Let’s circle back to the work with Duke and the residency program there and incorporating that information earlier in a surgeon’s career. A, I can see value for that, but B, moving earlier in the career I think also increases receptivity. How did that opportunity come about and how are you integrating with the rest of the curriculum?

Gina Catalano Yes, thank you for that question. Because I live in the Raleigh area, I’ve worked very closely with all the health care systems here. Two of the teaching institutions, Duke being one, UNC being the other, I have spent years, almost six plus years working closely with surgeon leaders there, the health executive team there. And so as I was talking with some of my contacts and they were asking about… Centroforza group and what do we do for coaching and how do we help? You know, they’re uncovering challenges that they have on a day-to-day basis. And then that got me talking to a couple of individuals that have now taken over the general surgery resident program. And they asked me, have you ever built the curriculum for this? This is a huge gap. We see that our surgeons… Need something. We just don’t know where to start. We don’t know how we’re going to do it. And so I work closely with them. We broke it down into bite sized pieces one hour at a time. New surgery residents come in every July, and the other ones go out and this will give them an opportunity to add this to their armamentarium of things that they’re learning. And it’s going to make it I’m excited about it.

Bill Sherman Well, and I can see almost setting it up as a research study on its own, where you have a control group, whether that’s at Duke versus UNC or even previous surgical residents versus these cohorts. You can look at them not only in the short term pre and post, but you could also look longitudinally. And say, what does this do for med mal over years? So, and I’ll pitch this to you and you may say yes, or you may go, no, you’re thinking too big here, but it’s like, I can see the conference presentation for the college of surgeons who are at responsible for teaching curriculum.

Gina Catalano Yes, yes, and it’s funny you brought that up because I actually received an email today where one of the surgeons I’m working with wrote, there are multiple ways of studying this and publishing in the surgical literature. The quickest is describing the curriculum and implementation followed up with the effectiveness. And so that is now on the table. How are we then gonna put this into a study? And there’s a surgery resident who’s studying communication skills that I will be meeting with, and we’ll see where this goes. I mean, it would be great to show some effectiveness,

Bill Sherman If you can document effectiveness and do it from a scientific perspective that A makes your case, B you start recruiting allies, and then it makes it easier to go to other programs and say, would you like to license this curriculum, right? Which A has a business impact, but also then B has a scalability impact around how you get this too. Every resident in North America that you couldn’t personally ever touch and teach.

Gina Catalano That is, that’s a little overwhelming. But, but gosh, think of the legacy, think of the work and how it will shift the future surgeons and how they impact patients. That is. Wow, I only have a visual response just thinking about that right now. That’s awesome.

Bill Sherman And that visceral response, sometimes it’s a combination of the adrenaline drop or a dopamine hit followed by that sinking feeling in your stomach at the same time and a combination, this is big, but it’s necessary, but it’s big, right?

Gina Catalano 100%. Right. It can be, it can be both end, right? It can be. Yes. And scary at the same time. Overwhelming.

Bill Sherman Gina, as we begin to wrap up here, we’ve got a number of irons in the fire. I wanna give you the magic wand, and I want you to look out maybe to next year between the speaking, the book, the curricula. What does the world look like for you, as well as then for the idea? What changes?

Gina Catalano I feel truly, and this is why I do feel that I was called to start this company and for this to continue to grow. I feel that the book, I feel the speaking is just a conduit and it’s like I’m a lighthouse, Shining out all of the information that I think is going to truly enable people to change. Current environment, their future environment. And if I can impact them professionally and personally. I’ll have a heck of a year.

Bill Sherman And what I love is you have chosen a path of narrow casting, where instead of trying to reach every leader, you have a very targeted audience, you have a message that is not part of their world or standard curriculum now. And so there’s a demonstrated need and there’s a measurable impact, as you said. This can be researched by science as well as impact on medical claims, right?

Gina Catalano I want to normalize human factors. EQ not only has to do with the present, but the future. AI is not going away. But emotional intelligence is something that computers cannot replace. This is a skill, power skill, that everyone needs to have in their pockets.

Bill Sherman Thank you very much for joining us today and a delightful conversation. Good luck on the launch of the book and the curricula with a new cohort. And I look forward to hearing about your successes.

Gina Catalano Thank you so much for having me on, Bill.

Bill Sherman Okay. You’ve made it to the end of the episode, and that means you’re probably someone deeply interested in thought leadership. Want to learn even more? Here are three recommendations. First, check out the back catalog of our podcast episodes. There are a lot of great conversations with people at the top of their game, and thought leadership, as well as just starting out. Second, subscribe to our newsletter that talks about the business of thought leadership. And finally, feel free to reach out to me. My day job is helping people with big insights. Take them to scale through the practice of thought leadership. Maybe you’re looking for strategy, or maybe you want to polish up your ideas or even create new products and offerings. I’d love to chat with you. Thanks for listening.