Intentional Leadership Is a System, Not a Mindset — with Michael Dixon

Mind the Fish Tank: Michael Dixon on Leading Culture With Intention

In this post: UNeMed's Michael Dixon compares culture to a fish tank: it stays healthy only when leaders tend it on purpose. He explains how intentional hiring, real ownership, and room to fail keep a small team running at full strength.

When Michael Dixon was getting ready to hire, a former boss gave him a warning that had nothing to do with résumés.

"Look, you've got a fish tank now," the boss told him. "Every time you introduce a fish, it changes everything. So be really thoughtful as you add or subtract, because you change your environment."

Dixon has thought of his office that way ever since. He leads UNeMed, the organization at the University of Nebraska Medical Center that turns campus research into products that help people. Roughly $250 million in research on that campus produces about 125 to 130 new ideas a year, and every one of them lands with Dixon's team of 11. They vet the ideas, file intellectual property, talk to venture capital, license technology to existing companies, and help launch new ones.

That is a heavy, complex workload for a small group. On Episode 26 of Activating Greatness, the leadership podcast from Velocity Advisory Group, Dixon argued that the workload is exactly why culture cannot be left to chance.

The Checklist Always Wins Unless You Choose Otherwise

For Dixon, intentional leadership comes down to one word. "As I think of intentionality, it's really, to me it's culture," he said. "It's being intentional about your culture."

The trouble is that culture never shouts. The demands on a leader, he said, are "a constant barrage and it never ends." In that noise, the easy path is obvious. "If you don't consciously redirect yourself to make sure that you're handling the things that enable the culture that you want, it's really easy to say I've got 25 things on my checklist that I need to get done. I'm just going to focus on those," he said.

The culture work does not reward you on any quarterly timeline. "They aren't going to show up on a metric tomorrow. They aren't going to show up on my board report next quarter," Dixon said. Yet those are the things that will make the organization successful years from now.

The fish tank explains the cost of neglect. Small, consistent maintenance keeps it healthy. Skip it, and the bill comes due. "You ignore it for a couple of weeks, you come back from a vacation, no one's taking care of it, you could have some problems you've got to deal with," he said. "If you lose control of it, it's going to take a lot of your time to try to get that back."

Let People Grow Where Their Energy Is

A healthy tank also lets its inhabitants thrive. Dixon shifts duties toward people's strengths, sometimes in big moves and sometimes in small ones, and he lets them experiment.

His favorite example is a PhD on his licensing and marketing team whose training was entirely in science. The employee was curious about Salesforce development at the same moment the office needed a new CRM. Dixon told him to try it. The result was a custom build that still saves the office money, one that would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy, and the employee kept doing the rest of his job.

That employee has since moved on to work as a Salesforce developer. Dixon does not see that as a loss. "Ultimately my goal is to train people to take over my job or to find jobs like mine to take over," he said. Former colleagues now work at other universities and companies across the country, and that network has become an asset he calls on regularly.

The payoff of passion projects inside a small team, he said, is outsized. "It's a multiplier. It's not additive."

Parry Headrick makes a similar case for hiring smart people and getting out of the way.

The Polar Bear Test

Asked how he handles gaps on the team, Dixon said he sometimes steps in himself, usually for the short term. More often, the team solves the problem before he hears about it.

"If I was eaten by a polar bear tomorrow, nothing would change," he said. "The office would run the same."

"If I was eaten by a polar bear tomorrow, nothing would change."

Michael Dixon, UNeMed, University of Nebraska Medical Center

That is the design goal. His people have agency and ownership over their areas, which frees him for strategy and relationships. He describes his own role in football terms. "My job is to do blocking, tackling, and take a few bullets here and there so that they can do their jobs," he said. That includes the unglamorous work. "If we need to haul chairs to the event hall, that's something I can do." He summed up the posture in one line: "I'm not a fan of leading from a throne."

Dixon is quick to share credit for the culture itself. He inherited much of it from his mentor, Jim Linder, after a 2007 reorganization brought several groups together. "I'm better at maintaining than building from scratch," Dixon said.

Results Over Process, and Room to Fail

Ownership only works if people have room to move. As a university-adjacent 501(c)(3), UNeMed can change course quickly. "If we want to change something, we can change it in a meeting by the coffee pot," Dixon said. That speed, he said, gives people hope that their input has impact.

He also keeps the focus on outcomes. "We want the result, not the process," he said. Documented processes serve as guidelines, not scripture, and smart people are expected to improve them.

The team's scientific background shapes how it treats failure. In graduate school, Dixon said, "if we succeeded 10% of the time, we were like rock stars." The office applies the same method to its work: test, learn, document, and try the next hypothesis. "Not everything's going to be successful," he said. "In fact, most aren't, and that's OK."

Rapid-Fire Leadership Lessons

• Daily habit: Show up and do the little stuff. If the team sees you carry the chairs and cook the food, "they'll follow you a lot of places."
• Most underrated skill: The ability to listen. The problems that reach leaders usually lack easy answers, and quick fixes rarely help.
• Stop doing: Chasing fads. Adopt something only if it fits. "Your culture needs to be your culture."
• Best advice: Hire people smarter than you, and hire slow, fire fast. Be intentional about who enters the fishbowl, because a poor fit can take years to unwind.

The Takeaway: People Are the Environment

Dixon's best advice circles back to the tank. "People are really important. I think they're the most important part," he said. Sometimes a person is a good person and still not the right fit, and a leader has to be willing to act on that. Joe Crandall explained why those hard decisions define leaders.

Culture is not a slogan or a ping-pong table. It is the sum of who you let in, how much ownership you give them, and whether you make time for it when the board report is due. Tend the tank a little every day, or it will demand far more of your time later.

Listen to the Full Episode

Hear Michael Dixon's full conversation with host Alec McChesney on Activating Greatness. Find it on YouTube, or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Learn more about UNeMed at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.