In this post: Synergy Health Partners CEO Gautam Shirhattikar explains VUCA leadership, how he uses the OODA loop to lead through constant change, and why the pace of a company's growth depends on the pace at which its leaders grow.
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About 11 years ago, Gautam Shirhattikar took his first job as a chief executive. Within three months, the insurance companies changed the reimbursement model, and most of the company's revenue disappeared overnight.
"I felt like I learned 10x from that experience than I would have if the environment would have been stable," he said on Activating Greatness, the leadership podcast from Velocity Advisory Group.
Today Shirhattikar is Chief Executive Officer of Synergy Health Partners, the fourth business he has grown or started from scratch. He has also led MyCare Medical Group and Pharmaco Ventures, served as chief financial officer at Vein Clinics of America, held a strategy role at Cardinal Health, and started his career at McKinsey & Company. He arrived in the United States from India with two suitcases and "the last 800 bucks in my pocket from my parents' life savings."
That path taught him VUCA leadership: how to lead through volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Host Alec McChesney put the theme simply. Shirhattikar runs toward the fire.
"Leaders have to lead very differently in environments where things are constantly changing," Shirhattikar said. Geopolitics, artificial intelligence, and shifting markets mean leaders need a blueprint not only to lead through change but to bring people along with it.
He starts with a thought experiment. Imagine growing up in the 1500s, taught by your parents that the earth is flat. Then Galileo and Kepler present a different set of facts. Do you hold on to what you were taught, or do you reorient to the new information? The leaders who handle change well, he said, are the ones curious enough to observe what is happening and flexible enough to change their response.
For the method, Shirhattikar turns to Colonel John Boyd, the Air Force strategist who created the OODA loop: observe, orient, decide, and act.
When change hits, most leaders feel a jolt of panic. Navy SEAL officers are trained to answer that moment with a simple instruction: "Relax and take a look around." Stepping back moves the brain from an emotional, reactive state into one where it can observe. In a company, that means gathering whatever data is available, even when it is incomplete.
Orienting comes next, and he called it even more important. New information is useless if a leader decides the earth is still flat. Once leaders orient, they can explain the changed reality to their people, decide on a new objective, and act. Then the loop starts again. Did the action produce what the situation needed?
He shared an example from Synergy Health Partners. The team changed how new patients were scheduled to make clinic days more organized for providers. New patient numbers fell. When leaders stepped back, they saw the change had limited how quickly patients could get care, which is how a health care practice wins. The fix was a hybrid: Patients could book freely, and the call center then adjusted the day to give physicians room to keep up. Within a week, new patients were up and providers were happy.
FREE ONE-PAGE CHECKLIST
Use it to separate the facts from the alarm, step back to see the field, and decide without stalling the next time change hits your team.
Shirhattikar does not just tolerate disruption. He looks for it. "In every change, there is also opportunity that is hidden within that change," he said.
In a recent meeting, after 45 minutes on a hard problem, he told his senior leaders, "So we have no idea what is going on here, and that's wonderful and exciting." The room laughed. The point stuck. "By repeatedly putting yourself in situations where you're comfortable with being uncomfortable, you learn how to operate and lead," he said.
Earlier in his career, he admitted, he leaped without observing or orienting. A daily practice of self-reflection and meditation changed that. He meditates at 4 a.m., when his mind is clearest, and lets the previous day settle before he acts. As a high Eagle in the Birds communication framework, he still feels the pull to act right away. The pause helps him decide whether to act as planned or to reorient. McChesney has explored the same habit of slowing down with Michelle Dauphinais on curiosity.
Leading others starts with leading yourself. "Every single day, all I'm trying to do is walk into the office trying to earn my job," Shirhattikar said. Mastery, he added, "is an ongoing process, not an endpoint."
He tells the leaders he develops that growth will be uncomfortable, like the first sore days at the gym. Then he makes a promise. "I'm invested in your success, and I won't abandon you on this leadership journey, no matter how tough it gets."
He rejects the idea that development and results compete. "It is possible to work on leadership growth at the same time that those leaders have to deliver results," he said. Stronger leaders produce better results, which builds more confidence, and the cycle compounds like a flywheel.
"In every change, there is also opportunity that is hidden within that change."
Gautam Shirhattikar, Chief Executive Officer, Synergy Health Partners
He once listed seven measures for a private equity board. Building an executive team came first, culture and core values second, and financial value seventh. A partner asked whether number seven should be number one. Shirhattikar laughed and explained that without the first six, the seventh never comes. "If your leaders don't scale with the organization, the spaghetti is not going to come out right," he said. Leaders steering similar change can compare notes with Melissa Pepper on transformational change.
Many executives worry about the leaders coming up behind them. Shirhattikar is excited. He now invests in four entrepreneurs, started a philanthropic fund to help startups grow, and serves on the board of trustees at International House, where an entrepreneurship fellowship recently drew more than 60 applications for three spots.
When someone seems disengaged, he flips the question to what he can own. "Nobody comes to their first day at work saying, I'm just going to do really bad today," he said. He borrows from Extreme Ownership: There are no bad teams, only bad leaders. "I truly do believe that there's a great leader sitting inside each person," he said. Like Michelangelo's David, the statue was always there. The work is chipping away what does not belong.
VUCA stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Gautam Shirhattikar, CEO of Synergy Health Partners, describes VUCA leadership as the ability to lead, and bring people along, in environments that change constantly. He learned it when most of his first company's revenue disappeared overnight, and he now treats change as a source of hidden opportunity rather than a threat.
The OODA loop, created by Colonel John Boyd, stands for observe, orient, decide, and act. Gautam Shirhattikar teaches leaders to step back and observe before reacting, then reorient to the new facts, decide, and act. The key is that it is a loop: After acting, leaders observe again to see whether the action worked and adjust quickly.
Gautam Shirhattikar relies on a daily practice of self-reflection and meditation at 4 a.m., when his mind is clearest. He borrows the Navy SEAL instruction to "relax and take a look around," which shifts the brain out of a reactive state. His advice is to pause before drawing conclusions, because that pause is where better choices appear.
No, according to Gautam Shirhattikar. He believes leaders can grow while they deliver results, and that stronger leaders produce better results, which builds more confidence in a compounding cycle. He tells private equity partners that financial value is the outcome of building an executive team and a strong culture, not a goal that can be reached by skipping them.
HOW VELOCITY HELPS
Shirhattikar measures his impact by the rate at which his leaders grow, and he expects them to grow while they deliver results. Velocity's Leadership Development program is built the same way. It runs for a year on the 70/20/10 model, combining cohort coaching, reinforcement calls, and a Velocity Coach paired with every participant, so leaders practice new skills on real work instead of stepping away from it. The result is a bench that can observe, orient, and act when the environment changes.
See how Velocity works with hospitals and health care organizations.
Shirhattikar's best advice came from a six-time private equity CEO, who told him he would lead a company one day. The question was, "What kind of leader do you want to be?" It took him a week to answer. His counsel now is to define that style, say it out loud, and test whether people experience it.
That question fits everything else he shared. Change will keep coming, and no leader will have all the answers. The leaders who know who they want to be can pause, look around, and run toward the fire with their teams behind them.
Hear Gautam Shirhattikar's full conversation with host Alec McChesney on Activating Greatness. Find it on YouTube, or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
FREE GUIDE
Shirhattikar's stop-doing answer was rushing to conclusions. This short framework helps leaders ask better questions before offering answers, especially when the pressure is on.