The Ripple Effect of Leadership: Inspiring Change in Cancer Care and Beyond

In her monthly leadership series, Barbara Schmidtman, PhD, vice president of cancer care operations, at Corewell Health in West Michigan, offers her perspective on addressing workforce-related issues through effective leadership practices. Find all her posts in this blog series on the ACCC website. 

Hello ACCC colleagues! After a 12-month hiatus from my leadership blog series, I’m back, returning to you with monthly leadership topics I truly hope will inspire you. In this first blog of 2025, I will chat about why I took a break and share a special lesson I learned that inspired me to find the time in my chaotic schedule to put my thoughts on paper.  

Sometimes we need to take a break from something, even if that something is incredibly important to us. 2024 was one of the busiest years of my life, as I set huge goals for my personal and professional development. To be honest, there were many potential inspiring blog topics along the way that I wish I had found the time to share with you all, but I simply wasn’t able to.

Or at least I was making the excuse to myself that I couldn’t make the time. But there was one particular situation this past fall that inspired me and made me realize the impact each one of us has on other people, some of whom we may never have even met. This ripple effect—defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “a situation where one event causes a series of other events to take place”—showed me that we never know how much our actions can impact one another, and it has led me back to you all, and to writing.

My Ripple Effect

In early fall 2024, my schedule finally started to lighten up a bit and my husband and I joined a golf league. One night, a fellow player we had golfed with a few times was there with her husband. The husband mentioned to me that he was a cancer survivor, that he had Google searched my name and found my ACCC blogs and other leadership writings, and how much the various writings inspired him. This was the first time since I began my blog series that I heard someone, especially someone outside of the ACCC, express appreciation for the words I had previously put on paper.

After the league finished, he, his wife, my husband, and I stood around talking for a bit about his journey with cancer and how something as simple as what I was writing about could inspire and motivate others. This moment allowed me the chance to reflect that this blog series is meaningful to others in a way I didn’t understand or expect. I realized then that I absolutely needed to find the time to prioritize this work because of the ripple effect it could have on others.

Let’s Continue the Ripple Effect With Our Actions

This is just one example, but the ripple effect is related to so many other areas of life. If you sit back for a moment and reflect on how many times you said you didn’t have the time, you may realize that perhaps you could have found that extra 30 minutes to write, go for a run with a friend, send a kind note to someone, learn something new, or work on that special project you have been thinking about for years.

As leaders, we are in a unique position to continually create our own ripple effect. That could be through a person we help get to the next step in their career, or the patient for whom we make a few extra minutes while rounding to make a special connection. This lovely experience reminded me just how much of a difference we can make for each other, big or small.

Whatever it is for you, I urge you to think about what a difference these moments can make, not only in your own life, but in the life of another person, through something as simple as smiling at a stranger. As we kick off 2025, I encourage you to take action. If there is something you have been longing to do, or you stopped doing and you miss, or something you have been afraid to do, you owe it to yourself, and those silently observing you, to act.

Over the next year, I am so excited to continue the ripple effect as I write about topics such as overcoming self-doubt, becoming better versions of ourselves, “smelling” what is around us, fragility, the ladder of inference, and sympathy/empathy, just to name a few!

In the grand scheme of things, we only have a short time here, and we are merely a few generations away from being forgotten, unless we act and find a way to make meaningful change. This is how our character lives on.

Barbara Schmidtman, PhD, has worked in health care for more than 20 years in a variety of professional and clinical roles. Currently, she is the vice president of operations for cancer care at Corewell Health in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she oversees 17 Betty Ford Breast Screening and Diagnostic Centers, 6 cancer centers that offer comprehensive cancer care services, and non-oncology infusion centers. Dr. Schmidtman serves as the chair of the Governmental Affairs Committee for the Association of Cancer Care Centers (ACCC) and previously served as the chair of the Workforce Subcommittee for the ACCC.

Dr. Schmidtman earned her Ph.D. in business administration, where she specialized in industrial organizational psychology. Dr. Schmidtman is involved in the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, speaks nationally on leadership topics, and has authored several articles in oncology journals related to leadership and team member burnout within the cancer community. Her doctoral research has focused on physician leadership styles and how those styles affect teams either negatively or positively. Dr. Schmidtman has received several awards; she is a dual-time winner of the Forty Under 40 for the Michiana and Southwest Michigan communities (2018, 2021), the Leo Soorus Leadership Award at Corewell Health South (2019), and the Innovator of the Year Award from the American Cancer Society (2019) for her studies related to use of virtual reality for anxiety reduction in oncology infusion clinics.