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Kamryn Schutzer

Professor Armstrong

Leadership 450

30 September 2023

Interview with Dr. Renee Dversdal Reflection

The leader I selected to interview is Dr. Renee Deversdal. Her current job title is “the

School of Medicine Director, OHSU Simulation,” meaning that she is the director for the

simulation center at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU). In addition to this, Dr.

Dversdal is also still a practicing hospitalist at OHSU and works in six day rounds. Hospitalists

are physicians that only treat inpatients in hospital, and often have training in general medicine,

or In Dr. Dversdal’s case, internal medicine. During the time she works in hospital she does not

only provide top notch care to patients but works to teach medical students and first year

residents simultaneously. As if her plate wasn’t full enough already, Dr. Dversdal also works

consulting for a startup company attempting to design and market handheld, portable ultrasound

machines. I selected Dr. Dversdal to interview not only because of her clear success in the field

of medicine, but because I have had the privilege to work under her leadership and genuinely

look up to her not only as a physician (my future career path of choice) but as a woman in

leadership.

Her career in medicine began in Salem, Oregon where she gained a Bachelor of Arts in

biology degree with a minor in chemistry from Willamette University in 2002. During her gap

years between undergrad and medical school, she worked in the OHSU School of Dentistry

office of admissions, and then worked doing liver research at an OHSU lab until she was

accepted to OHSU School of Medicine. In 2009, Dr. Dversdal Earned her MD from OHSU and
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started her first-year internship at Massachusetts General Hospital where she also completed her

residency in internal medicine in 2012. It was during her residency that Dr. Dversdal believes she

truly learned to lead. She had some leadership experiences in high school by being a sports team

captain, but nothing could have prepared her for the intense authority shift she was going to go

through between her first year-internship and residency. During your internship you have very

little agency and there are very few opportunities to practice leadership, as everywhere you go

you have the least experience in the room and are in a position of learning; but after that one year

is over, you dramatically shift into residency. In residency you are given your own team of

interns to manage and lead and have much more authority and opportunities to practice

leadership in the workplace. Dr. Dversdal reflects on this point of her leadership journey as a

time where she learned how to fail and continue despite it, and where she first began reflecting

on her own leadership style. After residency, Dr. Dversdal returned to OHSU where she still

works as a hospitalist, and prior to her recent promotion, was the director of OHSU Point of Care

Ultrasound and the Founding General Medicine Ultrasound Fellowship Director.

It was through one of her previous positions, the Director of Point of Care Ultrasound,

that I ended up having the opportunity to not only meet but work under Dr. Dversdal. My mom is

a lecturer on the point of care ultrasound (POCUS) team that Dr. Deversdal directed for many

years, and most summers the OHSU POCUS team hosts and organizes an American Institute of

Ultrasound in Medicine (AIUM) conference where established physicians from all over the

country come to learn POCUS skills to integrate into their practices to improve their ability to

care for their patients. For these conferences, living, human ultrasound models are required for

the students to practice on, which is the role I have had the privilege to multiple times. I phrase it

as a privilege because working under Dr. Dversdal and everyone on the POCUS team at OHSU
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is always an incredible experience. Ultrasound modeling can be uncomfortable because your

body is being used as a teaching tool. It involves rooms full of strangers poking and prodding

you in intimate or uncomfortable areas, as well as situations where you can’t always understand

everything that is being said about your body due to not understanding the medical language.

Despite this unavoidable reality, I have never felt uncomfortable being a model for an OHSU

AIUM conference, and it is genuinely because of the incredible team of people who organize the

events. I always feel respected, I am encouraged to advocate for my own comfort, I am

appreciated, and the faculty always allows me to have opportunities for me to learn something as

well.

I genuinely feel the reason I have had such positive experiences working at AIUM

conferences is because of the quality of the people working on the POCUS team, but also Dr.

Dversdal’s leadership. In the short experiences I have had seeing her in action, she has built

incredible rapport with her team. She comes off as very authentic and comfortable with herself in

a leadership position, constantly asks people for feedback and genuinely takes it into future

considerations, and genuinely wants the people around her to flourish and be the best version of

themselves. Additionally, my mom, who prior to Dr. Deversdal’s promotion worked directly

under her, has never had anything but wonderful things to say about her. I was so excited to be

able to interview Dr. Dversdal about her leadership because she truly is someone whom I admire

and would like to model my own leadership after.

Unsurprisingly, my interview with Dr. Dversdal left me with a lot of great leadership

insights that we have discussed greatly throughout my time in CLP. When asked to distinguish

between leadership and authority, she defined leadership as: “Something very different from

management…the ability to wield and demonstrate certain qualities to create shared goals and a
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plan in which to achieve those goals for a group of people,” and authority as a position with an

aspect of power and control. She further distinguishes between the two by saying that leadership

involves asking and authority involves telling people what to do. In leadership you create an

environment for people to genuinely want to do what you are asking, where in positions of

authority people need to do what you are telling them due to a distance in power. This

philosophy is in strong agreement with the When Everyone Leads text, we read in the first week

of class (O’Malley et al. 5-19). Much like the text, Dr. Dversdal’s leadership definition highlights

the idea that leadership is an activity, not a position, with the use of the words: “ability” and

“demonstrate.” Additionally, her inclusion of the idea of creating a common goal is present in the

Your Leadership Edge text.

A theme throughout the interview was that Dr. Dversdal cares greatly for those around

her and makes the feelings of the people she is working with one of her top priorities. When

asked about the greatest challenges facing modern leaders, she mentioned the extreme

polarization our country is facing and the inability of the modern person to engage in productive

discourse and conflict. When talking about her strategies to mediate the adaptive challenges that

come with our situation with polarization, she mentioned a book called Crucial Conversations

which seems to have a lot of overlapping ideas with Your Leadership Edge. She says she used a

lot of strategies straight from the book including creating safe spaces for conflict, creating a

common vision, taking the temperature of groups, and searching for common ground (O’ Malley

et al. 14-55); which are strategies all brought up in Your Leadership Edge.

While Dr. Dversdal did not specifically mention the term “servant leadership;” it was

made clear to me throughout our interview process that she wholeheartedly believes that

leadership is a selfless act done for others. When I asked her about her greatest success as a
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leader, told me a story of a team that she spearheaded and created, developing to the point where

they no longer need her leadership anymore. This team was the POCUS team at OHSU. When

she started it, it was very small, and it required a lot of leadership and management from her.

Over the years the team has grown not only in number, but the more senior members have

developed as leaders as well. She has guided them not only through the acquisition of skills but

has provided them with a safe space to grow and be their best selves in and with a mission that

they are all passionate about. Dr. Dversdal was recently offered a promotion to her current job,

the Director of OHSU Simulation, which she had to leave the POCUS team in order to accept.

She reflected on the fact that she had no reservations about the current team’s ability to continue

to improve the POCUS program at OHSU without her as something that made her very proud.

The fact that she considers her greatest leadership accomplishment to be a situation where she

guided others to success instead of another accomplishment more centered around her own

personal success is incredible evidence of her propensity towards servant leadership.

On a more personal note, I found my interview with Dr. Dversdal to be very beneficial

for me because in addition to respecting her as a leader, I also have career goals very similar to

what she has already accomplished in her life. She was able to give me real, field specific advice

about not only leadership but my medical school applications and being a physician in general. A

big piece of advice she gave me came in the form of a quote, it is: “People will forget what you

said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel,” by

Maya Angelou. She broke this quote down further by recommending that as I go throughout the

world, to ask myself not only how the people around me experience me, but also how they may

experience themselves around me. She says that at the end of the day, if people can feel good

about themselves around you, you are going to get the best out of them, be it an employee,
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friend, or patient. This advice has a lot of parallels with the chapter we read in The Practice of

Adaptive Leadership “knowing your tuning,” as it presents the idea that knowing your specific

“tuning” or personality can allow you to better lead and accommodate people with all different

kinds of tuning (Heifetz at el. 195-203). Because of her familiarity with this idea, she

recommended that throughout my life but especially as I go through school, to focus less on what

I want to be and more on who I want to be. The more personalized advice like this I was able to

get from her at the end of the interview ended up being my biggest takeaways, and I plan on

keeping this advice in mind as I develop as a leader, person, and physician.

Works cited

Grashow., Ronald A. Heifetz, Marty Linsky, Alexander. “Know Your Tuning .” The Practice of

Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World,

Unspecified, 2009, pp. 195–203.

O’Malley, Ed, and Amanda Cebula. “Diagnose the Situation .” Your Leadership Edge: Tools and

Strategies for When Everyone Leads, Bard Press, Portland, OR, 2015, pp. 14–55.

O’Malley, Ed, and Julia Fabris McBride. “Redefining Leadership: A 10-Point Manifesto .” When

Everyone Leads: How Tough Challenges Get Seen and Solved, Bard Press, Portland

Oregon, 2023, pp. 5–19.