Effective healthcare transformation depends on leaders who can align diverse teams around a shared mission, communicate fluently across disciplines and empower people with structure and empathy.
A landmark systematic review of 55 healthcare studies shows that teams aligned around clear goals and supported by strong communication consistently outperform their peers when implementing improvements. The researchers concluded that clarity of purpose and consistent communication are two of the strongest predictors of whether clinical and operational initiatives succeed. The review highlighted that when teams understand the mission and communicate consistently, implementation success rises sharply across clinical and operational initiatives.
“Alignment is what turns good teams into great ones,” says Eric C. Gardner, a healthcare transformation executive known for leading military, enterprise and early stage healthcare organizations. “When people see the same goal and understand how their work contributes to it, everything moves faster and with more purpose.”
Start With a Shared Mission
Gardner’s first principle of cross-functional leadership is anchoring teams in a shared mission, a unifying purpose that prevents even the strongest groups from drifting into siloed priorities. “In healthcare, silos are everywhere,” he says, having seen how quickly organizations fall into fragmented priorities when clinical, technical, financial and operational teams operate in isolation. His method for breaking them down begins with what he calls a shared mission set.
Early in his career, while leading units in the Air Force, Gardner observed that performance elevated the moment teams rallied around a clear, unifying objective. He carried that lesson into later roles. At WellMed, he centered transformation on a clear, enterprise-wide purpose. “Our objective was not digital transformation,” he explains. “It was improving patient access and experience at scale.”
That clarity changed the way teams interpreted their work. Technical groups understood their impact on patient experience. Frontline teams saw how workflow modernization amplified care delivery. By anchoring every initiative to a purpose the entire enterprise could feel, Gardner was able to create alignment that persisted even through rapid growth and operational stress.
Learn to Speak Every Team’s Language
Cross-functional leadership is an act of translation. Leaders must be fluent enough in each discipline to communicate priorities in ways that resonate. “It is not about being an expert in everything,” he says. “It is about being fluent enough to build trust and break down barriers.”
That fluency requires understanding clinical workflows, appreciating financial constraints, navigating regulatory requirements and grasping technical architecture. In his current oversight of more than 400 staff and 500 subcontractors delivering over 600,000 annual exams for the Department of Defense, Gardner adapts his communication style continuously. For clinicians, he focuses on patient safety and workflow reliability. For analysts, he emphasizes data integrity. For subcontractors, he highlights turnaround times and operational readiness. By shifting his language to match the audience, he ensures alignment becomes actionable.
Empower Teams With Structure and Accountability
While serving as Chief Innovation and Transformation Officer at WellMed, Gardner helped drive major operational and financial gains, including $27 million in workflow savings and a substantial lift in risk-adjustment performance. Those outcomes were the result of well-designed cross-functional teams with clear roles, real authority and transparent metrics. “Empowered teams deliver results, but only when they know how success is measured,” he says.
Dashboards, feedback loops and decision frameworks kept progress visible. Teams moved quickly because guardrails were defined. Accountability strengthened culture, not through pressure, but through clarity. This structure enabled innovation to scale, allowing Gardner to guide digital adoption, tech-debt reduction and large-scale modernization without compromising quality or speed.
Lead With Empathy to Build Resilience
For Gardner, effective cross-functional leadership is deeply human, a perspective shaped during his Air Force years leading in mission-critical, high-pressure environments. Whether the concern is clinician burnout or data overload, understanding the personal challenges behind performance allows leaders to guide with authenticity rather than authority alone. It’s an approach that fosters trust, psychological safety and a willingness among teams to take on difficult transformation work.
“Empathy builds resilience,” he says, positioning it as a strategic force that strengthens retention, deepens collaboration and helps teams navigate the unavoidable turbulence of healthcare innovation.
Turning Complexity Into Coordinated Performance
No single department can transform healthcare alone. Meaningful change requires alignment of clinical care, technology, finance and patient experience. His leadership demonstrates how shared mission, cross-disciplinary fluency, structured empowerment and empathy create the conditions for enterprises to move with purpose.
This is how complexity becomes coordinated performance. It is how large systems adapt, how early stage companies scale and how leaders shape the future of healthcare.
Connect with Eric C. Gardner on LinkedIn for more insights on leading cross-functional healthcare teams.
