Four lessons in handling uncertainty from an ER doc turned CEO

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.

When John D’Angelo became president and CEO of Northwell Health in October, he inherited a nonprofit health system in transition. Northwell, based in New Hyde Park, New York, had just completed its acquisition of Nuvance Health, creating a combined entity with 28 hospitals, more than 100,000 employees, and $23.1 billion in operating revenue in 2025. Many executives announced their retirement, requiring D’Angelo to replenish his leadership team. Meanwhile, the health system also embarked on an ongoing digital transformation that includes a new electronic health record platform and artificial intelligence (AI) integrations.

FINDING ANSWERS IN UNCERTAINTY

D’Angelo, a physician who specialized in emergency medicine and led Northwell’s COVID response team, likened his first months as CEO to a shift in the emergency room (ER). “We had these three major things going on, and a lot of things could go right or wrong,” he says. “With all that’s been happening in the last eight months, I joke, ‘That’s why they picked an ER doc as CEO.’”

D’Angelo’s experience in juggling multiple business priorities in a time of great technological upheaval is not uncommon among CEOs, but his experience in the ER is. For that reason, Modern CEO asked him to share his advice and insights on dealing with stress and uncertainty in leadership today. Indeed, D’Angelo, who originally thought he would specialize in orthopedics, says he was drawn to emergency medicine precisely because of the uncertainty. Patients, he says, didn’t come in with a diagnosis: “Someone might come in weak and dizzy or with some abdominal discomfort,” he recalls. “You were the first person or the first part of a team figuring it out from scratch and having to navigate that uncertainty.”

Here are four leadership tips gleaned from our conversation:

Get comfortable making decisions with incomplete data. In an ER, D’Angelo says, you rarely have the luxury of waiting for complete information. You learn to prioritize investigating the highest-impact unknowns—what can’t be missed—over everything else and to act on your best judgment when the data doesn’t exist yet.

Watch the vital signs, not the noise. Every organization has indicators that predict success or failure, D’Angelo says, and leaders need to stay fixed on those rather than getting pulled into distractions below that threshold. Just as important: Don’t anchor to a decision out of pride. “You’re looking to see if you got the response you expected,” he says. If not, “you have to be willing to take a step back and redirect or pivot if things aren’t going the way they’re supposed to go.”

Triage your time like you would triage patients. Not every problem deserves equal attention. D’Angelo says the discipline of an ER shift, when you’re deciding in real time who needs you most, translates directly to running a large organization with competing, simultaneous demands.

Build commitment, not just compliance. D’Angelo is a firm believer in connecting employees to the institution’s purpose, acknowledging that in healthcare, employers likely don’t talk enough about mission. Employees “hear about productivity, and we’re constantly asking them to work harder and do more with less,” he says. “We have to bring it back to connecting people to purpose. That’s what will keep the resilience and reduce burnout and create the drive to create the future of care we want to deliver.”

PULLING FROM YOUR PAST

Are you a leader who once held an intense frontline role early in your career? How did that shape the way you lead today or handle stress? Send your anecdotes to me at stephaniemehta@mansueto.com and we’ll publish some of the best tales in a future newsletter.