LEADING THROUGH LOYALTY: After a four-decade career at University of Utah Health, newly appointed University Hospital chief executive Dan Lundergan faces his biggest challenge yet.

• Author: Dark, Stephen

When Dan Lundergan started working in the laundry room of University Hospital in Salt Lake City in the early 1970s while attending night school, he worked with several men from a group home in Provo. They taught the 19-year-old his first lesson in work culture. "You work hard, you respect the team, and you show up every day," he says. "That's just what you do."

That lesson put him in good stead when, 40 years later, Lundergan was asked by Michael Good, MD, CEO of U of U Health, to become chief executive of University of Utah Health Hospitals & Clinics. That Fall 2021, then-COO Lundergan had planned to retire, travel, and spend time with family. What should he do? He still loved working for an organization he'd dedicated his working life to, his wife said. "This is what you do."

In an age when staying with one organization for an entire career is often viewed as anachronistic, Lundergan has risen from the basement to CEO, through good times and bad.

When Kristina Callis Duffin, MD, chair of the Department of Dermatology at U of U Health, first started working with Lundergan in 2019, she learned from him that leadership was about solving problems together. "Dan is masterful at creating a collaborative, consensus-driven atmosphere," she says.

As CEO during COVID-19 and a time of acute political divisiveness, such an approach is more valuable than ever, Duffin says. "I think that the world needs so much of his leadership style. We have to be kind to each other. We have to sit together and collaborate."

Lundergan never had a career path, he says, but rather threw himself into one job opportunity after another. Each offered valuable lessons. In his early 20s, Lundergan delivered equipment around the hospital. The first time he went to the burn unit, he found patients with their arms held up, towel clips on the end of their fingers to allow their burned digits to heal. That experience taught him about perspective. When someone becomes mired in politics, he references the burn unit to discuss what truly matters.

One key influence on Lundergan's approach to leadership was the late John Dixon, MD, a prominent U of U Health leader. Lundergan had managed the hospital's operating room for four years when Dixon hired him to join the then-embryonic Endoscopic Laser Surgery Unit, where Lundergan worked on the use of lasers in the OR for gastro-intestinal bleeds. Dixon emphasized the value of collaboration in an academic hospital. When Lundergan asked Dixon...