MARK MOHAMMADPOUR, HEALTHCARE KEYNOTE SPEAKER AND FACILITATOR
Your Clinical Teams Have The Expertise. Mark Helps Build The Culture To Sustain It.
Keynote Conversation, Team Implementation, Leadership Integration: Mark’s signature approach to building healthy, confident, and connected hospital, health system, and medical association teams.
Trusted by respected health care organizations
“Mark quickly built trust and rapport with our team, as though he had been working with us for years. We highly recommend him as a facilitator.”
— College of American Pathologists
About Mark
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A former communications executive who led teams and strategy for global brands like Adobe, Microsoft, and Samsung, Mark lost 150 pounds and has kept it off for more than a decade. Mark combines Fortune 50 leadership experience with certified health coaching expertise.
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Mark has worked with clinical leaders, hospital executives, pharmaceutical teams, and medical associations, and he understands that healthcare environments move too fast for vague inspiration. His sessions are built around concrete frameworks that clinical and administrative leaders can integrate into the real cadence of their work: during team huddles, in one-on-ones, and across organizational transitions.
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His keynote conversations blend full attendee engagement, actionable insights, and current research. Today, his most requested topics, Leading with Empathy, The Buoyant Leader, and Lead a Culture of Well-being, are built around one belief: healthy employees are your greatest competitive advantage.
Who We Help
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The Goal: Reduce burnout and stabilize nursing/staffing levels.
The Result: Better patient outcomes and lower costs.
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The Goal: High-performance leadership during launches and regulatory shifts.
The Result: Cross-functional alignment and reduced turnover of top talent.
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The Goal: Providing high-value, "sticky" leadership tools for your members.
The Result: Increased member engagement and "must-see" conference programming.
What We Address
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Clinical and administrative teams running on vapor, with nowhere to recover.
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Leaders who can’t ask for help without worrying it’ll be read as weakness.
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A culture that celebrates heroism and quietly expects sacrifice.
“It’s the kind of presentation that inspires you to take action right away. Several teams were already working to implement his ideas that very same day.”
— Reggie Johnson, Director of Communications, Division of Student Affairs, UNT Health Fort Worth
How to work with Mark:
Keynote Conversation
Start here. An interactive session built around your people and your industry. 45 to 90 minutes, steeped in data, insights, humor, and engagement. Your audience walks out with something they can use the same day.
Team Facilitation & Offsites
Go deeper. Mark sits with your team and names what's been going unsaid. No personality colors. No letter types. No trust falls. Half-day, full-day, or multi-day. You leave with a written plan: decisions, owners, dates.
Three-Point Impact™
Make it stick. Mark’s signature program. Includes one keynote, a facilitated team session, and follow-up coaching on priority topics. This is a long-term investment that builds healthy, confident, and connected teams.
Keynote Conversation Topics
Mark's Leadership Keynote Conversations
Lead a Healthy Culture of Well-being
Makes well-being how your team works, not a perk you offer.
Healthcare organizations spend millions on patient well-being. The ones with the lowest turnover have realized something simpler: you can't pour from an empty pitcher. Your leaders examine their everyday habits, from how huddle runs to how someone is onboarded to the unit, and decide together, in the room, which one to change first.
Why now: 52% of employees say their employer doesn't support their well-being in meaningful ways, and 69% of executives admit they have no way to measure it. (Deloitte)
Your leaders walk out able to:
- Treat staff well-being as patient care, not an HR line item
- See how small leadership choices build or drain a team
- Run huddles, onboarding, and feedback so they build energy
Pairs with The Team Culture OS workshop: Your leadership team walks through its own huddles, onboarding, and feedback habits, decides which one to change first, and agrees on how they will talk about workload and recovery from then on.
Lead With Empathy
Turns empathy into a performance skill leaders can use under pressure.
Empathy with patients is non-negotiable. Empathy inside the care team is where the culture either holds together or quietly fractures. Your leaders practice it live, in the moments where it is hardest: the colleague running on empty, the one who has stopped speaking up in huddle, the conversation nobody wants to start. They leave with moves they can use in the next conversation, not a definition.
Why now: Employees with highly empathic senior leaders report being innovative 61% of the time, compared with 13% under less empathic leaders, and 76% report being engaged, versus 32%. (Catalyst)
Your leaders walk out able to:
- Use perspective-taking to connect across role, shift, and discipline
- Build the trust inside the care team that patient care depends on
- Apply specific moves in the very next difficult conversation
Pairs with The Empathy in Action workshop: Paired conversations and real scenarios from your own floors, where leaders practice hearing the thing underneath what was said.
The Buoyant Leader
Turns pressure into the thing your steadiest leaders are known for.
Healthcare leaders don't need to be told the pressure is real. They work inside a culture that celebrates heroism and quietly expects sacrifice, where pushing harder is the default. The steadiest leaders do the opposite, and their team feels it. Your leaders work through a real high-pressure moment together and practice staying clear enough to make the right call.
Why now: 77% of workers reported work-related stress in the past month, and 57% reported effects tied to burnout. (American Psychological Association)
Your leaders walk out able to:
- Stay steady with a routine they can run on the hardest shifts
- Read stress as a signal and use it to make a sharper call
- Ask for help without it reading as weakness, and make it safe for their team to do the same
Pairs with Leading with Clarity and Calm: Live scenarios and group coaching for your charge nurses, managers, and directors, so the frameworks get practiced on the unit rather than heard once in an auditorium.
REWORK: The Future-Ready Leader
Rebuilds the leadership playbook for a modern workplace.
Healthcare leaders are managing record burnout and staffing shortfalls while being told to do more with less. The old playbook isn't just outdated, it is accelerating the turnover you can't afford. Your leaders rebuild their approach around energy and clarity, then test the new moves together before taking them back to the unit.
Why now: Global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, the second straight annual decline and the lowest level since 2020. Manager engagement has dropped nine points since 2022. (Gallup)
Your leaders walk out able to:
- Lead around capacity, not control
- Treat purpose and belonging as daily practices, not annual survey items
- Build the motivation a team creates together instead of waiting for it
Pairs with The REWORK Sprint workshop: Leaders map where their energy actually goes, pair up with someone outside their own unit or department, and leave with a 30-day plan they run together.
Work in Sunlight
Reconnects your people to the work and to each other.
Healthcare workers chose this career to make a difference, and purpose gets lost in the documentation burden and the emotional weight of the job. Disconnection costs organizations their best people one quiet exit at a time. We name where belonging is slipping and build the habits that rebuild it, right there in the room.
Why now: Employees with a strong sense of belonging show 56% higher job performance and 50% lower turnover risk. (BetterUp)
Your leaders walk out able to:
- Measure performance by energy, clarity, and connection
- Build small daily habits that keep belonging alive between shifts
- Run a shared, team-built plan for staying connected
Pairs with The Sunlight workshop: Small daily habits, regular peer check-ins, and a connection map the team builds together, so belonging survives the long stretch between all-staff gatherings.
The four facilitation topics teams ask for most.
Offsite themes
For teams seeking clarity and purpose
Gets everyone pointed at the same thing, in writing, before anyone leaves the room.
When you're merging departments, onboarding new leadership, or pivoting strategy, an offsite is the fastest way to align the compass. Mark designs the session to cut through the confusion instead of talking around it.
Why now: Across 124 organizations, only 28% of the executives and middle managers responsible for executing strategy could name three of their company's strategic priorities. (MIT Sloan Management Review)
- Before: A short team pulse and a conversation with you about what success looks like in the first 90 days.
- The offsite: Working sessions on mission, vision, and values that end in a written Team Charter.
- After: A 30/60/90-day plan and a follow-up guide, so clarity turns into consistency.
What the team walks away with:
- A shared purpose everyone can say out loud.
- Clear norms for how decisions get made and communicated.
- A foundation for a culture of well-being and accountability.
Pairs with the Lead a Healthy Culture of Well-being keynote and The Team Culture OS workshop. The keynote makes the case that culture is built through everyday decisions rather than programs. The offsite writes your team's version down. The workshop keeps it running after you leave the room.
For teams building confidence
Builds the nerve to say the thing in the room where it gets decided.
Your people are good at the work. They're less sure of themselves in the room where it gets decided. This offsite builds the confidence to speak up, be heard, and be trusted, under pressure and in front of leadership.
Why now: 61% of employees say they regularly watch colleagues stay silent rather than share a differing opinion, and 45% name psychological safety and trust as their single biggest concern at work. (Radical Candor, 2026 workplace report)
- Before: Each person picks a real upcoming conversation they're nervous about: a board update, a budget ask, a hard piece of feedback.
- The offsite: Hands-on work on influence, storytelling, and presence, ending with a live practice round in front of the group.
- After: A 90-day follow-through plan with checkpoints, so the confidence sticks.
What the team walks away with:
- Practical tools for influencing at the executive level.
- More clarity and more calm when the stakes are high.
- A team that speaks up before the hallway conversation.
Pairs with the The Buoyant Leader keynote and Leading with Clarity and Calm workshop. Confidence rests on calm. The keynote gives the room the idea and the language for it. The offsite gives them the reps, in front of people whose opinion they care about.
For executive teams and boards
Gets the hard decision made instead of postponed again.
High-stakes environments require high-stakes conversations. Mark provides the neutral structure that keeps dominant personalities from hijacking the agenda, so the hard decisions actually get made.
Why now: In a survey of more than 1,200 managers, 61% said at least half the time they spend making decisions is wasted. The strongest predictor of fast, high-quality decisions was the presence of real debate. (McKinsey & Company)
- Before: An anonymous team survey to surface where communication is strong and where it's stuck.
- The offsite: Structured work on the real disagreements, ending in a written operating agreement for how this team decides.
- After: A leadership health check at 30 and 60 days to track whether it's holding.
What the team walks away with:
- Faster decisions, because the real disagreement finally gets said out loud.
- Shared expectations and healthy boundaries.
- Stronger trust, transparency, and performance.
Pairs with the Lead With Empathy keynote and The Empathy in Action Lab workshop. Hard decisions need people who can hear the thing underneath what was said, especially when they disagree. That is the exact skill the keynote introduces and the lab drills.
For teams rebuilding after a hard year
Repairs the trust the last year quietly cost you.
A reorg. A round of layoffs. A leader who left. High turnover that never quite stopped. When a team has been through it, the work keeps going, but the trust doesn't. This offsite is about the health in healthy teams are wealthy teams: psychological safety, well-being, and repairing what got fractured.
Why now: Across 146 companies that conducted layoffs, employee confidence in the organization fell nearly 17 points, and engagement took 12 to 24 months to return to where it had been. (Harvard Business Review)
- Before: An anonymous pulse on how people are actually doing, plus a private conversation with you about what's been hardest.
- The offsite: Honest conversation about what the team has been carrying, guided so it stays safe and productive, ending in agreements on workload, boundaries, and how this team looks after each other.
- After: A well-being check-in at 30 and 60 days, so the agreements hold instead of fading.
What the team walks away with:
- Permission to say what's been hard, and a team that can hear it.
- Shared boundaries around workload and availability.
- A team that trusts each other again, and a leader they trust to keep it that way.
Pairs with the Work in Sunlight keynote and The Sunlight Series workshop. The keynote reconnects people to the work and to each other in a way that feels safe because everyone is in it together. The offsite repairs what got fractured. The series keeps belonging alive through the months that follow.
Any theme below can run as a half-day, full-day, or multi-day offsite. Mark builds the agenda around what your team actually needs.
“His energy was infectious, he was incredibly engaging, and we received nonstop compliments from our members about how well the session resonated with them.”
— Lindsay Leszczynski, External Communications, Dignity Health
Contact Mark about your event.
Email Mark at mark@chasingthesunpdx.com, call him at 360.609.1077, or fill out the form below.
Mark will respond to you within one business day.
Frequently asked questions:
How can hospitals address employee health beyond traditional wellness programs?
By fixing the system rather than asking clinicians to be more resilient. Mark helps hospital leadership get clear on who does what and rebuild trust between administration and the floor. When goals set in the office match what is possible on a unit, the exhaustion that pushes clinicians toward early retirement eases.
What is the link between healthcare staff well-being and patient safety?
When healthcare teams are burned out, clinical errors rise and patient satisfaction falls. Mark treats culture as a safety tool rather than a morale project. Steadying the frontline and improving how a team communicates shows up directly in the quality of patient care.
How do you make leadership training stick for staff working rotating shifts?
Rotating shifts are why most hospital training fails. Not everyone is in the room, and the people who were are gone for four days. Mark builds the session so a charge nurse can run the follow-up on their own shift, and the team writes a charter that lives on the unit rather than in someone's inbox.
Do you work directly with nursing leadership and clinical managers?
Yes. Much of Mark's healthcare work is with charge nurses, nurse managers, and clinical directors rather than only with the executive team. They are the layer carrying the most pressure and getting the least support, and they are usually where change either sticks or stops.
How much does a healthcare keynote cost?
The fee depends on the format, the length of the session, travel, and whether you add a follow-up workshop or coaching. Email mark@chasingthesunpdx.com with your date, location, and audience size, and you will have a number back within one business day.
