What if the key to leadership wasn’t a title—but a mindset of service, resilience, and influence?
As healthcare faces increasing demands, Dr. Jerel Brandt is charting a more intentional, people-focused path forward. After more than a decade of full-time surgical practice and leadership, he reached a breaking point: burnout. However, instead of walking away entirely, he chose to rebuild on his terms, with a mission to serve rural communities, develop leaders, and prevent others from hitting the same wall.
On this episode of the Ignite Leadership Podcast, Rob Followell welcomes this board-certified general surgeon, entrepreneur, and passionate advocate for rural healthcare and physician well-being. Dr. Brandt’s leadership journey is marked by a deep commitment to servant leadership, team building, and creating sustainable impact, both inside and outside the operating room.
What sets Dr. Brandt apart is not just his clinical expertise but also his heart for people—his family, his patients, and the healthcare professionals around him. In this conversation, he opens up about the challenges of burnout, the power of influence, and the future of leadership in medicine.
From Burnout to Breakthrough
Dr. Brandt felt caught in the demands of full-time surgical care, trauma call, and increasing leadership responsibilities. Like many high-performing professionals, he reached a point where the stress and pace of his responsibilities no longer aligned with his personal and professional well-being.
“I just couldn’t give it my all anymore,” Dr. Brandt reflected. “I wasn’t putting my best forward.”
Recognizing the signs of burnout, he made the courageous decision to step away and reimagine his future. Today, he’s building a locum tenens surgical practice focused on serving rural hospitals with limited access to surgical care. His goal is to bring quality healthcare to underserved communities while protecting his own time, energy, and family priorities.
Leadership Is Influence
Dr. Brandt’s leadership journey began when he attended the Global Leadership Summit—a defining moment that helped him see leadership not as a title, but as influence. He began building trust and working to improve communication among his office staff, introducing monthly meetings and personality assessments to foster collaboration. That ripple of influence expanded to his surgical colleagues and eventually into organizational leadership roles, including trauma medical director and chair of the Division of Surgery at Trinity Health.
One of Dr. Brandt’s core leadership principles is simple: words matter. He reminds us that the way we speak to others has the power to uplift or damage culture, and that leaders have a responsibility to use their words with care and intention.
He’s also a strong believer in building authentic relationships in the workplace. For Dr. Brandt, leadership is deeply relational—and those relationships are the foundation of a strong, resilient team.
Serving Rural Communities with Purpose
Dr. Brandt’s work focuses on supporting rural hospitals that often lack full-time surgical care. By creating strategic partnerships and providing consistent access to surgery, he reduces travel burdens for patients and improves healthcare equity across his state.
More than just clinical care, he actively mentors primary care and advanced practice providers in those communities, helping them develop the surgical knowledge and confidence to manage pre- and post-operative care more effectively. His goal: streamline care, improve outcomes, and elevate the capabilities of the whole care team.
Looking ahead, he is exploring how to expand his impact beyond the operating room. He believes that by investing in people—not just treating patients—he can spark a chain reaction of positive influence. One of his goals is to return to medical mission work and grow his leadership influence on a broader scale.
Dr. Brandt’s story offers a powerful lens into how physician burnout can become a catalyst for innovation, entrepreneurship, and purpose-driven leadership. It’s a reminder that leadership is not about control—it’s about service. It’s about managing systems so people can thrive, and using your influence to lift others up.
If you’ve ever faced burnout or questioned how to grow your leadership without sacrificing your well-being, this episode will speak to you. Listen to this powerful conversation with Dr. Jerel Brandt Ignite Leadership Podcast | The Followell Company
