About this episode

Mallika Madakasira discusses the importance of building trust with stakeholders before initiating change in healthcare projects.

"Spending time building those relationships is really important — because that's where you start to establish trust, and you're then able to reach that person. Their personality. Everything else. Good and bad." — Mallika Madakasira Most transformation initiatives fail before the first stakeholder meeting. Not because the strategy is wrong. Because the humans running it haven't done the work that makes strategy possible. Mallika Madakasira has spent her career driving healthcare innovation at the intersection of people, process, and technology — and her approach to leading change looks nothing like the playbook most executives are using. She maps the humans before she maps the project. She meets stakeholders where they are before she asks anything of them. And she's learned that the relationships you build before a project starts determine whether it lands — or dies quietly in a room full of politely disengaged people. In this episode, Karl and Mallika dig into what it actually takes to move complex systems in healthcare and beyond — and why the answer is almost never a better process. What you'll take away from this conversation: Why relationship-mapping before project kickoff is…

People in this episode

Host: Karl Pontau

Guest: Mallika Madakasira

Topics covered

• stakeholder trust
• relationship building
• change management
• healthcare innovation
• project kickoff

Keywords

• stakeholders
• trust
• relationship mapping
• change initiatives
• healthcare systems

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: healthcare

More episodes of The Human Connection Podcast

• Lincoln Bleveans on Change Management as the New Leadership Superpower · June 11, 2026 · 21 min
• Less Email. Shorter Copy. More Conversions. (Your Team Won't Believe It Either.) | Carolina McClanahan · June 10, 2026 · 21 min
• Work-Life Balance Is Bullshit. Here's What Actually Works. | Kevin Rice · June 9, 2026 · 22 min
• Your Team Isn't Resisting AI. They Don't Trust You Enough to Follow You Into It. | Patrick Reilly · June 4, 2026 · 22 min
• Corey Rosen: Humanizing Leadership Communication for B2B Executives · June 3, 2026 · 21 min
• Boy Hijnen: The Client Yield Methodology — Turn Existing Clients Into a Scalable Growth Engine · May 28, 2026 · 21 min

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the The Human Connection Podcast podcast page.