Thirty years in hospitals, ten of them turning hospitals around. I speak on hospital operations and on developing leaders.
What I speak on
Hospital operations. Reversing margin erosion, stabilizing staffing, and building a hospital that consistently performs. For hospital and health system audiences, state associations, and boards.
Developing leaders. Why good clinical leaders struggle when they are handed a business, and what closes the gap. For leadership conferences, and for any organization whose leaders develop other leaders.
Working with me
I run on-site operational intensives through Operational Performance Partners.
I take leadership teams through breakthrough work, in and out of healthcare.
ABOUT
Cory Geffre spent more than three decades inside hospitals, the last decade as VP in charge of Hospital Operations in large regional referral hospitals serving rural communities. In his most recent role, he led the integration and operational improvement of a critical access hospital. He's also served as a Chief Nursing Officer, so he knows both sides of the building: the clinical floor and the operational seat. And from that operational seat, he watched the same thing happen over and over... some of the best clinical leaders in the building were handed operational roles and expected to run them like seasoned business operators. Nobody ever taught them how. And that performance gap quietly cost the whole organization.
Now Cory takes the lesson on how to close that gap to the stage. He helps audiences stabilize staffing, optimize operations, and transform good clinical leaders into high performing hospital operators who can get results that last. He's the author of Lead Your People and the soon-to-be-published Stabilize. Optimize. Anchor. He runs on-site operational intensives through Operational Performance Partners, takes leadership teams through breakthrough work in and out of healthcare, writes two LinkedIn newsletters, creates videos for nurse leaders, and speaks across the country.
BOOKS
Available Now
Lead Your People
Framework for Leadership Success
Are you ready to discover a framework for exceptional leadership?
Drawing on decades as a healthcare executive, Cory Geffre distills hard-learned wisdom into a roadmap for inspiring, empowering, and guiding your team to new heights of quality, satisfaction, and financial performance.
Rooted in real-world experience, this guide walks you through the five essential skills of leadership mastery: developing people, managing performance, building teams, improving operations, and achieving results.
With candor and clarity, Geffre deconstructs the myths and offers pragmatic strategies for the toughest challenges leaders face.
Whether you're a manager, director, executive, or aspiring leader,
"Lead Your People" is your plainspoken playbook for unlocking extraordinary potential.
Available Now
DEAR NURSE LEADER
52 Letters from One Nurse Leader to Another
Nobody hands you a manual the day you become a nurse leader.
You were an excellent nurse... That is why they promoted you. Then they handedyou a unit, and it turned out to be nothing like the job you were good at.
Fifty-two letters, one for every Monday of a year, written by someone who has sat exactly where you are sitting. They are not instructions. No framework, no checklist, nothing to keep up with and nothing to fall behind on.
The letters move through four parts. Arriving, the first months and the doubt that comes with them. The Weight, what it costs to carry other people. The Work, the practical craft of running a unit. Staying, how to still be yourself at the end of a year of it.
If you have nurse managers reporting to you, it was built to be handed out.
FORTHCOMING
STABILIZE. OPTIMIZE. ANCHOR.
The Definitive Guide to Hospital Operations
Your hospital isn't broken... it's unbuilt.
Drawing on a decade of hospital leadership across facilities from 25 to 267 beds, Cory Geffre hands operators a precise, tested build sequence for the operating system nobody ever finished... a step-by-step for reversing
margin erosion, developing leadership talent, and building a hospital that consistently performs.
Its logic is unforgiving:
Stabilize. Optimize. Anchor.
Cure the foundation before raising the pillars, beginning with a proven staffing method that ends negotiation-based staffing for good. Performance, Geffre shows, is the result of an environment, not an act of will.
Stop fixing what's broken.
Start finishing what was never built.
Develop Leadership Talent
Most leadership training hands people a framework in a conference room and sends them back to a job that has not changed. So nothing changes.
A turnaround and a breakthrough are not the same problem.
A turnaround is a floor that gave way. Something was working, it stopped, and it has to get back.
A breakthrough is a ceiling. The leader has not fallen. They have never been where they are trying to go, and something is in the way. Usually it is not skill... it is that ever taught them the part of leading that is not technical.
This work is older than my healthcare career. Before I came back into healthcare, organizations in manufacturing and hospitality brought me in to help their leaders break through. I have been doing that longer than I was ever a hospital executive, and it never stopped.
It runs on the framework in my book Lead Your People. Developing people. Managing performance. Building teams. Improving operations. Achieving results. Five elements, in that order, because the order matters.
This is how I have developed dozens and dozens of clinical leaders into hospital operators. The measure I care about is whether the team ran better six months later.
This is for leaders who develop other leaders. The manager-of-managers layer, where every gap multiplies.
It works in a hospital. It also works in a plant, a hotel, and a company that has never had a patient.
If you have a leadership team that is ready to break through, send me a message.
SPEAKING
Keynote Speaking and Conference Presentations:
South Dakota Health Care Association
New Mexico Health Care Association
South Dakota SHRM Conference
Iowa Rural Health Collaborative
South Dakota Healthcare Financial Management Association
International Association of Workforce Professionals
What’s Right in Healthcare Conference
Vizient Connections Summit
Iowa Hospital Association
Iowa Nurses Association
North Dakota Hospital Association
Dakota Conference on Rural Health
Cory's newsletters
Honest, practical thinking
for nurse leaders and other clinical leaders finding their footing. Real talk on difficult conversations, leading former peers, and building the confidence to trust your own judgment... from someone has been there.
Written operator to operator, for the executives running hospitals under real pressure. Practical, specific thinking on staffing, throughput, workforce, and leadership... grounded in actual work, sharpened for the people who actually own the outcomes.
Honest, practical thinking for nurse leaders and other clinical leaders finding their footing. Real talk on difficult conversations, leading former peers, and building the confidence to trust your own judgment... from someone has
been there.
Written operator to operator, for the executives running hospitals under real pressure. Practical, specific thinking on staffing, throughput, workforce, and leadership... grounded in actual work, sharpened for the people who actually own the outcomes.
NEWSLETTER
HOSPITAL OPERATIONS LETTER
Written operator to operator, for the executives running hospitals under real pressure. Practical, specific thinking on staffing, throughput, workforce, and leadership. . . grounded in the actual work, sharpened for the people who actually own the outcomes.
NEWSLETTER
THE CONFIDENT NURSE LEADER
Honest, practical thinking for nurse leaders and other clinical leaders finding their footing. Real talk on difficult conversations, leading former peers, and building the confidence to trust your own judgment. . . from someone who has been there.
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Helping rural and community hospitals stabilize staffing, optimize operations, and transform clinical leaders into hospital operators.
Helping rural and community hospitals stabilize staffing, optimize operations, and transform clinical leaders into hospital operators.
© 2026 Cory Geffre. All rights reserved.