Part 1 of 4: How emerging sterile processing leaders are redefining leadership through trust, accountability, psychological safety, and professional development.
Seven emerging sterile
processing leaders from health systems across the United States shared their experiences and perspectives. Their organizations, career paths, and roles vary, but they raised many of the same questions about what leadership now requires.
The leaders are (Figure 1) Brandy Bowser, CRCST with Kaiser Permanente;
Mamadou Cissé, CST, HSR with Hospital for Special Surgery; Bobbie Gaskins with the Cleveland Clinic; MK Parrott with Ascension; Felicia Sheriff, CHL, CIS, CSPDT, with Harris Health; Eduardo Velazquez. CHL, CRCST, CFER, CSPDT, with UCHealth; and Michele Webb with Cooper University Hospital.
They are part of a generational shift, shaping sterile processing. Some advanced from technician roles; others entered health care by a different route. Their work now reaches departments, programs, professional associations, and multi-facility operations.
Despite those differences, the same themes surfaced: leadership, mentorship, accountability, workforce development, technology, professional identity, psychological safety, and patient care.
Their experiences point beyond 7 individual career stories. A recognizable model of sterile processing leadership is taking shape.
The model they describe keeps accountability, technical excellence, standards, and patient safety firmly in place. Trust, ownership, education, mentorship, and understanding are how they help people deliver those results.
Early in her sterile processing career, Bobbie Gaskins was working a weekend shift during a period of low surgical volume. The cases were finished, and she was assigned to clean and dust shelving throughout the department.
At the time, the assignment felt unnecessary. The important work appeared complete, and she wanted to go home. She emailed her manager to explain why she believed she should not have to complete the task.
Looking back, Gaskin laughed at the experience. What she considered a thoughtful argument was, in fact, the perspective of an ambitious young technician who did not yet understand the larger picture.
Her manager did not dismiss her question or embarrass her for asking it. He sat down with her, explained why the work mattered, and clarified what it meant to contribute to a team even when the assignment was not the one she preferred.
The conversation changed how Gaskin viewed work. She came to understand that the small things eventually become the big things, that what people do when no one is watching shapes culture, and that what a department does during downtime prepares it for periods of intense demand.
Something else stayed with her. Her manager held her accountable, but he also took the time to explain why the expectation existed. Today, Gaskin tried to give employees the same combination of high standards and meaningful context.
The next generation is not asking for less accountability. It is asking leaders to create the trust, understanding, and shared responsibility that make accountability meaningful.
Gaskin’s experience reflects something several of the leaders learned early: leadership development often starts before a promotion. It happens when someone is challenged, trusted, corrected, encouraged, or helped to see the work differently. Their paths varied, but each was building judgment, discipline, and confidence long before receiving a formal title.
For Felicia Sheriff, those early lessons began at home. She watched her father build a reputation through dedication, integrity, and consistency, qualities that later shaped her own understanding of professional credibility. As Asher’s career developed, other leaders recognized her potential, served as references, shared opportunities, and encouraged her continued growth.
Michele Webb’s development followed a more progressive operational path. She began as a sterile processing technician on the overnight shift at Cooper University Hospital, advanced through assistant supervisor and supervisor roles, assumed interim leadership responsibilities, and eventually became the department manager. Each step expanded not only her authority but also her understanding of the work, the people performing it, and the responsibility that comes with leading them.
Brandy Bowser’s path illustrates how persistence can become a leadership strength. Before entering sterile processing, she worked as a care provider in a retirement home, held a second job at a pizza restaurant, and attended community college part time. An externship at the V Palo Alto Hospital and a temporary materials management assignment introduced her to central processing, but certification did not immediately open the door. For 4 years, she struggled to secure a paid role because employers wanted experiences she had not yet been given the opportunity to build. When someone finally took a chance on her, she spent more than six years developing frontline expertise before moving into supervision. She continued to grow through association leadership. educational programming, vendor engagement, communications work, and formal leadership training. The rejections that once delayed her career now shape the ways she recognizes and develops potential in others.
Other leaders described development as an active process rather than something that happened simply because an opportunity appeared. After entering sterile processing at 18, Gaskins became determined to understand not only the technical work but also the people and systems surrounding it. Without a traditional road map, she says she “built her own college, ”studying leadership, emotional intelligence, communication, self-development, and human behavior while learning from mentors, projects, feedback, and failures.
Mamadou Cissé also received trust and responsibility early, but he does not portray opportunity as passive. Trust created room to grow; education, professional engagement, and a willingness to challenge himself helped him become ready for that growth.
MK Parrott gained confidence through early opportunities to contribute ideas and lead initiatives, reinforcing her belief that leadership is not dependent on title. Eduardo Velazquez benefited from formal coaching and mentorship that helped him understand his own approach, adapt to others, and remain open to learning.
Across their different paths, leadership grew through ordinary assignments, setbacks, increasing responsibility, mentorship, self-directed learning, and the choice to take ownership before authority was formally granted.
Sterile processing has traditionally relied on clear lines of authority, standardized procedures, and close oversight. Those structures remain necessary in a department where variation can affect quality and patient safety. What these leaders are changing is not the importance of direction, but the way accountability is created. Rather than assuming that authority alone will produce reliable performance, they are involving employees more intentionally in understanding problems, improving the work, and taking ownership of results.
Michele Webb describes this shift as moving away from an overreliance on hierarchy and toward treating employee voice as operational intelligence. The people performing the work every day often sense barriers, risks, and opportunities that may not be visible from the leader’s perspective. Their input can reveal where a process breaks down, where expectations are unclear, or where a practical adjustment could improve performance. Listening, however, does not make every decision negotiable. In Webb’s model, employee voice exists alongside adherence to manufacturers’ instructions for use, best practices, and the shared responsibility to provide safe instruments for patient care. Employees are invited to help improve how the work is accomplished, not to redefine the standard the work must meet.
That same balance appears in the way Eduardo Velazquez and Felicia Sheriff describe responsibility. Velazquez gives supervisors meaningful ownership of their teams rather than stepping in to make every decision for them. She remains available to provide support, but supervisors are expected to lead and deliver on established goals. Sheriff approaches accountability through credibility.
For her, leaders earn the ability to hold others accountable by consistently modeling what they expect, continuing to educate the team, and staying close enough to the work to understand its pressures. Their perspectives suggest that accountability becomes more credible when people see that authority is accompanied by support, consistency, and an understanding of operational reality.
Brandy Bowser carries the idea further by describing leadership as service. Removing barriers, developing people, and helping employees understand how their work affects patient outcomes are not separate from holding a team accountable; they are part of what makes accountability possible. People are better positioned to meet high expectations when they have the tools, knowledge, support, and context required to succeed. Bowser sees emerging leaders placing greater emphasis on collaboration, transparency, coaching, and relationships, while still drawing on the discipline and experience of those who came before them.
These leaders are not discarding traditional leadership. Direction still matters. Standards remain nonnegotiable, and leaders are responsible for decisions, performance, and patient care. What has changed is how accountability is built. It comes not only from authority, but also from voice, ownership, clarity, support, and a shared commitment to the work. Collaboration helps people understand the expectation and accept responsibility for meeting it.
When Velazquez centered his first educator and assistant manager role, he participated in 6 months of leadership and career coaching. Through team-building and individual sessions, he learned more about his own personality style and how to “style-flex” when communicating with others.
The experience taught him that employees do not all respond to the same approach. Some need context, others direct feedback, additional practice, or greater independence. For Velazquez, consistency does not mean treating everyone identically. It means giving each person the support required to meet the same standard.
Parrot extends that idea beyond communication. For her, empathetic leadership requires understanding how workplace conditions, relationships, and daily interactions affect an employee’s ability to contribute and grow.
In sterile processing, empathy is operational awareness. Leaders must help people with different backgrounds, communication preferences, and experience levels consistently execute highly technical processes. Adapting how they teach and coach can improve performance without changing the standard.
Adaptive leadership changes the route, not the destination.
In sterile processing, many of the most serious risks begin as moments of uncertainty. A technician notices something unusual, questions whether an instrument is clean, or realizes that an instruction is unclear.
What happens next depends not only on the employee’s technical knowledge but also on whether the work environment is safe to speak in.
BobbieGaskins views creating that environment as a fundamental leadership responsibility. For her, sterile processing leaders are accountable not only to the patient and the workforce but also to the conditions in which people perform their work. Employees should feel able to stop the line, acknowledge uncertainty, raise an idea, or respectfully challenge a process without first calculating the personal consequences of speaking up.
Her reasoning is direct: In sterile processing, silence can become a patient-safety risk. She would rather have an employee raise a concern that proves unfounded than notice something troubling and remain quiet out of fear. A question can be investigated and resolved. An unspoken concern may continue through the process until it reaches the operating room or affects patient care.
Psychological safety is sometimes misunderstood as protection from correction, criticism, or accountability. In clinical and operational environments, its purpose is far more consequential. Psychological safety allows people to make risk visible while there is still an opportunity to act. It does not mean that every concern is correct, every decision is open to debate, or that established standards can be disregarded. It means employees can tell the truth about what they see, what they know, and what they do not understand.
In sterile processing, making risk visible can take many forms. It may mean questioning an unfamiliar instrument, reporting contamination or damage, admitting that an IFU is unclear, or asking for assistance rather than guessing. It can also mean identifying a process deviation, escalating a concern despite production pressure, or stopping the line when something does not appear safe. These actions require technical awareness, but they also require confidence that the response will focus on the concern rather than punish the person who raised it.
When employees believe questions will be dismissed, concerns will be punished, or uncertainty will be interpreted as incompetence, risk does not disappear. It becomes harder to see. Problems may remain hidden until they disrupt the operating room, contribute to a quality event, or affect patient care. Leaders therefore shape safety not only through the procedures they establish but also through how they respond when someone questions whether those procedures are working as intended.
MK Parrott broadens that responsibility beyond formal authority. Anyone whose behavior influences whether colleagues can ask questions, learn, acknowledge uncertainty, or speak honestly is helping shape the safety of the work environment. A dismissive response can close down the next conversation; a thoughtful one can make future concerns easier to raise. Psychological safety is therefore not created by leaders alone. It is reinforced or weakened through everyday interactions across the team.
The practical lesson is that speaking up and accountability are not competing ideas. Employees have a responsibility to raise concerns, and leaders have a responsibility to take those concerns seriously, evaluate them against the standard, and respond appropriately. A safe culture does not remove accountability. It enables earlier accountability, while the team still has time to protect the patient.
Psychological safety means people can tell the truth about the work. Accountability determines what the team does with that truth.
In sterile processing, employees are surrounded by instructions. They follow manufacturers’ instructions for use, department policies, standardized workflows, quality requirements, and detailed technical steps. Those directions are important, but several leaders stressed that knowing what to do is not the same as understanding why it matters. A technician may be able to repeat a process correctly and still not fully see the patient, clinical, or operational consequences behind it.
Michele Webb believes leaders and educators must help new professionals understand the breadth and seriousness of sterile processing from the beginning. The work is not simply a sequence of technical tasks. Each step is part of a larger system designed to prevent infection, support surgical readiness, and protect patients. When employees understand that connection, routine expectations take on greater meaning.
Cleaning, inspection, assembly, sterilization, documentation, storage, and adherence to an IFU are no longer isolated requirements; they become part of a shared responsibility for safe care.
Felicia Sheriff approaches this as a shared responsibility by ensuring the leader’s visible presence throughout the development process. Education and mentorship are not responsibilities that can be delegated entirely to an orientation checklist or annual competency. Leaders reinforce purpose by staying close enough to the work to answer questions, connect expectations to their consequences, and show through their own behavior why the standard deserves attention. Their participation communicates that development matters and that the work is worthy of continued learning.
Brandy Bowser looks even farther upstream. If the profession wants people to understand the significance of sterile processing, that explanation cannot begin only after they are hired. Partnerships with schools, workforce programs, and health care organizations can introduce prospective professionals to the field, provide meaningful externships, and help them see how work performed outside the patient’s view supports the entire surgical system. These entry points do more than fill vacancies. They help people enter the profession with a clearer understanding of its purpose and potential.
The link between a task and the patient is often difficult to see. Sterile processing professionals may never meet the person whose instruments they prepare. Their work occurs before the procedure, beyond the patient’s view, and often outside the view of other health care professionals. Yet, each instrument that is cleaned, inspected, assembled, packaged, sterilized, transported, and stored carries the work forward toward a clinical moment. The patient may be invisible to the technician, but the technician’s influence on that patient is not.
Explaining the “why” also strengthens judgment. Instructions can guide employees through familiar circumstances, but purpose helps them reason when something does not fit the expected pattern. An employee who understands what we are protecting is better prepared to recognize when a shortcut, deviation, unclear instruction, or unexpected condition could create risk. The goal is not to debate every direction or replace adherence with individual interpretation. It is to develop professionals who can follow the standard while understanding its clinical and operational significance.
Purpose also changes the relationship between accountability and learning. Employees are more likely to take ownership when they understand what an expectation protects, and correction becomes more meaningful when it includes context rather than only stating what was done incorrectly. Explaining the “why” does not weaken authority or make standards optional. It helps transform compliance into professional judgment, connecting the work performed in sterile processing with the patient depending on it.
Procedures tell people what to do. Purpose helps them understand what they are protecting.
Growth often begins when someone is trusted with more than they have already proven they can do. That kind of trust involves risk. The employee may still need guidance, experience, or confidence, but a leader sees enough potential to offer responsibility before complete readiness is visible. Several leaders described moments when someone opened that space for them and how those opportunities changed the direction of their careers.
Felicia Sheriff remembers leaders who recognized her potential, shared opportunities, served as references, and encouraged her to continue growing. Their belief did not do the work for her, but it helped her see possibilities that might otherwise have remained out of reach. Leadership involves evaluating what people can do today while also recognizing what they may be capable of becoming.
Mamadou Cissé describes a similar experience, although he is careful not to portray opportunity as something a person simply receives. Leaders trusted him early and gave him room to learn, but he understood that trust created an obligation to prepare. Education, professional involvement, new challenges, and a willingness to stretch beyond what was comfortable helped him grow into the responsibility he had been given. Opportunity opened the door, but preparation shaped what he could do once he entered.
For MK Parrott, trust arrived through meaningful responsibility. As one of the early hires in a newly created national sterile process single-leader group, she was relatively early in her career when she was invited to contribute ideas, lead initiatives, and manage programs. Those opportunities did more than test her readiness. They accelerated it. Each assignment allowed her to build judgment, confidence, and experience that could not have been developed through observation alone.
BrandyBowser’s understanding of trust was shaped by how long she waited for someone to extend it. Even after earning her certification, she spent years trying to secure a paid sterile processing role because employers wanted experience she had not yet had the opportunity to gain. When someone finally took a chance on her, the opportunity carried lasting significance. Today, she views opening doors as a leadership responsibility. Mentorship, professional development, and visible career pathways help ensure that talented employees are not overlooked simply because no one has yet given them the opportunity to demonstrate what they can do.
Trust shapes each career differently. Sheriff had her potential recognized and encouraged. Cissé treated early trust as an area to prepare and keep reaching. Parrott grew through meaningful responsibility. For Bowser, finally receiving an opportunity created a commitment to open doors for others.
Trust does not require leaders to ignore readiness, lower expectations, or assign responsibility without support. It means recognizing that readiness is not always something people possess in full before an opportunity appears. Sometimes readiness is built through the opportunity itself, through stretch assignments, coaching, feedback, mentorship, and the chance to recover from mistakes. When trust is paired with guidance and accountability, it gives people room to become capable of more.
This is why investing in people cannot be separated from departmental performance. A department’s future capacity is shaped by the people leaders choose to develop today. Technical expertise, confidence, judgment, and leadership depth do not appear when a vacancy opens; they are built over time, often because someone saw potential early and created room for it to grow.
Recognition matters in sterile processing, particularly in a profession whose expertise and patient impact often remain outside public view. Bobbie Gaskins, however, argues that recognition cannot depend entirely on what hospital leaders, clinical partners, or other departments choose to provide. Professional credibility is also built through how sterile processing professionals communicate, collaborate, continue learning, and uphold expectations every day.
Her perspective brings the earlier shelving assignment back into focus. What seemed like an insignificant task ultimately represented cleanliness, preparation, teamwork, and readiness. Professionalism is often demonstrated in these ordinary moments: following the IFU when a shortcut would be faster, asking for help rather than guessing, reporting a concern others might overlook, or completing an undesirable assignment with care.
The other leaders describe the same principle in different ways. For Felicia Sheriff, professionalism is grounded in integrity, consistency, and reputation. Michele Webb connects it to following IFUs and best practices without cutting corners. Eduardo Velazquez emphasizes remaining level-headed under pressure and accepting responsibility for results. MK Parrott reminds us that leadership can be practiced from any position, while Brandy Bowser includes continued learning and creating opportunities for others to grow.
Professionalism is therefore reflected less in title, appearance, or external praise than in the choices people make when the work is routine, difficult, or unseen. Those choices shape the culture and credibility of the department, and help determine whether the profession is prepared for the greater recognition and responsibility it seeks.
No single personality type or leadership style defines this group. What they share is a set of practices that combines operational discipline with deliberate attention to people. The next-generation sterile processing leader remains responsible for standards, performance, and patient safety, while recognizing that results are more sustainable when employees understand the work, contribute to it, and take responsibility for protecting it.
Across these 7 interviews, six leadership practices consistently emerged. The next-generation sterile processing leader:
The 6 practices reinforce one another. Employee voice is more useful when people understand the purpose of the work. Trust produces more when expectations are clear. An adaptable leader remains credible by modeling the same standards required of the team. The result is a leadership model that develops people, keeps expectations high, and makes accountability shared, understood, and connected to patient care.
Effective leaders draw on both operational direction and developmental leadership. The shift is not from one valid model to another, but toward a broader balance: maintaining clear authority and standards while building the capability, judgment, and ownership of the team. (Figure 2)
The lesson Gaskins learned from that early shelving assignment extends far beyond a single task. Her manager maintained the expectation, but also helped her understand what it protected: cleanliness, preparation, teamwork,discipline, and the department’s readiness to support patient care. Accountability and development occurred together.
That balance is the defining characteristic of the leadership model described across these interviews. These leaders are not choosing between people and performance. They recognize that performance depends on people who understand the purpose of the work, have the confidence to raise concerns, receive opportunities to grow, and accept responsibility for meeting the standard.
Their leadership is collaborative and adaptable, with greater room for employee voice, yet remains demanding, consistent, and grounded in technical rigor. Trust supports accountability. Empathyhelps leadersrespondeffectivelywithoutloweringexpectations.Development enables people to meet standards when work becomes difficult.
People first, standards always; therefore, there is no choice between workforce needs and patient safety. It is a recognition that the two are inseparable. Reliable patient care depends both on the standards sterile processing professionals must uphold and on the leadership conditions that enable them to uphold those standards when the work is difficult, the pressure is high, and the consequences matter most.
Putting people first does not mean placing standards second. It means building the conditions in which people can uphold those standards when they matter most.
