Eliot Levitt: The Yvonne Awards demonstrate something that it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of

Eliot Levitt, Senior Leader in Healthcare Information Technology at Glissade Design, shared on LinkedIn:

“There is an old African proverb that goes, ‘If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.’.

A few days ago, LinkedIn pushed a ‘Suggested’ post to the top of my feed from an entrepreneur recounting a time he was rejected from a leadership position after a number of former coworkers reported that every time he was involved in a group, the effort, story, and recognition was always ‘all about him.’

The post wasn’t at all a lesson in humility from a leader who learned a hard lesson on how to value others, give recognition, and express gratitude; instead, the poster doubled down on what he took away from the experience: that self-promotion is not only valuable but necessary, and if you don’t do it for yourself, no one is going to do it for you.

Social media algorithms being what they are, the comments to his post mostly reflected the ‘atta-boy’ echo chamber you would expect from a group of people who mostly follow people who mostly promote themselves.

It was enough, after all the back-slapping, to make me want to spend some time off LinkedIn for a while, even to make me question how much my own sharing is about educating and celebrating, and how much is, at the basest level, also just ‘all about me.’

Then I read this post about the 2024 Yvonne Awards. As I scrolled through, I became intensely curious about what a person had to do, exactly, to earn what turns out to be international recognition for ‘Challenging the Status Quo’ in healthcare.

Dr. Erica Tsang—a highly-regarded medical oncologist from the University of Toronto and the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre who researches advanced treatments for gastrointestinal cancers—shared the award this year with Dr. Pashtoon Kasi from Weill Cornell Medicine and New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

In addition to her research and leadership roles at PMCC and the University of Toronto, Dr. Tsang co-leads one of the four research teams the Marathon of Hope Cancer Centres Network (MOHCCN) announced would be funded under its MAESTRO program in 2024, with research focusing on using next-generation sequencing to help match pancreatic cancer patients to personalized therapies.

MOHCCN set up its Pan-Canadian Projects in 2021 with a call for white papers specifically targeting cross-institutional research that would disrupt the normal way that cancer research centers and universities normally operate—working in isolation and competing for funding and recognition—to specifically fund cutting-edge research that would benefit from shared resources, expertise, and data across institutions.

The Yvonne Awards demonstrate something that sometimes, as we wade through all the slop of social media, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of: there are good people out there who distinguish themselves more than they promote themselves, and who have dedicated their lives to collaborating with others to make the world a better place.

And two, well, that sometimes you have to wade through some slop to find them.”

David Schultz, Founding Member at Design Leaders Community added:

“The ones doing the greatest work are often too focused to even think about self-promotion, so it gets difficult to accurately connect success with the people who created that success. I’m glad to see OncoDaily giving this shout-out.”

Source: Eliot Levitt/LinkedIn