40 Under 40: Anthony Perrotti

Anthony Perrotti first learned some of his most important lessons about leadership and teamwork in the outdoors.

As an instructor for the Colorado Outward Bound School, he led leaders and teams through expeditions where challenge, uncertainty and shared effort had a way of stripping things down quickly. In those conditions, people could not rely on good intentions alone. They had to rely on what they knew how to do together.

Later, in the U.S. Air Force, he encountered the same lesson under far greater pressure. As a SERE specialist — Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape — and later as a master instructor, Perrotti trained military members at high risk of being isolated in combat to lead and work together to survive and return with honor.

The setting changed, but the lesson did not.

When conditions get hard, what matters is not what people intend to do. What matters is what they have practiced enough to do together.

“My work has always been about one thing: helping people perform together when it matters,” Perrotti said.

That lesson has followed him into healthcare, where he now serves as director of Culture & Learning at Kootenai Health.

For Perrotti, healthcare is a different arena, but not a different problem. Teams still have to perform under pressure. Leaders still have to create clarity when conditions are changing. And results still depend on how well people work together.

His work today is focused on helping leaders create more consistency in how they lead so teams have clearer direction, stronger follow-through and more dependable results.

“In those environments, what you actually do matters more than what you intend,” he said. “That’s still true in healthcare.”

Perrotti said his formal education reinforced what experience had already taught him. His graduate studies and doctoral work deepened his ability to help people turn learning into daily behavior through clear standards, practice in real work, feedback and reinforcement over time.

“That approach shapes everything I do — from leader development to culture work — because results don’t improve sustainably unless behaviors become repeatable and consistent,” he said.

Over time, that lesson also shaped the way he thinks about culture. Culture, he said, is not a slogan or words on a wall. It is what people experience every day in how work is led — especially when pressure rises.

“Culture isn’t slogans or values on a wall,” Perrotti said. “It’s the behaviors people fall back on when time is short and stakes are high.”

At Kootenai Health, that belief now shows up in work aimed at strengthening leader consistency and improving the lived experience of engagement, safety and patient experience across the system. As that work has taken hold, progress has become visible both in organizational results and in the day-to-day experience of the people doing the work. That work also gave Perrotti the opportunity to represent Kootenai Health at Press Ganey’s national HX26 conference.

It is also the advice he would give his younger self.

“Go do hard things with good people,” Perrotti said. “That’s where you learn what people are capable of, what you’re capable of, and the power of leadership and teamwork in practice.”