The 2025 AOA | USC APEX Leadership Conference: Achieving Peak Performance

The AOA APEX Leadership Certificate Program, in partnership with the USC Marshall School of Business, is a transformative five-month hybrid leadership development experience designed exclusively for orthopaedic surgeons. Rooted in the AOA Leadership Principles—Include, Envision, Balance, Orchestrate, and Grow—this cohort-based program cultivates the leadership skills necessary to navigate the evolving healthcare landscape with confidence and impact.

Participants will engage in a dynamic blend of in-person and virtual sessions, led by world-renowned USC Marshall faculty and experienced APEX alumni. The program provides personalized leadership insights, hands-on experiential learning, and tailored discussions contextualized for the orthopaedic surgeon community. It will consist of a 5-month program which will include two in person modules (June at the AOA Annual Leadership Meeting and September at USC), and two online modules in July and August. Participants are encouraged to register for the Cohort Model Package for a reduced fee or may register for a single individual session in June

Registration Now Open

Learn more about Tuition & Fees

Dates & Locations

  • Orientation Webinar: Monday, May 5, 2025 @4:00pm CT
  • Program Kickoff – AOA Annual Leadership Meeting: Saturday, June 7, 2025 @8:00am CT (Minneapolis, MN)
    • Launching immediately after the AOA Annual Meeting, participants will spend a full day with USC Faculty Greg Patton.
    • Using the Strength Deployment Inventory (SDI) 2.0 assessment, participants will examine their leadership styles, motivations, and interpersonal dynamics to enhance self-awareness and effectiveness.
  • Two Virtual Leadership Workshops (90-Minute Sessions): Monday, July 14, 2025 @7:00pm CT & Monday, August 11, 2025 @7:00pm CT
    • Led by USC Faculty Jay Conger, a global authority on leadership development, these interactive sessions will focus on Influence & Persuasion:
      • Essential techniques to lead, inspire, and drive change in healthcare teams and organizations.
      • How to influence in all directions (up, down & lateral).
  • Program Capstone – USC Campus: Friday, September 26-27, 2025 (Los Angeles, CA)
    • The program culminates with an immersive in-person experience at the USC Marshall School of Business:
      • Team Leadership – Leading high-performance teams in complex environments.
      • Using Narratives to Communicate Well – Mastering storytelling to enhance leadership presence and impact.
      • Productive Dialogue – Navigating difficult conversations with clarity and effectiveness.

Program Overview

Program Kickoff – AOA Annual Leadership Meeting: Saturday, June 7, 2025 @8:00am CT (Minneapolis, MN)

    • Session Title: Personal Leadership & SDI 2.0 Assessment
    • USC Faculty: Gregory Patton

This session focuses on enhancing leadership capabilities with a focus on leading oneself and others.  We begin by leveraging the processes and antecedents of leadership growth to maximize the effectiveness of each of your journeys.  In this session, we explore core motivation values that drive behavior, frame and constrain our view and, when explored, allow for the development of more positive and impactful relationships.  We explore how to enhance interpersonal effectiveness, lead change in yourself and others and to build influence and drive results.

Two Virtual Leadership Workshops (90-Minute Sessions): Monday, July 14, 2025 @7:00pm CT & Monday, August 11, 2025 @7:00pm CT

    • Session Title: Communicate, Convince, Lead: Persuasion for Physician Leaders
    • USC Faculty: Jay Conger

Persuasion at work is more than just presenting ideas—it’s about driving action and commitment. Your ability to champion initiatives effectively is a key factor in your influence, yet persuasion is a skill few have been formally trained in. It’s not enough to rely on experience or expertise alone. Persuasion is the most versatile influence tool, working in all directions: upward to leadership, across to peers, and downward to teams.

This session will teach you how to refine your ideas, make them more compelling, and lead others to actively support and implement them. Unlike transactional persuasion, which focuses on short-term wins, this approach helps you build lasting influence through meaningful conversations. You’ll explore four key persuasion skills and apply them to real initiatives, ensuring you don’t just communicate your ideas, but you get them adopted.

Program Capstone – USC Campus: Friday, September 26-27, 2025 (Los Angeles, CA)

    • Session Title: Lead with Impact: The Power of Storytelling in Leadership
    • USC Faculty: Jay Conger

Effective leaders don’t just communicate, they inspire, persuade, and leave a lasting impact. What if your words could shape decisions, rally teams, and drive action, even when you’re not in the room? This session will give you the storytelling tools to elevate your leadership presence, influence colleagues, and create narratives that move people to action.

  • Key Topics: The storytelling secrets of effective leaders who inspire with clarity and impact.
    • Techniques to strengthen your leadership presence and influence.
    • Using storytelling to guide decisions, align teams, and shape culture.
    • Choosing the right narrative for any leadership challenge.
    • Crafting stories that engage, motivate, and drive change.

Session Title: Mastering Productive Dialogues for Physician Leaders

USC Faculty: Jay Conger

Effective leadership in healthcare requires more than clinical expertise—it demands the ability to navigate complex conversations with clarity, curiosity, and impact. Drawing on the pioneering research of Chris Argyris, this program equips physician leaders with the skills to foster productive dialogues, reduce defensiveness, and drive meaningful change within their teams and organizations. Participants will explore how deeply held assumptions and defensive routines can hinder effective communication and problem-solving. Through interactive discussions and real-world case studies, they will learn to:

  • Recognize and overcome common barriers to open, constructive dialogue.
  • Apply the Ladder of Inference to make better decisions and challenge assumptions.
  • Cultivate a culture of psychological safety to encourage honest feedback and innovation.

This session will help physician leaders move beyond surface-level conversations to address underlying issues, strengthen relationships, and lead with greater influence and insight. By mastering productive dialogues, participants will be better equipped to resolve conflicts, align teams, and drive positive change.

Session Title: Meta-4 Simulation

USC Faculty: Gita Govahi

Meta-4 is an engaging experiential simulation that involves one large group. Participants will take on the challenge of perfecting their score through many rounds of planning and executing their strategy.

This is an “experiential” exercise, like many other activities in life, and learners take part in experiences, reflect upon, and integrate observations into personal theories, and begin to use them in making better quality decisions. Meta-4 serves as a microcosm in this case by allowing learners to gain new insights into effective planning, working in a team and successfully executing to accomplish the objective. The debriefing discussion that follows the exercise allows participants to reflect on the activity and focus on personal take-ways that are then applied to “real-life” scenarios.