Tag Archives: physician leaders

Some of the same skills that make physicians, nurses, medical administrators and allied health professionals excel in our clinical roles can potentially hinder our effectiveness as leaders. If the process of recognizing these risks were automatic we wouldn’t need to think about it. And there would be an even greater number of effective healthcare leaders.

Unfortunately, every group I speak with can quickly relate stories of a bad leader or two. While bad leadership may be common, I contend that intentionally bad leadership is rare. People don’t get up in the morning, and while shaving or brushing their hair, look in the mirror and say, “Today I will be a bad leader.  I will mismanage and mess with someone’s career…” That should be sobering for us, however well-intentioned we may be. In the spirit of continual reflection and renewal, it’s worth examining three strengths we develop in the study and practice of healthcare that can sometimes be leadership liabilities.

Talented tacticians.
Healthcare is inherently tactical.  We learn the craft of medicine one patient at a time: one exam room, one hospital bed, one operating room.  It is a pattern reinforced through decades of training during the crucial years of adult development. After training, daily practice is a series of independent encounters in the ambulatory or inpatient arenas.  The rules of patient privacy necessitate our forgetting the last patient as we move onto the next.  Sometimes we may not think about them again until the lab or consult comes back, or we see them in follow-up.  There is little time or expectation for the awareness necessary to string together patterns of patient problems or behaviors, or for us to think about the larger, strategic implications of our medical practice.  The way of thinking may spill over into our personal lives where our best intentions to be the people/partners/parents we know we should be become lost in the tyranny of day-to-day “tactical” execution (drive the kids, take out the trash, finish the lawn etc). Continue reading →