From setting strategy, establishing organizational mission and values, and selecting the right talent, the skills of healthcare leadership are changing
Leaders with clinical credibility are more able to be influential in healthcare organizations and as system leaders than those coming from outside — though there will always be notable exceptions.
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From his years of experience, Professor Brian Golden is emphatic about what makes a successful healthcare leader: “I’ve never seen a high performing health system that didn’t have significant clinical leadership,” he says. Whereas 30 years ago clinicians who transferred to management roles might be accused of moving to the "dark side," today doctors and other clinicians know that the system is driven by multiple stakeholders and complex dynamics — finance, regulation, human resources, etc. "They need someone who can speak their language, who is on their side [in a leader]."
“There is a bit of ‘trust edge’ when clinicians are in leadership roles, because they have been socialized to the end purpose, to the meta purpose — which is to use resources as effectively as they can to care for patients,” asserts Golden. It’s not so much that clinicians who convert to management roles have special medical knowledge, but more that they have the credibility as people who understand the nature of the profession. Leaders with clinical credibility are more able to be influential in healthcare organizations and as system leaders than those coming from outside — though there will always be notable exceptions.
Otherwise, the characteristics that make a successful healthcare leader are similar to those any leader in a complex, multi-stakeholder environment must possess—critically, the ability to lead through persuasion and influence, rather than through exercising top-down power. (The latter doesn’t work since most hospital-based physicians aren’t employed by the hospital.) Healthcare leaders must have the ability to actively listen, see alternatives, negotiate and resolve conflict.
Much recent thinking around leadership focuses on organizational culture and the need to prioritize values and purpose. Leadership at all levels with space given for individualism, creativity and innovation are widely embraced in progressive organizations today. But do healthcare leaders have time for these things, when they are consumed with technical issues and concerns — operations, finance and risk management?
Golden has a clear view on this: “We tell our healthcare program participants that we’re not training you to be the chief financial officer, the chief risk officer or the chief information officer; what we’re training you to do is to understand what those people do, to ask them tough questions, and not get the wool pulled over your eyes.” It’s the leader’s role to set the strategy, to establish the mission and the values of the organization and to select trusted people who have the technical expertise and ensure that the job they do is aligned with the organization’s goals.
[This article has been reprinted, with permission, from Rotman Management, the magazine of the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management]