On any given day, healthcare leaders who would prefer to devote their time to improving patient care instead can find themselves overwhelmed with financial matters. At the same time, other challenges mount and these leaders aren’t always prepared for the onslaught.
Maybe that’s not their fault. In many cases, they were trained in medicine but not necessarily in leadership. Beyond that, today’s challenges — such as rapid technological innovations, shifting patient demographics, and mounting financial pressures — call not for just any leader but for a particular type of leader. They must be able to assess like clinicians and lead like CEOs.
And the healthcare industry needs to take steps now to train this new generation of leaders who embody the three-dimensional traits of palpable leadership, performance leadership, and people leadership.
Palpable leadership builds trust and inspires followership. Performance leadership bridges strategy with execution and accountability. People leadership creates environments where teams and individuals thrive.
Each trait builds on the others, resulting in someone in authority who builds trust, executes strategy, and creates environments where teams and individuals thrive.
Palpable leadership
Palpable leaders influence others to achieve their goals. They do this not just through their actions, accomplishments, and communications but by fostering a culture of followership that permeates the entire organization.
But palpable leaders don’t make everything about themselves. This type of leader sets aside ego and instead exudes foundational characteristics of trust, humility, and resolve. Those characteristics enable leaders to effectively connect with their teams and motivate them as they navigate challenges.
The characteristics of a palpable leader are also not stand-alone attributes. They require emotional intelligence, an important skill that helps leaders build credibility, act with integrity, demonstrate empathy, persevere with grit, and be authentic.
Performance leadership
Performance leadership is about driving outcomes, managing complexity, and ensuring that organizational goals are met through clear strategy and accountability.
This is important because if you can lead with charisma but don’t back it up with results, you are missing one of the essential parts of leadership. In healthcare, where operational complexity and patient outcomes are intertwined, these leadership attributes are of the utmost importance. Where palpable leadership is about leading without ego, performance leadership is leading with excellence.
The performance element, however, is particularly difficult in healthcare for many reasons, including:
- Large healthcare delivery systems are driven by significant, competing, and often urgent priorities. It’s easy for leaders to find themselves constantly putting out fires, which diverts their energy away from long-term efforts.
- Large health systems often have complex matrix reporting structures with multiple supervisors. Each of those supervisors has urgent projects that can require input and assistance.
- Performance leadership skills are not part of clinicians’ literacy. This is a significant gap, and it is particularly concerning when clinicians are unfamiliar with management basics, such as operations, high reliability, and financial literacy.
A performance leader must understand the big picture, and that can be overwhelming because the picture in healthcare is a gigantic one.
People leadership
People leadership, which is about building genuine, trust-based relationships, is the cornerstone of exceptional leadership.
To perform this type of leadership effectively, leaders must approach their role with empathy, vulnerability, and a commitment to understanding each member of the team. By prioritizing human connections to develop trust, leaders can inspire followership, align diverse teams, and unlock collective potential.
But trust takes work. How do you go about establishing it?
You do it by communicating clearly, demonstrating genuine curiosity about the team’s perspectives, and creating environments where individuals feel valued and empowered.
This approach goes beyond managing tasks. People leadership requires you to design organizational systems that support collaboration, autonomy, and shared purpose. Leaders must build strong relationships and high-functioning teams.
Such teams don’t happen by chance. Leaders must recruit talent and develop and empower teams to work effectively across disciplines. By fostering psychological safety, ensuring role clarity, and reinforcing shared goals, leaders can ensure teams operate with both independence and cohesion.
Lasting impact
Leadership that has a lasting impact is a continuous, intentional process that balances each of the three leadership dimensions.
As the healthcare industry continues to evolve, physicians, clinicians, and healthcare executives must rise to the challenge by embracing strategic thinking, innovation, and agility to navigate disruption while remaining committed to patient care.
The challenges are there to be met, and leaders who embrace all three leadership traits will be better prepared to meet them.
Photo: Sergey Khakimullin, Getty Images
Dr. Timothy N. Liesching is a physician leader, author, and Chief Physician Executive with more than two decades of experience in pulmonary and critical care medicine. He has served as Chief Medical Officer and interim President of a major academic medical center, where he led organizational transformation and clinical excellence initiatives. His new book, White Coat Leadership: Empowering the Next Generation of Healthcare Leaders from Bedside to Boardroom, provides a blueprint for developing clinician leaders equipped to navigate the challenges of modern healthcare with skill, integrity, and purpose.
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