Growing Leaders
There’s a simple truth that most healthcare organizations never come to terms with: medical school isn’t leadership training. As a matter of fact, it’s one of the worst places you could go to learn leadership skills. For the most part, medical education runs on a system of hierarchy, trial by fire, shaming and intimidation. As a result, most clinical leaders come to their roles with little or no preparation, and their organizations suffer as a result.
The usual path to advancement as a clinical leader goes something like this:
You’re a good clinician.
You’ve been around for a while.
No one else wants the position.
Presto change-o: you’re a leader! Go get-em, tiger.
Some organizations do a little better. They send their new leaders to some leadership training seminar and expect them to come back ready to lead. It’s better than nothing. Barely.
If an organization is serious about developing their leaders, they need to take it to the next level. First of all, they need to establish a philosophy and approach to leadership that’s practiced and shared from the C-Suite on down. That approach should align with their values and their mission, and it should create the culture that they aspire to build.
But even that isn’t enough. To stock a deep bench of skilled, effective leaders, you need to identify leadership potential and help it grow. Every leader should have their own personal growth plan, and that plan should have the full support of their supervisors and their organization.
You can spend an enormous amount of time and resources designing strategies and launching initiatives, but unless you have the leaders to execute them, why would you even bother?
