Doctor to Doctor: Seven Leadership Hints You Can Use

  1. Learn to listen. Jennifer Goldstein, MD, makes a point to listen to both her colleagues and her patients. “With how busy we are today, we forget to listen. We may hear but I’m not sure we listen,” she says.
  2. Know how to handle confrontation. “The biggest leadership skill that physicians don’t learn in education is confrontation, which nobody likes but we all have to do,” says Christopher Hager, MD. Dr. Goldstein advises taking deep breaths and responding calmly and quietly to diffuse the situation.
  3. Get organized. Eric Gertner, MD, found this out firsthand when he and his colleagues made a request to the hospital administration and were turned down. “We hadn’t done our homework enough,” Dr. Gertner says. The group got organized, put together a plan, and gathered data. Their second pitch to the administration was a success.
  4. Teamwork. Teamwork. Teamwork. Medicine is a team sport, and good leaders know how to inspire their team—whether that’s physician colleagues, hospital administration, other medical professionals, and patients. Todd Fisher, MD, made sure to emphasize team spirit with his staff, and it paid off when his staff teamed up to make sure their patients received flu shots during a vaccination shortage.
  5. Effectively manage your time. Just seeing patients is enough to keep you plenty busy. How do you find time to be leader? Gerald Tracy, MD, says it can take as much or as little time as you want. “It’s not the hours you spend. It’s what you do with the hours that you spend,” he says.
  6. Be comfortable speaking in public. You’ll need to know how to speak in public, whether you’re leading a packed meeting, making a pitch to the hospital administration, or just speaking to your staff or colleagues. Robert Ettlinger, MD, says, “I see public speaking as being a skill you need to learn to have any sort of leadership role.”
  7. Passion. If you love what you do, others will follow your example. The best doctor is “one who wakes up every morning and pinches himself and thinks this is the greatest job in the world,” Dr. Fisher says.

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Last Updated: 2/23/2009
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