Humans in Healthcare #32 | Leadership

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There’s a long-standing debate between leadership being innate vs learned. What is your take? From my perspective, I think some traits can make someone more prone to leadership, but I think it can be learned with the right mindset, effort, desire, and guidance.

That’s why it is my core belief that it’s not the title that makes the leader. It’s the person behind the title that does.

This is true everywhere, but especially in healthcare. In healthcare, we all have to be leaders even if we don’t have the title. We have to lead our patients well. We have to work collaboratively in a team well. We have to lead ourselves well.

Yet, there is still little preparation for what it takes to be a leader. Leadership doesn’t often come with a handbook, yet some of us are thrust into leadership positions or find ourselves climbing the ladder of leadership wondering how we got there. Others work for leaders to only learn what they will not do when they find themselves in a position of leadership.

Leadership is not theoretical. It’s an action — what you do backed up by what you say backed up by how you show up. Leadership often requires duality — having a presence that is quiet enough to hear and bold enough to share. And it’s hard — hard to balance humility and confidence, charisma and character, vulnerability and courage, boldness and kindness.

Clinicians are now finding more opportunities to use their clinical experiences in sought-after leadership positions outside of clinical medicine — in tech, industry, and beyond. So is this a prime time for clinicians to shine? I think so, and yet, there still isn’t a great support system to help clinicians shine.

Today, I am gifting you a few words from someone who shines here and walks the walk: Dr. Tzvi Doron (who also happens to be a founding member of the Humans in Healthcare community!).

Dr. Doron didn’t climb his way to leadership — rather, he learned his way through leadership, starting as employee #3 in a fast-growing health tech startup to eventually become their Chief Clinical Officer, holding functions in both the corporate and clinical teams.

Below, he offers some wisdom from lessons learned through actively leading people and teams. Please also take our quick survey at the end and tell us if you’re interested in joining a clinician leadership conversation to help prepare you to become the leader you can be in healthcare and beyond.

📖 Today’s chapter: Leadership isn’t theory, it’s action

with Dr. Tzvi Doron

The leadership transition

One of the greatest challenges to rising clinician leaders in startups and industry is the transition from individual contributor (IC) to manager. As practicing clinicians, we are judged by our own work. This may be antibiotic stewardship, door-to-balloon time, readmissions, or polyp detection rate, etc. Even when we lead other clinicians, our jobs often depend to a large degree on supporting those goals for other clinicians for a percentage of our work while we continue to practice our craft. 

Working in tech or industry is different. As an IC, you are judged—and judge yourself—by your own output. How many policies have I created that are being used? How many sales have I made? What products, devices, drugs, or clinical journeys have I created that are helping patients and pushing forward company objectives? 

However, as you transition to a manager, your output and success are based primarily on what your team produces. Your job is to bring out the best in your team by coaching them and helping them solve problems as well as providing moral leadership and inspiration. This can be a difficult change. 

One of the most important things you must learn how to do is to give away your legos. You will no longer have the time to be in the weeds on every little task or project, including ones for which you used to hold primary responsibility. Your job now is to build and/or maintain a team with the right people in different functions. You must bring out the best in those people through empowering them with the support they need to succeed. You must know enough to maintain alignment and prevent things from going too far off the rails and be ready to dive into the weeds from time to time as necessary. But how do you give people autonomy and trust while not allowing the ship to sail into the wind?

Trust, Empowerment, and Alignment

There is a delicate balance rising leaders must strive for. It is a balance between autonomy, empowerment, alignment, and preventing serious damage to team or company goals. Don’t worry. This balance is not an exact point but more like a zone. Just as there is no exact normal value for potassium or hemoglobin, there is no exact point for this. You might be fine with a potassium level of 4.0 or 4.5 but not treating a level of 7.0 would be medical malpractice. Similarly, you must empower your teams and reports to have autonomy and solve many problems themselves, but you cannot allow for catastrophic mistakes or mistakes that undermine company goals or values. 

There are several factors here that will contribute to this balance. The first is establishing rapport. Leaders must genuinely care for their teams’ and reports’ personal and professional well-being. Faking it will not do. People will know if you are not for real. This does not require a deep personal relationship, but it also means knowing something about people’s personal lives. It is necessary to be able to help them be the best at their jobs. It is also the right thing to do because our lives do not have neat compartments, much as we pretend they do. 

Once rapport has been established (this is not sequential but rapport is necessary for everything else), bidirectional trust is a must. Your reports and those on other teams must know that you will be truthful and that your feedback is never meant to hurt or punish even though it may sting at times. Once again, the only way to earn trust is to truly earn it. Most people have decent bullshit detectors. They will know if you are lying, and there will be downstream repercussions. Trust is the basis of all human relationships, and leading is a form of service. If you are not interested in serving others, you will never be the best leader you can be. 

Along with rapport and trust, you must strive to maintain alignment with your team. This is not something you can establish and put on autopilot. It is more akin to steering a car. It requires ongoing communication to make sure each individual understands company and team objectives and you understand what people are doing is laddering up to those objectives. It is much easier to reestablish alignment early in the process than later. This is like a ship that has gone off the route 5 degrees for only a few minutes. At that point, getting back on course takes no time at all. However, if the same 5 degree deviation is maintained for a month, the problem is much larger. This is what regular one-on-ones and other impromptu communication is for. You must use this time to continually realign with your people. 

Good rapport, trust, and alignment are what give you the confidence to empower your teams with autonomous decision-making and problem-solving. Alignment provides you with confidence that they know what they should be working on, and trust and rapport mean they are not afraid to come to you if they need help and you can also be sure that they will come to you if there’s a problem before it’s too late. This may all seem too simple, but it isn’t. Sure, there are many fine points you will learn with time and may vary by team and context, but these basics form the bedrock of solid leadership.

🛑 Want opportunities to learn more clinician-focused leadership tips from experienced leaders? Tell us here by completing this 2-minute survey.

Thanks for reading and thanks to Dr. Doron for sharing his lessons learned. More to come!

In humanity,

Amy

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