Successful Leadership in Healthcare
What you need to know to do it well.
I’ve been reflecting recently on what I’ve learnt from being a leader in a healthcare company and, importantly, how to be good in this role. I have learned them through many failures and some successes along the way. I hope that this article can help you avoid a few.
Contents
Make your decisions with empathy
Your Patients
Yourself
Your Team
Your Department
Your Organisation
Keep Learning
You need a Growth Mindset
Follow the Science
Watch the Art
Cross-Functional Learning
Invest in Psychological Safety
What is psychological safety
Why it matters
The ways you can create psychological safety in your team
1. Make your decisions with empathy
For every decision you make in your role as a leader in a healthcare company, make sure you consider the impact on:
Your Patients
Yourself
Your Team
(Your Department)
Your Organisation
1.1 Your Patients
The most remembered part of the Hippocratic Oath is still the most important.
First, do no harm.
Healthcare decisions must always centre around the patient and avoid harm. Without this, you put your patients at risk with every decision.
Beyond avoiding harm, people expect to be treated with compassion and dignity, remember that healthcare professionals are simply advisors and should respect the primacy of the individual.
1.2 Yourself
Be kind to to yourself.
It’s hard work being a leader in a healthcare organisation.
The stakes are high, as are the expectations placed upon you by your patients, your reports, and the organisation.
Empathy with yourself and your decisions is crucial to avoiding burnout or becoming overly stressed, which can affect all the other people listed in this article.
1.3 Your team
What does being empathetic with decisions regarding your team mean? It means leading by example for your team. Showing up and doing the work. Representing their best interests. Remember to consider your team outside of work, is performance an issue due to problems at home? Are there any reasonable adjustments you can make to help this person?
1.4 (Your department)
This may only be relevant for larger organisations, hence the parentheses.
Once you’ve considered the patient, yourself, and your team, you can consider how your actions and decisions affect the other staff members working for another manager in the organisation. They’re probably facing similar challenges in terms of resources and pressures. Try to find solutions that benefit your broader department.
1.5 The Organisation
There is a natural tendency for things to become less organized over time. This is called Entropy. Weeds grow in vegetable patches. Trees need pruning. Engines rust. Even Mountains are gradually eroded.
It’s the same in any organisation.
Things tend to become less organised over time.
Your role as a leader is to prevent and reverse entropy. However, you have to do so with empathy and compassion.
2. Keep Learning
2.1 You Need to Develop a Growth Mindset
Stanford professor Carol Dweck proposed the term growth mindset in her book ‘Mindset’. Essentially, people with a growth mindset feel their skills and intelligence can be improved with effort and persistence. They embrace challenges, persist through obstacles, and learn from criticism.
2.2 Follow The Science
Medical knowledge is constantly evolving and expanding, both in depth and breadth. A 2011 paper tried to quantify the speed at which medical knowledge is increasing. The authors estimated that the doubling time of medical knowledge in
1950 was 50 years
1980 was 7 years;
2010 was 3.5 years.
2020 was 0.2 years — just 73 days
I’m not sure if this is correct, but I agree with the sentiment.
To be a good clinician, you have to keep learning.
2.3 Watch The Art
Medicine is said to be the most scientific of the arts, and the most artistic of the sciences. There are things to continue learning that you won’t find in a medical textbook.
How your patient communicates with you.
Why they’re reluctant to try that new medication?
The real reason they’ve decided to speak with you.
The subtlety of the art of medicine has a big impact on applying the science.
2.4 Crossfunctional learning
Healthcare and healthtech will become increasingly intertwined over the next decade.
To be a good leader in a healthcare business you will need to really understand the technologies you’re using to provide care.
I’m not saying you must know how to write JavaScript or query a SQL database. You will need to understand tradeoffs in design, scalability, and implementation of technology to the point that it impacts the care that you and your team are providing. You will need to be able to ensure that the care you’re providing is safe and effective.
To be a good leader in this field you will need to be curious about the technology and want to learn more.
3. Invest in Psychological Safety
3.1 What is Psychological Safety
Dr Amy Edmonson wrote about Psychological Safety in 1999 after studying clinical teams and noticing that high-performing teams shared their mistakes more freely than lower-performing teams.
It can be defined as:
the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes,
3.2 Why Psychological Safety Matters.
Psychological safety enhances collaboration and trust by promoting open dialogue and respect, leading to improved problem-solving and productivity.
Crucially, it supports mental well-being, reducing stress and burnout.
Establishing psychological safety requires leaders to make a conscious effort to model vulnerability, encourage diverse perspectives, and respond constructively to feedback, creating a culture where everyone can thrive.
3.3 The ways you can create psychological safety in your team
Leaders must encourage open communication, show empathy, and actively listen to team members to create psychological safety in a team.
Foster an environment where mistakes are treated as learning opportunities, not failures. Regularly solicit feedback and diverse viewpoints, demonstrating genuine interest and appreciation for different perspectives.
Recognise and celebrate contributions from all team members, reinforcing the value of every individual's input.
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