“Sometimes I feel the physicians demonize us for the decisions we make because they don’t understand why we’re making them.” This quote is from a healthcare administrator lamenting the tension between his department and his physicians. Several colleagues of mine and I conducted 25 administrative interviews. As a professional listener who specializes in physician and…
Careful! So you think you’re looking at a remedial circumstance because one of your physicians or executives is behaving poorly. Behavioral issues are often developmental needs in disguise. When dealing with “problematic behavior,” consider instead that you’re dealing with a normal human being who needs support. No one got up one morning, rubbed their…
Your leadership team does not have a brain. It does, however, have shared perceptions, shared biases and memory, collective thinking, and mutual assumptions. In other words, just as individuals have minds, so does your leadership team have a mind. Many leadership teams are too busy to objectify and examine their own collective mind. The price…
Shame is antithetical to effective leadership. It’s a fear-based emotion that keeps you thinking about yourself. Competent leadership requires altruism. Shame, sometimes referred to as insecurity, can impede or debilitate new, young, and sometimes even seasoned leaders. Worse yet, shame will prevent some of your most talented people from stepping up, speaking out, leaning in,…
Physician leaders and healthcare executives sometimes speak of creating oases of efficiency and people-centeredness within organizations or systems they consider dysfunctional. Get enough people together for long enough, they say, and years of good policy intentions turn redundant, excessively complicated, and wasteful. Dysfunction in healthcare systems (often pejoratively described as “healthcare bureaucracy”) is especially problematic…
It’s a forest-through-the-trees kind of thing. You don’t see your thinking because you’re using your thinking to see. Perception begets interpretation > Interpretation begets emotion > Emotion drives behavior. Many physicians, physician leaders, healthcare executives and leadership teams don’t take the time to examine these perception-feeling-behavior progressions and their impact on performance. Yet failure to…
Physicians dedicate their young lives to technical growth: pre-med requirements, preparing for and taking entrance exams, medical school, passing boards, residency, and so on. Often, the price of this laser focus on technical growth is neglected adaptive growth. Adaptive growth is associated with wisdom, gravitas, maturity, courage, complex thinking, governance, vision, competent leadership, and confidence. Adaptive…
What about the colleague who is willing to sacrifice the truth if being truthful means being wrong? What about the boss who has no concern about the consequences of his or her manipulative style? What about the employee who is a stranger to empathy and has no problem hurting others? What about unreasonable people?
Power, Control, Revenge, Avoidance, and Attention. These are Rudolf Dreikurs’ five motives for troublesome behavior.[i] We can use them to gain insight into ourselves and to understand some of the difficult behaviors we see in others. Dreikurs taught us to look beyond problematic behavior, identify the unmet need, and resist the knee-jerk urge to use…
Fear of being dispossessed was and is a biological brain function promoted by natural selection. Subsequently, we’re hardwired to fear social estrangement. (In other words, you’re normal.)