It's a jungle out there. Who has the best chance of successfully toughing it out?
Healthcare leadership is not for the faint of heart. For starters, the profession is changing — and rapidly. Where specialists were once prized, generalists are now key players, and everyone is more or less expected to be able to pivot at a moment's notice.
The demands on today's healthcare leader are more stringent than ever before. Leaders must be experts in their field and highly competent in many others. They must have it within themselves to be personable yet gritty, compassionate yet driven, down-to-earth yet all-knowing.
This is a tall order for one person.
Healthcare environments are diverse, and there is room for many different types of leaders; there is no magic formula for leadership. However, according to Mark Madden, senior vice president of executive search with healthcare leadership search firm B. E. Smith, there are several nonnegotiable core traits of successful healthcare leaders. These traits include:
• Intellectual dexterity. Healthcare is a highly strategic business. Leaders must be able to take complex information and make consistently successful high-risk decisions. Leaders must be strong problem-solvers, but they must also know when they are out of their depths and when they need to ask for outside input.
• Outstanding interpersonal skills. As the need to collaborate and partner in healthcare expands, so too grows the importance of interpersonal skills. "Being a leader is about influencing," says Mr. Madden. "Good interpersonal skills are the foundation for the relationship building that is so important in healthcare."
• Integrity. This trait may seem obvious, but it can be overlooked. While charisma is a crucial attracting factor in relationship-building, integrity serves as the foundation for long-term loyalty and commitment to a leader, according to Mr. Madden. Integrity helps leaders build their followings.
• Intensity. This quality is the driving one behind leaders' ability to achieve success. Intensity drives leaders to expect results, pursue success and know when taking a calculated risk is appropriate.
While these four traits are old standbys in leadership competency, there are a few traits that have become increasingly important as they relate to a leader's ability to be successful in the new healthcare environment. They include:
• Adaptability. In today's healthcare environment, there is very little room for those who refuse to adapt. Without a willingness to change, it is easy to drive an organization into the ground.
• Agility. A simple willingness to change isn't enough to make it so. Healthcare leaders also must be able to reprioritize tasks and goals at a moment's notice and integrate new information into plans as it appears.
This is a lot to ask of a leader. The good news is that while some of these leadership traits are innate, others can be learned.
When onboarding leaders, it's important to identify which core competencies they already have, which they can develop and how to help set them up for success within the organization. There are two ways to achieve this, according to Mr. Madden.
The first is for leaders to engage with others within their field, whether it is through extra education, joining a professional society, getting accredited or other similar pursuits that allow idea-exchanges with thought leaders to see what's working and what isn't in others' organizations.
The second thing leaders can do is to seek out a mentor. This is something Mr. Madden says is an overlooked opportunity when it comes to being proactive in developing leadership skills. "Don't accept the fact that if your institution doesn't have a mentoring program then you don't have a mentor," he says. "Go find a mentor. That mentor doesn't have to be in your organization or even in your own industry. Seek out the top executives or leaders in your community and talk to them. Ask questions and gather information."
Finally, it's critical to remember that people who display leadership competencies can come from any quarter. Seasoned executives may remember a "standardized" path to their executive role. They knew the ladder they had to climb to get to where they are today, and they played the game. Today's upcoming leaders are very different.
"We're seeing horizontal, rather than vertical, moves in the younger generations. They want to be stimulated with new opportunities and get a different experience. I think leaders that are looking horizontally as well as vertically to gain experience will gain competencies to give them a better and broader perspective," says Mr. Madden.
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