Dheeraj Raina

Dheeraj Raina

  • Joined: July 28, 2025
  • Articles: 45
  • Comments: 1

What Physician Leaders Must Do Before Deploying ‘AI Therapy’

Emotional support validates and comforts. Psychotherapy comforts AND transforms.

AI chatbots are everywhere. Some people now treat them as therapy. They aren't. This post draws a clear line between emotional support — comfort, listening, reassurance, available from almost anyone — and psychotherapy, which is a clinical treatment delivered by a trained professional who assesses, diagnoses, and is accountable for the result. Using psychiatrist Dr. Steven Reidbord's gym-versus-cardiologist comparison, it explains why tools engineered to be agreeable are excellent at comfort but unfit for care. Confusing the two has already cost lives. Physician leaders have a special responsibility to help their organizations see the difference. This post shows them how.

Why You Are Both Cabo Verde and Argentina

To keep on playing one must pause and reflect

On Friday, a nation of half a million people took the defending World Cup champions to extra time. And lost on an own goal in the 111th minute. Cabo Verde's story is being told everywhere as an underdog triumph, and it is one. But there's a second story sitting on the other bench, and leaders need it more. Argentina nearly lost because their winning ways had quietly taught them the wrong lesson. This post reads the same match twice: first as the underdog who builds something the scoreboard can't measure, then as the champion whose success hides its own flaws. Because if you lead anything, you are both teams at once. And the best leaders learn to see both stories.

“Got a Minute?”: A Leader’s Guide to the Feedback Talk

Make giving feedback a culture

You've thought about what you want to say. Then you sit down your mouth opens, and the words come out wrong. This post — the third and final in the Building an Honest Feedback Culture Series — walks physician leaders through the feedback conversation, step by step. Drawing on Crucial Conversations by Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzler, it covers four moves. You'll see how to Start with Heart, Master My Stories, Make It Safe, and STATE the Path. It shows how to share facts without putting the other person on the defensive. The post closes with the power of silence. It also covers what to do when feedback lands hard. And it shows how to handle the conversation when it's with a peer or someone above you.

Care Personally, Challenge Directly: A Feedback Framework

build an honest feedback culture

Even with the right structure in place for feedback, what we say is often shaped by our gut sense of what good feedback sounds like. Most of us often get it wrong. This post — the second in the Building an Honest Feedback Culture — draws from Kim Scott's Radical Candor framework. We will see the two ideas at its core that lead to the four quadrants every leader should know. We will spot the trap most well-meaning leaders fall into. The framework makes us rethink what "caring" really means as a leader. A quick self-test at the end helps you spot the quadrant you live in most often.

Why Not Everyone Gets Honest Feedback

building a feedback culture

Most organizations don't have a feedback culture. They have an annual review process and call it one. The two are not the same. This post, the first in a three-part series, looks at why honest feedback is so rare in physician-led teams. It explores three quiet factors that decide who gets the truth and who gets a polite smile: hierarchy, responsibility, and setting. Drawing on my experience in Toastmasters, where structured feedback is part of every meeting, the post argues that feedback culture is a structure you build, not a process you visit occasionally. It offers healthcare leaders a place to start.

What Silence Really Means — Humble Inquiry, Part 2

Quality questions lead to quality relationships

In Part 1, I shared the story of a night call schedule that failed because my team didn’t warn me…because I didn’t really ask them. This follow-up explores what that silence actually means: not agreement, but resignation. Drawing again on Ed and Peter Schein's Humble Inquiry, we see why physician leaders find humble inquiry especially difficult because it feels slow, vulnerable, and out of their control and how we can start practicing it today.

Why Didn’t Anyone Tell Me? — Humble Inquiry, Part 1

Humble Inquiry leads to open communication

Once, when a Chief Medical Officer, I rolled out a night call schedule that failed three weeks in. The team had seen what was coming; they just didn't tell me. The reason wasn't a communication failure — it was an asking failure. Drawing on Ed and Peter Schein's Humble Inquiry, this post explores why physicians, trained to be the person in the room with the answer, struggle to ask real questions when they move into leadership. It introduces the Scheins' four types of inquiry — humble, diagnostic, confrontive, and process-oriented — and shows how most physician leaders unknowingly default to confrontive questions that teach their teams to confirm a hypothesis rather than share what they actually see.

Why Psychological Safety Is Not About Being Nice

which kind of open door do you have

A nurse once told me the truth only when the doctor in charge was away. That is what a lack of psychological safety looks like in healthcare: not loud fear, but quiet calculation. When people cannot say what needs to be said in the room, truth starts traveling through hallways and whispers. And when that happens, leaders are not hearing reality. They are hearing what feels safe.

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