Tag healthcare leadership

The Meeting That Had No Idea Why It Existed

Meetings without a clear purpose are a waste

Physicians already run superb meetings. A code has a leader, defined roles, one goal, and a decision at the end. So does morning rounds. So does tumor board. Then the same physician walks into a 2 p.m. committee meeting and forgets all of it.

This post tells the story of a clinic executive committee that met for years without anyone asking what it was for. It had no governance structure, no minutes, and made no real decisions — and when it kept running over, the group solved the problem by making the meeting longer.

Meetings earn their place on the calendar only when they do a specific job. Name the purpose before you gather the people.

“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 Servant Leadership Actually Means For Physicians

Physicians know how to serve. We've been doing it since the first day of medical school. But serving patients and serving a team are not the same skill. The shift from one to the other is harder than most people expect. And getting it wrong can quietly undermine your leadership before you even realize what's happening. Robert Greenleaf's concept of Servant Leadership can help.

Why Your Speech Must Reveal Something About You

Whatever your message, someone has said it before. And someone will say it again. But when you say it with your story — your thoughts, your memories, your joy, your pain — that's when it becomes unforgettable. The final installment of this series covers the last two lessons: show yourself, and have fun. Together, they explain why ChatGPT can write a speech about your topic but can't write your speech, and why both showing yourself and having fun are indispensable to becoming a voice that moves.

Why You Can’t Practice Your Speech Without Saying It Aloud

Someone told me they practiced their speech while walking their dog. "Do you say it out loud?" I asked. "No," they said. That's not practicing — that's thinking. Part 3 of the series about lessons I learned from my Toastmasters contest last year covers two lessons about preparation: practice aloud to find the words make you stumble, and rehearse with real people to find out if your message actually lands.

How Saying Less Can Make You More Persuasive

Would you pay four people to do a job one person could do better? So why do we do that with words? Part 2 of this series covers two tightly linked lessons: make every word earn its place, and tell the truth without being boring. Together, they explain why cutting 44% of the words from one paragraph made it hit harder — and why a CMO's no-brainer proposal to imrove care took a whole year to make happen.