Tag physician leadership

The Why Question, Part 1: The Doctor Behind My Why

My why began in illness and healing

Before I could explain it, a sickly childhood taught me this about good doctors: They make you feel better before you actually start getting better. Years later, Simon Sinek's "Start With Why" gave the lesson a name. This post walks through Simon Sinek's Golden Circle — Why, How, What — and pairs it with Daniel Pink's research on purpose, autonomy and mastery as drivers of motivation. It includes a short exercise to find your own Why, a candid admission that this blog’s Why only became clear to the author a year into writing it, and a bedside technique borrowed from addiction medicine: asking a patient why they want to change instead of telling them why they should.

The Standardization Tax: Not Every Tradeoff Is Worth It

continuity of care is a given in rural medicine

What would a pre-med student think if she heard how many doctors today say that they would steer their own kids away from medicine? They blame increasing corporatization, shrinking autonomy, and burgeoning documentation burden. These stem from increasing standardization in medicine. This post, the first in a series, introduces the idea that while standardization has benefits — catching errors, controlling costs, protecting clinician time — it also has a cost. Not all eliminated variation is waste.

Anecdote, Story and Speech: What Every Leader Should Know

What makes a story a story is transformation

A phone call from a crying teenager, a residency training director who didn't ask a single clarifying question, and six words that changed how one physician has led ever since. This post opens with the story, then takes it apart. Drawing on a distinction learned in a storytelling class — an anecdote is something that happened, a story is something that happened and changed someone, a speech adds a call to action — it argues that physicians aren't bad storytellers. They were trained out of the middle term. The case presentation is built to strip away transformation. Leadership requires putting it back. Includes the line between using a story to illuminate your ask and using it to smuggle one, plus a two-sentence exercise for finding your own.

One Year of Writing and the Question I Keep Coming Back To

write every week

I wrote my first post on Voice That Moves one year ago. Except for a short break this summer, I have published a post every Sunday. This anniversary post highlights eight posts from the past year – on the communication gap between doctors and business executives, the discipline of hope, healthcare's strange economics, the truth about office politics, lessons from a national speaking competition, physician well-being and agency, the evidence behind servant leadership, and leading peers without formal authority. One question underlies my writing: how do you help those trained to heal learn to lead? There’s no tidy answer here…just a year spent working on it one post at a time.

The Most Important, Invisible Thing Regular Meetings Do

The important, invisible thing that regular meetings do

A clinic administrator announced a set of changes in the local newspaper. The staff who would carry out those changes found out the way everyone else in town did — over coffee, from the paper.

For days, people complained in hallways and parking lots. It went nowhere. Then, at the pointless monthly committee meeting, one senior physician said it out loud, in the room, in front of everyone. That naming set events in motion that eventually removed the administrator.

How did that happen? Because of every "pointless" meeting session that came before it. The committee had been building the team's connective tissue the whole time — badly, by accident, and without anyone naming it.

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.

The Medical Arts Building — What Is Lost and What We Still Have

As medicine evolves, is the art of medicine lost?

When I arrived in Ashland, Wisconsin for my first job out of training, a building stopped me. It had the name “Medical Arts” on it, proud for the whole town to see. My teachers had always called medicine an art and a science. They never mentioned the third word that medicine always was as well: business. And it's the business of medicine that has quietly erased those Medical Arts buildings across the north woods. The one in Ashland is apartments now. This post uses my own first practice, sold to a large health system before I arrived, to trace what physicians give up in that trade and the voice they don't have to. The lesson for any leader with more influence than authority: when you carry a strong argument and a sore spot, keep them in separate sentences.

Leading Peers: How to Influence People Who Don’t Report to You

Leadership is about influence, not about authority

When I became chief resident 25 years ago, the title came with a $1,000 a year increase in stipend and authority over the call schedule — yet I still spent the year asking peers for favors. That paradox opens a hard truth about medicine: authority rarely works, even when you have it. Every physician is independently licensed, and replacing an unhappy one costs a fortune. So leaders at every level run on influence, not authority. Drawing on a spring-break scheduling standoff between two psychiatrists I once supervised, we see how to move people who don't have to move — asking before telling, letting facts speak, reframing the stakes, and let them find their way. And when influence fails? Protect the relationship and try a different key.