Central Leadership Tenets

Leaders have an important role in inspiring people, persuading them to execute on excellence, and influencing the behaviors that help teams achieve outcomes. These central leadership tenets are relevant for physician and non-physician leaders alike.

In this issue of Physician Leadership Journal, we get a taste of how experienced physician leaders inspire, persuade, and influence team performance to achieve operational and cultural transformation, an outcome that is needed more now than ever in our industry.

First, we have included a discussion article advocating the application of high-reliability organization (HRO) principles and highlighting the critical role of physician leaders. This article provides a case study of the use of HRO principles to support the continued health of U.S. Navy and Marine Corps operational forces in a pandemic.

HROs are organizations with consistent systems that aim to achieve their goals and avoid potentially catastrophic errors. When errors occur, people learn from the failure, leading to improvement and resilience. The authors argue, and I agree, that physician leaders need to understand the potential that HRO principles and practices bring to organizational improvement and sustained high performance.

Second, we offer a discussion article that describes the value of effective physician–patient communication. This article provides a change management framework for establishing a relationship-centered care (RCC) communication program for hospital systems. The authors provide preliminary evidence of the value of a program that places the physician–patient relationship in a central role to care delivery. They argue that patient-centered communication training can improve communication skills, patient satisfaction scores, and physician wellness.

Finally, there is a field report from Duke Health describing an unconventional method to improve the well-being of frontline hospitalists during the COVID-19 pandemic, a situation exacerbated by the severe limitations on social interactions. The authors conducted semi-structured, one-on-one telephone interviews with hospitalists to build and improve relationships among colleagues. The report concludes that these interviews enhanced the connections between colleagues and rejuvenated the resiliency of hospitalists. They suggest that this was a valuable complement to other established physician well-being efforts.

As the official journal of the American Association for Physician Leadership, PLJ provides a platform for you to share your research with members throughout the world. Now is the time to use this platform to help inspire change in healthcare and to improve the way we deliver care to the patients, families, and communities we serve.

Please send me your thoughts at editor@physicianleaders.org. We would enjoy hearing stories about relevance of mentorship and the methods you use to ensure that you and your team are well-cared-for in our demanding careers.