Developing Physician Leaders

Medicine has been a calling for me. From a young age, I was interested in both the science and the personal engagement that go with being a physician. The ability to serve others and help many of them through their darkest hours was rewarding. While I still miss my clinical practice each day, the ability to serve others as a physician leader and offer hope and determination to other leaders is as real for me today as it was when I was clinically active.

Service to others can be taxing. On a physical level, long hours and stress can affect your health, your judgment, and your success. Emotionally, relationships can be altered, sometimes irreparably, and you can become drained. Each of us has a duty for self-preservation.

Without caring for ourselves, we cannot hope to serve others through the oath that we took at our graduation. Many of us find our way. We work out. We explore art, music, or writing. Others may not. To you, I say: Find something outside of your work that continues to energize your mind, body, and soul.

Besides the obvious value of self-preservation in the physician’s own life and for those whom we love and care about, there is the added value for those whom we serve. People and patients derive value from their interactions with their physicians. To ensure that this value continues, we must be in a position to reflect on where we are in our own careers, assess our current wellness, understand if there are gaps to that wellness, build resilience within the scope of our work, or even recognize that a role change may be what is necessary so that we can continue to contribute in an optimal way.

In this issue, several articles provide for self-reflection.

First, a discussion article links personality traits with leadership styles and describes how data-driven self-reflection on their relatively stable personality traits may enhance the leadership process for all physician leaders.

Next, a research article, “Executive Coaching Women Faculty: A Focused Strategy to Build Resilience,” addresses the issue of physician burnout among female physicians and demonstrates the effectiveness of executive coaching as an intervention to improve their decision making.

Finally, you will find a field report that presents the concept of “goodness of fit” for physicians and describes how jobs that fit result in higher job satisfaction and less burnout.

As you read this collection of articles, I encourage you to reflect on how you are addressing your own resilience as a physician leader and whether you are taking appropriate steps for self-preservation. Then, once you have done your own work, you can see how the principles offered here may help those with whom you work.

Send me your thoughts at: editor@physicianleaders.org. We would enjoy hearing stories about resilience and the methods you use to ensure that you and your team are well cared-for in our demanding career.