Leading a Culture of Mentorship

If you pause to reflect on your work during a given week, you will realize its diversity. Conversations related to patient safety, clinical care, and employee or physician management require your attention. Some meetings require your participation in contracting conversations and contributions regarding the public’s health; others anchor you, as a physician, to the outcomes of individual patients and families who may be interested in their health, healthcare, or end-of-life care.

Regardless of the content area, this breadth of topics requires a range of competencies in the “how to” aspects of our work. At the same time, we must be experts in mentoring, advising, influencing, and managing the next generation of our physician leader colleagues throughout their career journeys.

In this issue, we get a taste of how experienced physician leaders are well-positioned to lead a culture of engagement and mentorship. There are two field reports: one presenting sabbaticals as an antidote to the physician burnout crisis and another describing the importance of the chief medical officer to the progress and success of a healthcare system. Further, this issue offers two discussion articles: one describing an approach for improved provider engagement and the other describing the importance of continuing education for delivering core skills of multidisciplinary leadership for practicing physicians.

We end with a piece on a critically important topic for the success of our colleagues: leadership and management training for physicians.

As you read through this collection of articles that we have carefully selected for this issue, I encourage you to consider their relevance to the work you are doing with your teams — not just for the purposes of informing your own leadership strategies, but also in sharing the ways you guide your colleagues, staff, and others.

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

We welcome your papers for publication. To request author guidelines or to submit a completed manuscript, email editor@physicianleaders.org.