Transformative Leadership: Impact At 45 Years Young

Transitions. We have all managed life and career transitions. Remember going into medical school, or residency, or your first actual clinical job, or that initial foray into administrative activity — or even leaving clinical care altogether? These transitions often are smooth, but usually require us to do advance research and homework to ensure our success. While success is based somewhat on good luck, that good luck usually favors those who are best prepared and widely experienced.

Optimally Prepared For Transitions

An organization such as the American Association for Physician Leadership is not much different from others. We have managed its transition from the American College of Physician Executives (ACPE) during a period of industry-wide confusion and complexity. The respective boards of directors, AAPL staff, and superb executive team have been doing their research and homework to ensure AAPL is well-prepared for its future. Additionally, the legacy of its origin and related experiences from ACPE clearly prepared AAPL for a new growth trajectory.

Externally, the healthcare industry in which we currently operate is multifaceted and complex. That complexity extends to decisions about how best to sustain organizational growth within the association world. In addition, the increasing digitization of our interactions in society and within the profession has created complexity regarding our interactions with members, as has the need as an association to simultaneously accommodate four or five generations’ disparate professional and personal needs.

Internally, AAPL has necessarily become adaptable and flexible with its approaches. To broaden its overall reach, the association changed its name from ACPE to AAPL. We moved away from being a solely member-driven professional society that primarily provided targeted education for a select niche of physicians in hospital administration to an association that is more broadly oriented and highly focused on helping create large-scale positive change for the healthcare industry by maximizing the potential of our physician and inter-professional leadership platform.

This strategy enables us to create significant personal and institutional transformation resulting in improved patient outcomes, a healthier workforce, and better healthcare delivery systems.

AAPL genuinely inspires change and transition.

A Focused Organization

Since its founding in 1975, AAPL has been the only organization focused solely on providing full-service professional development, leadership education, management training, and a full array of specialized offerings oriented toward the physician workforce and the organizations where physicians work or are represented. Our robust portfolio of information resources is unparalleled and continually growing.

Additionally, the networking community of AAPL is bonded with a custom-designed AAPL-built technology platform that serves as the lifeblood for all that AAPL provides across its deep catalog of programs, products, and services — it also offers an unparalleled suite of resource tools that enhance the AAPL user experience.

Beyond the thousands of physicians who receive training annually, our association now has in its database approximately 250,000 physicians who represent a full spectrum of physician leadership roles in nearly 50 countries. The ever-expanding portfolio of the association currently includes more than 100 courses, numerous certificate and academy offerings, seven master’s degree programs, and deep layers of specialized career enhancement programs customized for physicians. The industry-standard credential — Certified Physician Executive (CPE) — originated with AAPL in 1997.

Routinely, when any of the various annual lists of top healthcare individuals are published each year by outside organizations, between 30 percent and 50 percent of those listed passed formally through the transformative leadership influences of AAPL in some way, including membership, professional development courses, or other involvement.

Domestic and International Impact

After 45 years, in addition to those quarter-million physicians in our database, AAPL now has:

• Awarded our signature Certified Physician Executive (CPE) credential to nearly 3,500 physicians.

• Graduated more than 2,000 physicians with a master’s degree from our four university partner programs: Carnegie Mellon University, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Thomas Jefferson University, and Arizona State University.

• Delivered more than 350 onsite leadership courses annually to some of the most renowned healthcare institutions in the country.

• Provided approximately 25,000 individual annual engagements across the various AAPL offerings.

• Expanded its professional development offerings of information resources, educational programs, career support services (e.g., psychometric assessments, interview skills, mentoring, coaching, etc.), and a rapidly evolving holistic wellness program.

• Conceptualized, developed, and implemented a unique technology platform that weaves together all the AAPL programs while also augmenting the interconnectivity within our robust community.

• Developed an extensive network of professional collaboration initiatives and engaged with numerous strategic partnerships to help facilitate AAPL’s growing influence within healthcare.

• Supported individual members in about 50 countries with a series of international onsite leadership programs and soon an international CPE credential.

• Strategically placed itself to develop inter-professional leadership offerings to complement the physician leadership approaches (e.g., dyad and triad leadership).

• Initiated the opportunity to offer AAPL’s endorsement of existing institutionally based physician leadership programs in the marketplace.

New Competency Matrix

To better serve our constituency and the global industry, AAPL has created a scalable, industry-relevant competency matrix that not only maps at a granular level across all current and future AAPL programs, products, and services, but also provides a better opportunity to assess for positive measurable outcomes within the competency matrix from those individuals or organizations who use AAPL’s offerings. In so doing, we are able to deliver on our commitment to become an expanded thought leader and influence group.

It is a responsibility of our association to contribute to the development of the physician and interprofessional leadership academic discourse on the benefits and impact of physician leadership.

This complementary blend of leadership characteristics and technical skills now combine to create AAPL’s holistic competency model for physician leadership (see Table 1).

AAPL Enhancements Abound

Here are some of the more recent enhancements for AAPL that will be profiled at our 45th anniversary AAPL Annual Meeting in Chicago, June 12–14, 2020:

• Formal opening of our new AAPL headquarters office in Washington, D.C. presenting improved and sophisticated approaches for thought leadership, expansion of AAPL’s presence in the industry, and development of a government relations program.

• A multitude of initiatives consolidating the AAPL brand and improving its market position, including refreshed brand and visual identity along with a new AAPL logo, key messaging, and thought leadership tenets that take a stand on what matters most to our constituents.

• An expanded catalog of AAPL’s programs, products, and services that not only better describes these offerings, but also makes navigating its offerings easier.

• Refinements to the AAPL website with a new look and feel that provides a vastly improved experience by augmented display and navigation of AAPL’s suite of services.

• Further enhancements to the AAPL Platform, including an expansion of its capabilities and use potential for AAPL’s robust networking community.

• Ongoing expansion, refinement, and interaction capabilities for AAPL’s education curriculum design with novice-to-master active learning approaches; information resources that include two journals, several newsletters, an archived library, books, a deep cache of podcasts and webinars, as well as a growing social media presence; and a redesigned and soon-to-be-implemented career service and support initiative.

• Sophistication of AAPL’s member benefits programs and an improved member experience with a clear value proposition for lifelong member engagement.

• Expansion and revision to the Certified Physician Executive credential that provides refreshed approaches for the CPE brand and clarity for CPE certification maintenance.

• Extension of AAPL’s wide range of activities to augment its international, inter-professional, and institutional initiatives.

• Redesigned and expanded approaches for our signature onsite offering, Leadership Solutions (Lx Solutions), with consolidation around the Lx Solutions brand.

• Further refinements to and expansion of the now well-recognized AAPL Holistic Wellness initiative.

Opportunity For Our Constituency

To those who are active members of AAPL, I hope these plans for 2020 and beyond excite you and that you will be motivated to further engage with AAPL and to explore new ways to enhance your own professional development. I am confident that by doing so, you will be impressed with the potential AAPL represents for you as you pursue your efforts to change and improve healthcare. AAPL can provide support throughout your career, and we are committed to our own continual improvement as we work to provide the AAPL community with exceptional tools and seamless connectivity for lifelong partnerships and an expanded network potential.

For those of you who may have disconnected with AAPL for whatever reason, or those of you not yet clear on what AAPL represents or how the association benefits healthcare through transformative leadership and lifelong professional development, I encourage you to have a closer look at what AAPL is doing and where it is going.

AAPL is a unique and noteworthy association committed to helping create large-scale positive change across the international healthcare industry. We are steadfast in our mindset not only to change the industry, but also to pursue a rich assortment of approaches that create better health and clinical care for patients and families, and help create a healthier, better-balanced workforce and work environments.

Transition and change are inevitable for all successful organizations. To ensure our current and future relevance for creating positive impacts within healthcare, AAPL has clearly invested heavily on several levels and can demonstrate itself as a vibrant and invigorated association. There is no better time to view the numerous new opportunities AAPL can provide.

A Privilege To Serve

At some level, all physicians are leaders. Our profession continues to be highly trusted and favorably viewed as a leadership profession. Physicians carry a unique privilege in being able to serve patients and to pursue the public’s best interests. We therefore must continue to meet the responsibility of that professional privilege. Leadership is an indispensable and critical component within this responsibility and acknowledged set of professional expectations.

I am privileged to help lead the 45-year-old American Association for Physician Leadership. As I witness so many career successes achieved by AAPL members and transformative change created by our Lx Solutions clients, it is gratifying to recognize how the association continues to provide large-scale impact in healthcare. It is the AAPL staff, our board of directors, and our constituency of members and clients who are creating impact on a daily basis. As we collectively do so, the industry will recognize the significance of this association.

While we further leverage the treasure’s trove of opportunity described above, healthcare as a whole will continue to respond to our influences and further embrace the qualitative and quantitative value of physician leadership and inter-professional leadership.

Good on us all as we celebrate this anniversary!

So, as AAPL maximizes the potential of physician leadership to create significant personal and organizational transformation, we must continue seeking deeper levels of professional development and appreciate how we can each generate positive influence at all levels. As physician leaders, let us get more engaged, stay engaged, and help others become engaged. Creating a broader level of positive change in healthcare — and society — is within our reach. Our patients and their families will appreciate the eventual outcome.