It's time for the VITAL Physician Executive's Monthly Leadership Favorites – June 2017 Edition. In this feature I share inspiring and enlightening advice from respected leaders, generally from outside of healthcare (but not always).

Leadership Favorites – June 2017 Edition

This month's favorites follow…

How Leaders Kill Trust

In 16 Ways Leaders Kill Trust, Skip Prichard provides a guest post by his colleague Bruce Rhoades. Rhoades lists 16 things leaders commonly do that erode trust in team members, including:

Micromanage
Publicly criticize
Overreact to mistakes

As Rhoades writes: “When a leader exhibits any of these trust-killing behaviors, it not only undermines the trust of the team member directly involved but also threatens the trust of other team members. Even when not done in public, the word will spread among the team and damage the environment for trust.”

To see the complete list of bad behaviors, with examples, check out 16 Ways Leaders Kill Trust.

How Much Risk Should a Rising Physician Leader Take?

Here is another guest post, this time by Jeff Goins on Michael Hyatt's blog. Goins addresses his advice to entrepreneurs, but I think it applies to physicians who are contemplating a move from clinical to non-clinical work. In How Much Risk Should Entrepreneurs Really Take? Goins lists three actions to take to move in the direction of your dreams:

Believe you have what it takes. So, if you're still a clinician, but working part-time as medical director, tell yourself that you are becoming a healthcare executive. Then live into that vision as you expand your efforts to take on that role.
Behave as if it's true. Start reading management journals and books and join leadership associations like the AAPL and ACHE as described in Resources for the Emerging Physician Leader.
Become your dream. Slowly take on more management and leadership responsibilities until you have morphed into the physician executive you want to be.

Some of his advice is similar to what is presented in the book, Pivot, by Jenny Blake that I wrote about in How to Pivot and Launch a New Career.

You can read much more about this topic in Jeff Goins' new book Real Artists Don't Starve.

What the Best Leaders Do

There are probably hundreds of articles written by leaders in which they describe what the major requirements for the job are, including skills, attitudes and behaviors. But I find it useful to be reminded of some of the core responsibilities of an effective leader every so often.

In What the Best Leaders Do, Claire Lew, CEO of a software company, describes what she sees as her role as leader of her company:

“…you assume that people already have innate talents, gifts, and capabilities within them… to provide an environment for those inherent qualities to come to light.”

She then goes on to describe exactly how she tries to do accomplish that.

In a related article, Jason Cudriet describes Three Simple Principles for Creative Leadership. He has developed his leadership framework around three core duties: to inspire, direct and support. And he gives specific ideas on how to accomplish each of those.

I've addressed some of my core principles of leadership in posts like these:

Drop Out Club

In the first article I've seen from the online journal STAT, author Sarah Kwon does a pretty good job of describing the rising problem of burn-out in physicians. One of the things I liked about her article (In ‘Drop Out Club,’ desperate doctors counsel each other on quitting the field) is that she describes the Drop Out Club.

The DOC provides resources for physicians and other professionals that are useful for those looking to change careers. DOC has job postings, forums for physicians looking for career advice, and other resources.