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Begin Your Career Transition in Earnest

In today's episode, we revisit the topic of 5 persistent myths that clinicians believe when they begin to contemplate a career transition. This presentation was given at the 2023 Licensed to Live online conference.

In today's fast-paced healthcare landscape, many professionals find themselves yearning for a more fulfilling and rewarding career path. To embark on this transformative journey, the first crucial step is recognizing the widely held beliefs or myths that hinder progress. The prevailing misconception that the only way to succeed is by adhering to the status quo may be one of the main barriers preventing professionals from embracing a more fulfilling path. 

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5 Persistent Myths

Once the myths are dispelled, a world of possibilities opens up. This journey often involves exploring alternative career options where one can leverage their expertise and training to make a meaningful impact in unconventional roles. Embracing a different direction, such as pursuing a nonclinical career or venturing into healthcare innovation, allows professionals to find new avenues for personal and professional growth.

In this list, we debunk the following persistent myths:

1.  “There are no jobs.”
2.  “I'm not qualified.”
3.  “The salaries are low.”
4.  “I'm abandoning patients.”
5.  “I won't be respected.”

Best Kept Secret

The first of the 5 persistent myths pertains to available jobs. In fact, there are several large industries that hire thousands of physicians each year to do nonclinical work:

• Hospitals and health systems,
• Pharmaceutical and medical device companies,
• Medical publishers,
• Educational institutions,
• Consulting firms,
• Federal, state, and local governments, and,
• Life and health insurers.

Additional Training Not Required

The next of the 5 persistent myths pertains to necessary training and skills. For most of these new careers, the primary qualification is the completion of medical school. Such physicians have broad exposure to the life sciences, an understanding of the U.S. healthcare system, and how to interact with patients. Additional education during residency and fellowship and board certification are sufficient to qualify us for most of the remaining positions.

Sometimes, additional certifications and degrees may be preferred. But for the most part, it is the physician's unique background, training, and experience that prepares them for these nonclinical jobs.

Incomes Improve

The next of the 5 persistent myths pertains to income levels. Salaries may be less than those for clinical work initially. But that will be offset by improved lifestyles and work-life balance. Benefits and vacation time are often quite generous. And most physicians experience opportunities to quickly advance and enjoy very attractive income levels over time. 

What About the Patients?

You'll be helping patients in new ways and sometimes much broader ways and in larger numbers as you can one patient at a time…

In pharma, you'll help develop life-saving drugs. You'll reduce pain and suffering for large groups of patients in public health. And in consulting, you'll bring new and improved models of care to hospitals, and help implement new service lines.

Reputations Improve

The last of the 5 persistent myths relates to your reputation and identity as a “doctor.” Generally, these positions have an impact on larger groups of patients. And physicians become content experts, managers, and leaders over time by combining their medical expertise with skills in their new industries. 

Summary

In the ever-evolving healthcare landscape, it is vital to challenge long-held myths and beliefs that may hinder professional growth. By breaking free from corporate-style, high-volume models of care, healthcare professionals can unlock their true potential and enjoy their work again. Leveraging one's medical expertise in innovative ways is the key to unlocking a fulfilling and purpose-driven career when the traditional healthcare system fails us.

NOTE: Look below for a transcript of today's episode. 

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Links for Today's Episode:

• How to Kill the Myths About Alternative Jobs for Clinicians – 252
• Month One of the 12 Month Roadmap to a New Career – 269
• NewScr!pt

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Today's PNC Podcast Transcript

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Transcription PNC Podcast Episode 309

Let's Dispel These 5 Persistent Myths About Nonclinical Careers

John: All right, nonclinical nation. Let's get right into today's presentation in which I do my best to dispel five persistent myths about nonclinical careers. Let's start by talking about Dr. Brenda M. She's two years into her first job as a hospitalist, and she's feeling very unhappy and disappointed.

Now, when she was in medical school, she really enjoyed it, although at times it was a little bit overwhelming, but all in all, she felt maybe some slight burnout during certain parts of that for a year program. And then she went on to her internal medicine residency anticipating becoming a hospitalist. And during that time, again, she was happy to be there, but she really started to feel as though she was getting burned out. There just was too much work to do. There wasn't enough support and not enough recovery time before the next shift or the next clinic and that sort of thing.

But she thought, "Well, I'm going to try and find a really good job in a location that I'm interested in, and by then, things should get better." And we've all heard this, right? And some of us have felt it recently. It seemed like the burnout from medical school to residency to practice just kept building on each other.

But she joined a group. She thought, "Well, it seems like the coverage is good. There's enough of us to take care of this hospital." She was promised a certain number of days off each month, and things were going well at first, but then the support staff seemed to be falling off and not being replaced. And the volumes that she had to see during those two years kept increasing to the point she felt like she never really could keep up. She had to go back and do her medical records when she was at home online. And she just thought that things were not going the way she anticipated.

Now, she was really starting to think, "Well, maybe this just isn't what I thought it would be, and maybe I need to do something else." But every time she had those feelings, she sat back and thought "There's just no way I've spent my life learning to do this job. I don't really have other options. I'm going to see a drop in my income." With still having some outstanding loans, even though there was some partial payback through her employer, she felt constrained. That's what someone in the past called the golden handcuffs, in a sense. You make a good living, but at the same time, there's huge pressures. The income doesn't really seem to go up unless you just work longer and harder. And it also seemed as though she would be letting people down if she were to not continue on in her clinical career. Her family, her friends, and even her patients.

This is a common thing that we see in today's healthcare environment. And if you're frustrated or disenchanted about your work in healthcare, if you feel as though you're being ignored and taken for granted, or that you've been forced to forfeit your autonomy to do what's best for your patients, then it is entirely reasonable and even necessary to consider a nonclinical career in order to maintain your integrity and maybe even maintain your sanity.

You certainly aren't alone. In fact, tens of thousands of clinicians over the last decade have come to the same conclusion. However, many of us like you are hesitant to do that because of several myths that our employers and training programs promote in order to maintain the status quo.

We continue to suppress our feelings that something is wrong and delay implementing the solution to these problems. So, what is the solution? Well, for the most part, it is to take the next step in your professional life and join all the other professions who make at least five to seven job changes, and try and find a career that leverages your training and experience outside the traditional unrewarding assembly line corporate style approach that is currently the predominant way that healthcare is being provided.

But to do that, one of the first steps we must take is to recognize these widely held beliefs or myths that hold us back and dispel those myths and enthusiastically embark on the next phase of our professional lives. That is really the major solution. Other solutions would be to retire early, do something else. If you're independently wealthy or you have a spouse who's willing to provide the financial while you do other things, that would be great. But basically what we need to do is set ourselves on a new path. But first, most of us have to try to overcome these widely held myths that hold us back.

All right. So, let's talk more about that. I think if Dr. Brenda does the same thing, she will find herself in a better place. And so, I want to answer these questions today as we go through this discussion. First of all, what do I mean by nonclinical career or nonclinical job? What are the five most common persistent myths that we encounter? And how can I dispel those myths and prepare you to find a nonclinical or non-traditional career, if that is your goal?

All right, what I'm talking about today when I'm talking about a nonclinical or non-traditional career, it's an alternative career, an unconventional career, one that is based on your background, your education, training, and experience in medicine, or even nursing or dentistry or pharmacy. Because a lot of the concepts I'm talking about today apply to those other clinicians that often find themselves on the same team and in the same situation as we are in which is we're being overworked, we're being abused, and we need to try something different.

Now, those nonclinical jobs usually include a term that indicates that it's still within the healthcare system. For physicians, it means it might include the term physician or medical. For nurses, it'll include nurse or nursing. And dentist, dentist or dental, those kinds of things.

For example, I'm talking about careers like physician advisor, medical director, medical writer, executive medical director, chief medical officer, chief medical information officer. It could be the same thing. Chief nursing officer, nursing director, that kind of thing. And these kinds of jobs also apply to those other specialties in other fields that I mentioned a minute ago.

Now, I'm not addressing what some might call self-limiting beliefs, the feeling that I'm not good enough, I might fail, there's something wrong with me. It's too much to learn, it's too hard to do. Those are internal, again, self-limiting beliefs that are really generally pretty easily overcome. We had to overcome those kinds of thoughts when we contemplated going to medical school or nursing school, or get our PharmD or our DDS, those kinds of things.

I'll list the five most common myths that I encountered. I'm going to list them, state them in a way that is at the extreme. What we're saying to ourselves, what our former instructors and professors and employers wanted us to think while we were in training and even in our current positions.

And these are the kind of things they want us to think we fall victim to. One is that there are no jobs for us that aren't within healthcare, per se, in patient care, that I don't have the qualifications. I have no qualifications. I'll make no money. Obviously, you'll make some money, but the money I'm going to make is going to be completely inadequate. That I won't be helping patients anymore, which is what I really went into healthcare and medicine, or nursing or pharmacy to do. And then I'm going to lose my stature. I'm going to lose all my respect because I'm just going to step away and do something that's not as noble in a way.

I'm going to take each of these individually, describe them in more detail, and then address how to really understand why these are myths and therefore, kind of take away those barriers to you moving forward with your next professional advancement and next stage in your professional career in that field. You can be a physician, you can be a nurse in the nursing field, in the medical field, but not in the same clinical way that we've done in the past.

I remember a colleague and a mentee of mine, Dr. DH, I'll use his initials. He was a vascular surgeon, and he really got to the point where he just felt like he could no longer do his job. He was in this situation, we often find ourselves in, particularly if you're a specialist, which is relatively uncommon. What happens is you end up working somewhere and there's a few number of you helping each other, supporting each other, and covering for each other.

So you go to, let's say, even a big academic center, and they say, "Look, we need to have a service of three or four vascular surgeons." Okay, great. That's a profession that takes a lot of training. So you're careful. You do all your interviews, you find you're going to join this group of three other vascular surgeons, you're going to be able to do this surgery that you want to do, and not be doing general surgery, for example, when really you were trained to do vascular.

And some of the vascular surgeons even narrow that down further, of course. Well, Dr. DH found that he was there and things were good at the beginning, and then they had EMR issues, and they had to change EMRs. And all of a sudden he was having to do a lot of documentation at home and on weekends, because it wasn't really that efficient. They were still trying to bring it on and develop better protocols and order sets and so forth. So that didn't help.

And then the staff, again, I mentioned this with Dr. Brenda, the staffing was cut back on the areas where he was working, whether it was in his clinic or even in the OR. And then it turned out one of his partners left and they dragged their feet. Even though he was recruited to be one in four, they dragged their feet, then he was one in three call, and then if someone took vacation, it was one in two call for a week or two at a time.

And there seemed to be no effort to really find a replacement and no ability or desire to hire locums, even to provide some temporary relief. And so, he found himself in an untenable situation. Meanwhile, his kids were growing up, he was working long hours, he didn't get enough time to spend with them, and he found it was time to make a change.

At first, he thought "I'm going to have to look for a different kind of clinical job because of this myth of I don't know how to do anything else or I can't earn enough money." He was a really good one to remind me about this common myth that "There aren't any nonclinical jobs that a vascular surgeon can do. I hear about my primary care friends doing these jobs, but I don't think there's anything I can do."

I'll come back to his story in a moment. But before I finish off with Dr. DH, I want to explain something to you about maybe one of the best kept secrets in medicine and healthcare, and that is this. What we're taught and what people talk about, especially in medical school, in our residencies, in our fellowships, is that there is this process.

You go from medical school to residency, you may have a fellowship after that and then you make a choice. You go into an academic practice, maybe you go into an employed situation that's not academic or in a small percent, you may even find yourself in an independent practice. And that's it. Basically, that's what you have to choose from. You have to kind of make a choice. Academic, large employed, maybe you can do something independent with two or three partners come in initially as an employed physician, and then later become a partner.

But what's going to happen in all those situations is as payments to physicians go down, even though you're sheltered a little bit from that in an academic setting or an employed setting, eventually it's going to trickle down to you that you need to produce more RVU and see more patients and do more procedures to maintain the income that justifies your salary.

Some large institutions, especially procedural ones, an ortho, other surgeries and cardiovascular can subsidize that through those procedural activities. But the bottom line is you're going to have to do more, and you're going to have to do them faster, and you have to see more patients to feed into that. And so, the whole system kind of breaks down, and it usually leaves us really disappointed and disillusioned.

What most people don't really realize, especially while they're still in their training and early in their career, is there is something beyond those options. In fact, as I think about it, I can define and describe at least nine major industries, all of which hire hundreds or thousands of physicians every year to do nonclinical or non-traditional work. Let me just go through that list. And again, your instructors, your professors, your employers, they won't tell you about this, but sometimes you'll see it. It's obvious. If you're working in a hospital system, you'll find out, "Wow, there are people who are leaders, who are managers in these health systems." Whether it's a freestanding hospital, a three hospital system, a large academic system. They all pay physicians and other non-physician clinicians to do management and leadership.

Pharma companies hire tens of thousands of clinicians every year to work full-time jobs in pharma that do not involve direct patient care. The insurance industry that includes disability insurance, somewhat more so life insurance. And then the big one is really health insurance. They hire a lot of physician advisors, medical directors, who become senior medical directors, who become chief medical officers. There's a lot of education by physicians in which they're doing straight education. It doesn't have to be in the context of direct patient care. It could be at universities, at medical schools, at PA schools, nursing schools. It could be online.

And there are, again, thousands of jobs. There are medical writing jobs. That's one of the most common nonclinical careers. There are consulting jobs, both freelance, individuals, small groups, consulting, as well as national and international companies that hire consultants.

There's consumer health, which means teaching the consumer about medical care, about the healthcare system, about anything related to that. There's government jobs, and a lot of those are in public health and so forth. And then there's lots of nonprofits that are related to the healthcare field that have to hire physicians with their expertise.

Again, I just wanted to remind everyone of this first one, that it's foolish to think there are no jobs. In fact, there are thousands of jobs. And it turns out that these jobs are available for every specialist in any area with any length of training, with any degree of experience. That's myth number one that we need to really put aside. You have to realize there are a lot of jobs out there.

Sometimes you've got to learn and do a lot of research to find the jobs, and there's some strategies to that. I'm not going to get into that today, but let me just say, go on LinkedIn, look up medical director, and you'll see page after page after page of jobs, and then it's necessary to figure out which of those might be appropriate for you, located in the appropriate places, and then begin the process of trying to find them.

That's exactly what Dr. DH did. He really started doing research. He was involved in a mastermind that I was running. So he had the opportunity to engage not only with myself, but with other physicians in various stages of their career transition. And he really did reach out to other past colleagues, did some networking, and within a very short period of time, had two or three options. Some of them were part-time clinical options, doing just a very smaller part of his specialty.

And he was looking at wound care and vascular, but other types of non-traditional jobs that did not require being on call, did not require long hours, didn't have complicated and difficulty use of EMRs. But ultimately he found a utilization management job in which he could apply his vascular background. And he became a UM physician advisor or really a medical director when you, when you're working for a healthcare plan. And he was the vascular surgery specialist as well as doing some general reviews. And he's been very happy so far.

Okay, that's myth number one. Now, what is the second myth? Well, that is like I said, "I don't have the training. I have no expertise." Sometimes I hear this put as "Well, all I know is medicine." And if you think about that, in a way, medicine isn't a thing in and of itself. We obviously talk about as though it is, but to provide medical care is really a compilation of many, many skills in different areas that one outside of medicine wouldn't think of putting together necessarily. I usually like to go through this thought experiment where you're at a large ship and the ship is sinking and everyone's jumping into the life rafts to try to get somewhere safe, to someone can come by and pick you up or find yourself on a desert island.

And in the experiment, just think about the professions of the people you would like to be in the boat with. Just think of all the people you run into. Sales people, managers, directors, instructors, police, welders, taxi drivers, you name it. If you were going to be able to choose the people in the boat with you, and there were two people you'd want to be with you in that boat, who would they be? And I contend that they would be an engineer and a physician. And some of this relates to the broad experience, a broad education both of those types of people have.

But how many times the people come to you to ask a question, whether it's about chemistry, whether it's about their pets, experts in medicine. There's many, many sub, I guess I would call them, expertise that we have that makes us attractive. And we're excellent employees.

I'll give you an example too of Dr. MA. She was a foreign medical graduate, basically, and she also did some work in preventive medicine, but she was having difficulty finding a position in the US because she couldn't get licensed. She started networking, she started taking a lot of courses, and she became aware of the fact that there was a job called the medical science liaison, which is quite often open to those without residency or a license or board certification.

And after about a year of networking and taking courses and joining the MSL society, she landed her first job. And really everything that she does as an MSL does use her skills as a physician, as an MD or some places would be an MBBS and so forth. But everything that we know is included in the curriculum applies to jobs like this. The biochem, the pharmacology, physiology, pathology, microbiology, anatomy, epidemiology, statistics, laboratory interpretation, physical examination, interacting with patients, radiography, interviewing skills, teaching and presenting to colleagues, healthcare, economics. There's just so many areas that we become experts in when we're going through our medical education. And there are many jobs even for those with the medical school background, a medical degree without residency.

If you're a physician, if you're a nurse, especially with an advanced degree in MSN, definitely an APN. If you're a physician assistant, if you're a PharmD, you have a lot of skills, knowledge, and also work habits that employers are looking for.

And so, let's really dump myth number two is that you need special qualifications, or you need an MBA, or that all you know is medicine, when in fact you know a lot and the combination of things that you know put you in a position to fill a lot of these jobs, otherwise, you will not be qualified for.

Now, the big one that also affects us more so in the last 10 to 20 years is this idea of really making no money or making an inadequate income because a lot of us have loans and those have to be paid off. And sometimes you get a clinical position where they're going to help you knock off $10,000 or $20,000 a year on your loan. But if you've got $150,000 out there, it's going to take a long time to get that paid off unless you're making a really, really super high salary, and you can accelerate that. And thinking, "Well, I know I'm going to take a big hit in this career in my salary, this nonclinical career, then it'll really hold you back."

I can think of Dr. ML, who was an OB-GYN, and she was very busy. A lot of OBs, a lot of weird hours, a lot of call, similar situation. Staffing was cut back. Some of her partners left, even though she was part of a large multi-specialty group. She was employed, and it just became quite miserable. And she thought, for sure, I don't have any special skills and there aren't that many jobs out there in a nonclinical field for an OB-GYN and also it's not going to pay enough for me to pay my bills.

Well, she ended up looking around, networking, working on her resume, working on her LinkedIn profile, and she ended up landing a job after several months of search, working for a Medicare MAC. For people that work in the hospital that have anything to do with billing, they will know that a MAC is a Medicare Administrative Contractor, and it's an intermediary that processes the payments between CMS and hospitals. And she became a chief medical officer at a MAC.

And so, she made a very good income. She had to work fewer hours. In fact, mostly now she's working from home, which was enhanced a little bit by the pandemic. But she has children at home so she can be available for them, work for this Mac, make a very good income that is commensurate with her clinical income.

And again, as I mentioned before, our incomes are going down, Medicare's paying less for each patient care visit, not keeping up with inflation. And a CMO job pays very well. In fact, if you look at some of the stats out there, this is from last year, from salary.com, the typical physician advisor, which remember includes some that are not licensed, that simply have the medical degree, would be about $134,000 a year. Now, that's a median. So people make more, people make less.

If you're an experienced clinician, you become an MSL and you've already got some contacts for that job, you're definitely going to make well over $200,000. Overall average for a medical director is $295,000 per year. And quote, chief medical officer is over $400,000 a year.

I don't know what she was making per se. I would say that she's probably at least in the 300 thousands. I think those higher salaries are for CMOs and hospital systems, pharma and big insurance companies. But definitely if you have a CMO position, that is usually a very awesome, well-paid position.

So, this whole idea that there's inadequate income, it's a farce. And plus you have to compare apples to apples. If you end up working a job like she's doing, which is for sure no more than 40 hours a week, most times, most of these nonclinical jobs are 40 hours a week, sometimes even less. Often they offer complete or at least part-time remote work from home and while traveling. To compare that to a OB-GYN who's doing 60, 70 hours a week of work minimum, being on call and having a really disastrous schedule, because you never know when you're going to have to leave home, really, there's no comparison if you have to take a little bit of a pay cut.

But everybody that I've talked to that's started a nonclinical job, within two to three years, they have surpassed their clinical income because now they're really hitting their stride and really providing benefits and support, and really are doing something at the job that really helps their employer succeed. That's three of the myths.

Fourth one, patients. "I dedicated my life to patients, and I won't be helping any patients in a nonclinical career. And it's hard for me to do. I don't want to abandon people." Well, here's the thing. If you look at it from a different perspective, there are reasons these jobs exist, and there's reasons why these jobs need a physician, because a physician or a nurse or a pharmacist is providing the expertise that's going to benefit patient care. That's the whole point.

You can go through almost every industry, and maybe it's not 100% across the board, but if you're working for a hospital system, you're probably helping with quality and improving quality improves patient care. If you're working in pharma, you're developing new drugs to either save lives or improve lives. There are some extreme examples. Imagine the people that worked on Gleevec. Now there's a drug that took what was a pretty much uniformly fatal disease and turned it into nothing. If you take Gleevec every day for that particular illness, you will never have a recurrence. I personally know a family member that's been using this drug for 15 or 20 years now. And there's hundreds of those drugs coming out every year.

And so, obviously, if you're a physician working in pharma, as a medical director or a chief medical officer, you're definitely benefiting patients. What if you're working in UM in the insurance industry? Well, I'll just say that you will on occasion stop patients from having a procedure or surgery that really was unwarranted to begin with, and you've avoided a possible death or disability or error resulting from that procedure. You're teaching in any capacity. You're helping bring on the next group of nurses, pharmacists, doctors, PAs, NPs, who are going to help patients.

Writing. You're educating by writing or doing journalistic writing or doing technical writing to protect patients. Again, I can go on and on. Consultants are bringing new services to hospitals and pharmacies and pharmaceutical companies and home health, consumer, health wellness nutrition, helping patients, sometimes better than the actual physician is helping them. When you step into a nonclinical, non-traditional clinical job, oftentimes you are greatly enhancing patient care, community care, and so forth.

All right, the last one that I want to talk about is "I won't get any respect." It reminds me of Rodney Dangerfield. Do you remember the comedian? He's been deceased for a few years, but he always talked about not getting no respect. He gets no respect. I guess I'll use myself as an example. We all have a decent amount of respect and admiration and a certain recognition in our communities as physicians. Everybody knows it's hard to do. It's a difficult career to pursue and maintain. It's a lot of hoops to jump through. And there's licensing and there's board certification and recertification.

And so, we think, well, we have that stature in the community, and it's fun, and it's good. It helps to interact with people, and it puts us in a position that helps us to help people actually. So, if you go into a nonclinical job, your reputation, your influence is going to be gone. Could say your gravitas as a physician might disappear.

But I'll use myself as an example. I was a physician, family physician, and back in the day when I first started, I was working at the hospital. I had admitting privileges, I had nursery privileges, and I even had OB privileges. I knew a lot of people. I did all those things as long as I could so I could grow my practice and over time I started to cut back. And I also did other things because I was interested in that. So I did physician advisor for a while and medical director for a family planning clinic and some other things.

But I was one of a hundred primary care doctors on staff at that hospital. I had no special sway or pull, people didn't listen to me a whole lot like the other family physicians. They had a little more likelihood of being heard if they had a concern or a request at the hospital, at least if they were a surgeon, particularly an orthopedic surgeon, neurosurgeon, cardiac surgeon, and so forth.

But over time, as I became VP for medical affairs and then chief medical officer, instead of being one of 500 primary care doctors that didn't bring a lot of revenue to the hospital, I became basically one of the most well-known and go-to physicians on the medical staff or in the medical and administrative hierarchy because I was responsible for quality and safety and hiring new physicians and recruiting groups to work for our hospital. I was over the lab in the pharmacy and people would come to me talk about formulary.

Really, when you get into these other positions, you're still a physician. Everybody's still calls you doctor, but now your influence and reputation in certain areas will actually be much more enhanced. And so, I've never really felt or heard or talked to anyone who said that as a result of them moving into a medical director role, or chief medical officer, chief quality officer, any chief role, for sure, that they had less of a reputation or felt like they were contributing less, and that it was recognized than when they were a physician.

You're still a physician. You'll always be a physician. You're likely going to end up managing a team. You're usually seen as a content expert. That's why they're hiring you in the first place as a physician for that role. And you're often a leader. In the hospital setting, you've always got a CEO or COO, but you've got a chief medical officer, chief nursing officer, and so forth. Same thing in pharma, same thing in health insurance. You're going to end up there if you persist.

That's what I wanted to talk about today. There were five common persistent myths that I hear about all the time and that are concerns to physicians, nurses, pharmacists, trying to move into a nonclinical career so that they can have a better lifestyle, they can have more control, more autonomy, and less feeling like an assembly line worker.

And so, these myths are wrong and there are a lot of jobs. You are already qualified for most of those jobs. In some cases, you might need to do a little bit more. You'll learn on the job for sure. Sometimes getting an MBA or an MHA or an MPH or something would be helpful or another certification. But basically you've already got the qualifications you need.

You will make a similar salary and you'll have the opportunity to make even more. I made much more as chief medical officer than I would as a family physician. You'll be helping patients in new ways and sometimes much broader ways and larger numbers as well than you can one patient at a time, and you'll still be respected. You'll still have that gravitas or that recognition.

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The opinions expressed here are mine and my guest’s. While the information provided on the podcast is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no express or implied guarantee that using the methods discussed here will lead to success in your career, life, or business.

The information presented on this blog and related podcast is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only. I do not provide medical, legal, tax, or emotional advice. If you take action on the information provided on the blog or podcast, it is at your own risk. Always consult an attorney, accountant, career counselor, or other professional before making any major decisions about your career. 

The post Let’s Dispel These 5 Persistent Myths About Nonclinical Careers – 309 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

Before we get to the interview, I must mention that my NEW focused mentoring program, called Become CMO in a Year, is the sponsor for today's episode.

In this program, you’ll launch your career as a hospital or medical group Chief Medical Officer. Then, over three to four weeks, we develop a plan together to get the necessary experience you need to become irresistible to recruiters and health system CEOs.

To learn more about the program, visit vitalpe.net/cmomentor.

OK, let’s get to today’s interview.

Career Transformation with Dr. Michelle Mudge-Riley

Dr. Michelle Mudge-Riley is a physician career coach, consultant, and entrepreneur. She was my guest on Episode 010 of the podcast.

She has spent the last ten years coaching physicians and creating helpful resources for those seeking career change. She’s come on the podcast to explain the 5 Stages of Career Transformation that she has come to recognize during her long career.

Photo by Suzanne D. Williams on Unsplash

For each step, she describes the common emotions you feel and actions to take to move through the stage.

She also describes where you might get stuck, and how to overcome the obstacles you may meet during each stage. She notes that some physicians reaching Stage 5 may need to circle back and re-engage at an earlier stage once or twice during the process.

And, she reminds us that the greatest mistake you can make is doubting your ability to navigate this process successfully.

Click here to download a TRANSCRIPT of today's episode.

Physicians Helping Physicians 2.0

At the end of our conversation, Michelle provides us a glimpse into her latest resource for physicians. It’s a membership site at Physicians Helping Physicians with a complete explanation of the 5 Stages and how to progress through them. And, it offers 30 videos that you can work through at your own pace, as well as other resources that she described during our conversation.

If you’d like to check out Physician Helping Physicians 2.0 simply go to vitalpe.net/php2. Use this link to access this wonderful resource AND receive a 25% discount.*

Physicians Helping Physicians 2.0*

Thanks again for listening. I hope to see you next time on Physician NonClinical Careers.

As always, I welcome your comments and feedback.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, share it on Twitter and Facebook, and leave a review on iTunes.

Disclaimer:

The opinions expressed herein are those of me, and my guest. And, while the information published is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no express or implied guarantee that using the methods discussed herein will lead to success in your career, life or business.

The opinions are my own, and my guest's, and not those of any organization(s) that I'm a member of, or affiliated with. The information presented on this blog and related podcast is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only. They should not be construed as advice, such a medical, legal, tax, emotional or other types of advice.

If you take action on any information provided on the blog or podcast, it is at your own risk. Always consult a professional, e.g., attorney, accountant, career counsellor, etc., before making any major decisions related to the subject matter of the blog and podcast.

*As an affiliate for this program, I may receive a stipend in exchange for helping to promote it. This will not affect the price of the program.

Right click here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.

The easiest ways to listen:  vitalpe.net/itunes or vitalpe.net/stitcher

The post How to Survive the 5 Stages of Career Transformation with Michelle Mudge-Riley – 055 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

This is in follow-up to Episode #52, in which I talked about the skills and experiences needed to become a physician executive. You’ll recall that there were five major domains, beyond character and medical knowledge, that recruiters and CEOs consider when filling an executive position:

• Data Management
• Financial Management
• Business Practices
• Leadership Skills, and
• Talent Management

Powerful Tool

Today I want to describe a powerful tool that managers and leaders use to set goals. The ability to properly identify, describe and measure goals is important to all managers, directors, executives, and leaders in any organization.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

Writing proper goals falls into the Business Practices domain of my model. And, I’ll talk about that briefly today. Sometimes goals are self-evident, driven by universal business needs, such as growing volumes or improving profits.

But sometimes a good leader needs a tool to help her team surface new initiatives, based on a more thoughtful consideration of internal and external factors. That’s where the SWOT Analysis can be an extremely powerful tool. In my model, a SWOT Analysis falls under the Leadership Domain.

For those of you who haven’t heard that term before, I didn’t say “swat” analysis, like swatting flies. No, SWOT is an acronym that stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.

The  development of the SWOT Analysis (or Matrix) has been attributed to Albert S. Humphrey, although he disavowed having invented it. Countless business leaders have used this tool to assist in planning. As a physician manager, director, or leader, you should become very comfortable using it.

What Are the Components?

The strengths and weaknesses generally refer to internal characteristics of an organization. This includes financial resources and performance, human resources, branding, and customer loyalty. It also might include cultural issues, such as whether your organization is nimble or slow-moving.

The opportunities and threats describe external considerations. How is the local economy doing? Is the market growing or shrinking? What are the demographics of your clients or patients? Is your competition strong or weak? What is the regulatory environment like? Are there major hurdles to entering a new market?

Click here to download your TRANSCRIPT

From SWOT Analysis to Goal Setting

To use a SWOT Analysis, goals can be developed from the intersection of Strengths and Weaknesses with Opportunities and Threats from the SWOT Analysis. The following table shows this:

During this episode, I go into great detail on how to use the information in the table to create SMART goals, using examples from an imaginary team considering the opening of an urgent care center.

If you’d like more help in pursuing a CMO job or any other executive healthcare position, I’ve developed a new mentoring program for you that I rolled out in Episode 52.

It’s called Become CMO in a Year.

It’s designed for board certified physicians who work at least part-time in a hospital setting, who want to move into hospital or medical group management. Through the mentoring program, you will identify and fill the gaps in your resume that you need to be irresistible to recruiters and CEOs.

You can learn more by heading over to vitalpe.net/cmomentor

Thanks again for listening today.

Please join me again next week for an exciting interview with a previous guest on the podcast who has a fantastic new program that I'm sure you'll want to hear about.

As always, I welcome your comments and feedback.

If you enjoyed today’s episode share it on Twitter and Facebook, and leave a review on iTunes.

Disclaimer:

The opinions expressed here are mine, and my guest where applicable. While the information published is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no express or implied guarantee that using the methods discussed will lead to success in your career, life or business.

The opinions are my own, and my guest's, and not those of any organization(s) that I'm a member of, or affiliated with. The information presented is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only. It should not be construed as advice, such a medical, legal, tax, emotional or other types of advice.

If you take action on any information provided on the blog or podcast, it is at your own risk. Always consult a professional, e.g., attorney, accountant, career counsellor, etc., before making any major decisions related to the subject matter of the blog and podcast.

Right click here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.

The easiest ways to listen:  vitalpe.net/itunes or vitalpe.net/stitcher

The post How to Deploy a Powerful Tool to Identify Goals – 054 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

But before we get into today’s exciting interview, I need to tell you that today’s episode is sponsored by my NEW focused mentoring program called Become CMO in a Year.

In this program, you’ll launch your career as a hospital or medical group Chief Medical Officer. In three to four weeks, we develop a plan to obtain the necessary experience to make you attractive to recruiters and health system CEOs.

To learn more about the program, visit vitalpe.net/cmomentor. The introductory price of $229 is available to the first ten students who sign up before October 1st. Unfortunately, only a few slots remain. So, time is running out. After October 1st, 2018, the price returns to $459.

OK, let’s get to today’s interview.

Enter Dr. Steinberg

Dr. Peter Steinberg is a board-certified urologist. He's also the director of endourology and kidney stone management at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, one of the Harvard Medical School teaching hospitals. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He then completed a urology residency at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, and an Endourology Fellowship at Montefiore Medical Center.

Photo by Claire Anderson on Unsplash

His interests include medical malpractice, expert witness, patient safety, communication in the operating room, and medical writing. He also enjoys consulting related to medications and devices, health care venture capital, angel investing and public speaking. Of interest to us, he has extensive experience as a urological expert witness. He has been a guest on several other podcasts, including “The White Coat Investor” and “Radical Personal Finance”.

This work seems like a really good way to augment your clinical practice. It's like the ultimate moonlighting. You can earn MORE on an hourly basis than working clinically.

You should recall that work as an expert witness allows you to create beneficial tax-favored retirement accounts. These include options such as a SEP-IRA or a Solo 401(k). I’m not an accountant, so don’t rely on my advice on retirement accounts. But check it out if you work as an independent contractor in this, or any other, capacity.

Click here to download the TRANSCRIPT

How to Become an Expert Witness

Here are some of the topics we talked about:

• Resources provided by the American Urological Association, including a registry, and policies to apply when working as an expert witness.
• Three big reasons Peter enjoys his work as an expert witness, with a full discussion of the income opportunities.
• The three major duties of an expert witness, which include chart reviews, depositions and, rarely, testifying at trial.
• Other resources for those wishing to pursue this career.

You can connect with Peter on LinkedIn – just search for Peter Steinberg MD.

[table id=28 /]

Next week’s episode is still being selected, so don’t miss it.

Thanks again for listening. I hope to see you next time on Physician NonClinical Careers.

As always, I welcome your comments and feedback.

If you enjoyed today’s episode share it on Twitter and Facebook, and leave a review on iTunes.

Disclaimer:

The opinions expressed herein are those of me, and my guest where applicable. And, while the information published in written and audio form on the podcast are true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no express or implied guarantee that using the methods discussed herein will lead to success in your career, life or business.

The opinions are my own, and my guest's, and not those of any organization(s) that I'm a member of, or affiliated with. The information presented on this blog and related podcast is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only. They should not be construed as advice, such a medical, legal, tax, emotional or other types of advice.

If you take action on any information provided on the blog or podcast, it is at your own risk. Always consult a professional, e.g., attorney, accountant, career counsellor, etc., before making any major decisions related to the subject matter of the blog and podcast.

Right click here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.

The easiest ways to listen:  vitalpe.net/itunes or vitalpe.net/stitcher

The post How to Develop a Side Gig as an Expert Witness with Dr. Peter Steinberg – 053 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

Granted, this is a pretty tall order. It’s certainly easier if the organization you’re working for is looking for a CMO, or if you’re in a large city with multiple hospitals, MCOs and large medical groups.

But what do you need to do to get that chief medical officer job as soon as possible, even if you have limited management and leadership experience? Well, let me be your mentor and show you how it might be done.

Let’s start with the end in mind. What skill sets will a CMO candidate need to demonstrate so that an employer will…

1. read a cover letter and resume,
2. set up a series of interviews and,
3. select you as the new CMO?

If you’ve graduated medical school, completed a residency and worked clinically for a few years, you already have many of the necessary leadership skills.

Photo by Adam Smotkin on Unsplash

But you’ll need to work on those additional business and management skills that will enable you to work in a corporate environment.

I break down those skills into five general areas that a health care organization will generally be looking for:

1. Data Management
2. Financial Management
3. Business Practices
4. Leadership Skills
5. Talent Management

In this solo episode, I describe the specific skills needed in each area. I also provide examples of how you can develop those skills, if you don't already have them. Then, you can dream about becoming CMO in a year!

Click here to download a TRANSCRIPT of today's episode.

So… Is it possible to Become CMO in a Year?

It’s a stretch, but here's one plan for doing so, based on what I outlined in today's episode:

1. Join the AAPL and sign-up for one or two management courses. This demonstrates commitment.
2. If you’re a member of a committee or team, volunteer to be chair as soon as the opportunity presents itself. Let everyone know NOW that you’re willing to do so.
3. Find a local nonprofit that needs a board member and join ASAP. Volunteer for the Finance and Quality Committees and attend every board and committee meeting. Volunteer to chair at least one of the committees as soon as you can.
4. Try to get certified in QI, Lean Process Improvement or Six Sigma in the next 6 months.
5. Keep track of your positions, AND of the measurable accomplishments the organizations or committees have achieved with your help.
6. Leverage any current part-time management positions to include direct reports that you can manage.
7. Take one of the teams or boards that you chair through a SWOT analysis and mini-strategic plan, and set measurable goals for the coming year.

If you can complete those steps in the next 12 months, you’re ready to prepare an awesome resume, and begin your search for that CMO job.

New Paid Mentoring Program

I described a very special offer at the end of this episode. It's for a new paid Mentoring Program called Become CMO in a Year.

It’s designed for board certified physicians who work at least part-time in a hospital setting, who want to move into hospital or medical group management.

Through this mentoring program, I’ll obtain a detailed summary of your business and management experience, training and skills. I’ll identify the gaps in your skill sets, and then outline a plan for you to address gaps as efficiently as possible, using methods I’ve used myself, and have seen others use to great success.

The mentoring will occur through detailed audio advice and coaching that you can review as often as you like, and written transcripts, all designed to address your specific needs. It is completed with a live one-on-one call to answer specific questions and provide additional insights and advice to launch your new career.

If you'd like to read more about this program and launch your fulfilling, high-paying career as a physician executive, you'll definitely want to check out Become CMO in a Year.

There is no obligation. So, go check out Become CMO in One Year, because this could be the turning point in your nonclinical job search!

Please join me again next week for an exciting interview with a physician expert witness. I hope to see you then.

As always, I welcome your comments and feedback.

If you enjoyed today’s episode share it on Twitter and Facebook, and leave a review on iTunes.

Disclaimer:

The opinions expressed herein are those of me, and my guest where applicable. While the information published in written and audio form on the podcast are true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no express or implied guarantee that using the methods discussed herein will lead to success in your career, life or business.

The opinions are my own, and my guest's, and not those of any organization(s) that I'm a member of, or affiliated with. The information presented on this blog and related podcast is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only. They should not be construed as advice, such a medical, legal, tax, emotional or other types of advice.

If you take action on any information provided on the blog or podcast, it is at your own risk. Always consult a professional, e.g., attorney, accountant, career counsellor, etc., before making any major decisions related to the subject matter of the blog and podcast.

Right click here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.

The easiest ways to listen:  vitalpe.net/itunes or vitalpe.net/stitcher

The post How to Become CMO in a Year – 052 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

I made a commitment to present a new episode each week. I must apologize for completely skipping last week's episode. My family and I were in Munich, Germany last week. I had intended to complete the editing and posting of today's episode. But the preparations for our vacation took precedence and I was unable to finish the episode prior to leaving.

Basilica of St. Michael, Mondsee, Austria – Used in the film “Sound of Music”

The photos used in this edition of the show notes are from my recent trip to Munich and Salzburg.

Interview with Dr. Judy Finney

Today I present my interview with Dr. Judy Finney. I've been hoping to get an expert in Life Insurance Medicine on the show for many months. I was able to link up with Dr. Finney after seeing her quoted in a blog post by Heather Fork at Doctors Crossing. I approached her about being interviewed and she graciously agreed.

Judy completed undergraduate studies in zoology, and medical school, at Michigan State. She completed an internal medicine residency and fellowships in cardiology and interventional cardiology, and became board certified in all three disciplines. She built a private cardiology practice, then opted to work for a large group for the final 3 1/2 years of her clinical career. Six years ago she moved into life insurance medicine.

Stopped for a picture with Kay in the foyer of the HofBrauHaus

As stated, she now works for Allstate full-time. But she also finds time to work as a speaker and mentor at the annual SEAK Nonclinical Careers for Physicians Conference each October.

Pursuing a Career in Life Insurance Medicine

Judy does a great job during our discussion addressing several issues:

• Her career path from interventional cardiologist to full-time Associate Medical Director for the Allstate Insurance Company
• Her advice on how to increase your odds of getting a job in life insurance medicine
• The personality traits that are probably most compatible with such a career
• Some of the adjustments that will need to be made when pivoting to this type of position
• Resources that can be helpful for the prospective life insurance medical director, such as:
  • Brackenridge's Medical Selection of Life Risks: Fifth Edition (note: this is an Amazon affiliate link).
  • American Academy of Insurance Medicine (AAIM)
  • Midwestern Medical Directors Association
  • SEAK’s Annual Non-Clinical Careers Conference
  • LOMA (Life Office Management Association)

By following Judy's advice, you can really accelerate your pursuit of this career choice.

A young artist creates a sand sculpture near Viktualienmarkt in Munich

I hope you found this episode helpful. If so, please subscribe to the podcast on your favorite smart phone app or on iTunes.

Get the Newsletter

I provide additional nonclinical career information in my newsletter. For example, I have a list of several new jobs for physicians in management at HCA that have been shared by a recruiter. I will be sending that list out later this week. To sign up for the newsletter, simply complete the information found at vitalpe.net/newsletter.

Neuschwanstein Castle in the south of Bavaria

Leopoldskron Castle served as the Trapp family home in the film The Sound of Music

The Eagles Nest, one of Hitler's governmental headquarters during World War II

Join me next week for another episode of Physician Nonclinical Careers.

Be sure to subscribe to the podcast on the Apple Podcast App.

If you liked today’s episode, please tell your friends about it and SHARE it on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Right click here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.

Disclaimer:

The opinions expressed herein are those of me and my guest, where applicable. While the information published in written form here, and in audio form on the podcast, are true and accurate to the best of my knowledge, there is no express or implied guarantee that using the methods discussed herein will lead to success in your career, life or business.

The opinions are my own, and my guest's, and not those of any organizations that I'm a member of, or affiliated with. The information presented on this blog and related podcast is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only and shouldn’t be construed as advice, such a medical, legal, tax, emotional or other types of advice. If you take action on any information provided on the blog or podcast, it’s at your own risk. Always consult a professional, e.g., attorney, accountant, career counsellor, etc., before making any major decisions related to the subject matter of the blog and podcast.

Affiliate Links:

Where noted in parentheses, I receive a small stipend for referring you to a site, such as Amazon, where you may purchase a product discussed in a podcast, show notes or blog post. This does not affect your cost for the product. I only promote products that I have purchased or used myself, or that have been recommended by respected colleagues, including podcast guests.

The post How to Flourish in the Little-Known World of Life Insurance Medicine with Dr. Judy Finney – 039 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

You may have noticed, if you're a regular listener, that I've been a little bit delayed. My last episode was released a day or two late, and then the show notes were about two or three days late. Basically, there's just been a lot going on. And rather than just skip a week, I usually give myself the leeway to publish something a day or two late, rather than just skipping and missing an episode.

You'll notice the last three, including this one, are solo episodes. I'm hoping that's okay. I prefer to do interviews, but interviews are logistically a little more complicated. Every once in a while we'll have someone who cancels and then we reschedule, so then I'm left with a gap. I'm not that far ahead in planning my interviews. I’m still going week by week at this point.

Sometime in the future, I'm going try to get a little more organized. Right now, I'm planning for my next two episodes to be interviews. They should be very interesting. I'm not going to give you the names, but I will say that the next one should be with a physician who's been working in the life insurance industry, which is a very attractive industry for physicians. I should have her on next time. And then I've got one lined up for after that as well.

Updates

You might know through previous episodes that, for the last few months, I've been helping Laura McCain as an administrator for the Physician Nonclinical Career Hunters' Facebook group. And, I have three bits of information about that. There's some news I'd like to share with you.

Physician Nonclinical Career Hunters is Growing

The first is, it continues to grow. We're adding about 20 plus or minus new members every day. And, we're, oh, a few hundred members from breaking the 10,000 mark. So that's quite a milestone. And I'll announce that when it happens.

Facebook has added some new services, at least one new service. And that is, for certain types of Facebook groups, including those that are geared for careers, they've added a mentoring program. That's something I found very interesting. So they're facilitating a program where we link up mentors with mentees, and Facebook will walk us through an eight week process in which the mentor helps the mentees to make some real, tangible progress in a way towards their new career goals, or in improving their careers.

From what I know, the process involves about one hour a week for both parties. And, it runs, like I said, about eight weeks. We just got it set up on our Facebook group. So, if you haven't been on the group in a while, you might go there again. It's the Physician Nonclinical Career Hunters Facebook group.

Physicians Only

This group is only for physicians. So, if you're not a member of the group and you join, or attempt to join, you're going to be asked three questions. Be sure to answer those questions. We need the reassurance that you're a physician.

Anyway, there is a process. And we're just learning about the mentorship now. I've just assigned one mentee to me. And I've also assigned one other. So, we only have two pairs right now. But I saw today that we have probably close to 20 mentees, and only myself and one other mentor. So, we're looking for more mentors for the group. And we're trying to link the mentees and mentors up so that they're looking at the same type of career opportunity. In other words, since my background is in hospital management, I'm looking for a mentee who's interested in hospital or medical group management as opposed to someone who might be looking to go into entrepreneurship, or consulting, or working for Pharma, since that's not my expertise.

Some Members Struggle to Get Started

So far, I've also noticed that there are a number of mentees who just want help with “finding a nonclinical career.” So, it's pretty generic, pretty open-ended, which brings me to the third point about the group, which is, I often get ideas for this podcast from discussion threads that are occurring on the Facebook group.

And, with this new mentorship program, there were so many requests for a generic, “How do I start a nonclinical career” question, I decided today that I'm going to talk about three practical, tangible, simple, direct steps that you can take if you're interested in a nonclinical career and you really haven't taken any steps to get started.

This is for those who are very early in the process. They're still thinking about, “Well, what do I want to do? How do I do it?” And so I hope you'll find that useful today.

Okay, to reiterate, today's episode is some advice for those who are very early in the process and are just struggling to figure out how to actually get started. So, if you're looking for a nonclinical career, or you're considering it, and you want to know what's out there, I'm going to give you some ideas of ways to get started.

Begin Your Education in Nonclinical Careers

The first thing to do is to educate yourself. I've been looking at these things for a year or two, if not longer. Here are some suggestions. You want to educate yourself about the whole issue of nonclinical careers and career transition. There are several good books and websites that you might want to start with, just to get an overview, and to get a partial list of all the potential nonclinical jobs that are out there.

I found the following books to be useful. Note that for the books, there will be affiliate links here, where you can link directly to the book and purchase it through Amazon. I do get a small stipend for doing that. But it does not affect the price for the book in any way. There's no affiliate link for the websites. Those are just normal links.

Great Books

The first is Michael McLaughlin's book, which is very readable, inspiring, and extremely helpful. It is called, Do You Feel Like You Wasted All That Training?: Answers About Transitioning to Non-Clinical Careers for Physicians. It's done in a question and answer format. And, even though he ended up in a specific career – I guess you'd call it medical writing, and ultimately entrepreneurship, because he started his own company – he really addresses a lot of the issues related to career change. And he even talks about how he followed a process, which could serve as a model for you to follow if it makes sense to you.

The second book is Cory S. Fawcett's book, titled, The Doctors Guide to Smart Career Alternatives and Retirement. And he does spend a fair amount of time talking about retirement and financial issues. But there are two or three chapters in there that address some unusual clinical and the usual list of nonclinical careers. And he has vignettes and stories about physicians who have successfully made the transition. So I think you'll find that useful and instructive.

Latest Find

I found another book recently that I've not mentioned in the past, because it's new to me. And this one is by Emily Woolcock. It's called, Make Your Move: A Physician's Guide to Clinical and Non-Clinical Alternatives to Medical Practice. It's written by an orthopedist who now teaches online how to do independent medical exams. And I believe she's still practicing. So, I read the book. I found it interesting, and inspiring. So you might check that out.

The last book I want to mention is a book that I reviewed and summarized somewhat in Episode Number 2, called Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One, by Jenny Blake. It provides an overview of the process of career change and transition that I think makes a lot of sense and can take some of the fear out of the process. So, again, I would recommend that you read Pivot, by Jenny Blake.

Useful Blogs

There's a relatively new blog called Look for Zebras. And, recently there was a post titled, “Nonclinical Career Profiles for Physicians.” But it links to 19 specific jobs that are nonclinical, with fairly detailed descriptions. And for each one, the author answers this question: Is this a career for you?

I found that very interesting and helpful, because we don't want to rush into a career that really is not compatible with our personality, our interests, or our passions. I found this one to be very helpful.

Another blog that lists many nonclinical careers and provides some examples of each, is called NonClinicalDoctors.com. This is the blog that's produced by Heidi Moawad. She's got a long list of nonclinical careers. And, some of them have links to specific examples. So that'll give you a little bit more insight into each of those careers. It might be a little different from the other ones.

And finally, I want to recommend the blog that's produced by Heather Fork at Doctor's Crossing. It doesn't have as many specific job descriptions, but there are a lot of articles that address issues like personality, how to make the decision, and other supportive topics that will help somebody who is looking to leave clinical medicine. To really make sure they've considered all of their options, and to go into this process with their eyes open. That can be found at DoctorsCrossing.com.

So that completes my comments on action item number one, which is to educate yourself. There's a lot more out there than what I've described. But those books and websites will surely get you started.

Try Something New

Now we're going to move into the second action item you can follow. And these can be done concurrently. One of the approaches that can be helpful in career transition is to do little pilots, or to try different things and see if they gel with you. If they meet your needs. If they're something that generates some degree of passion or interest and fits your personality and so forth.

And, it's not always easy to tell ahead of time if this is going to be the case. Sometimes you try things and you find out after you've tried them that they really do get you going. That they really interest you. They motivate you and inspire you. So, just get into something, even though you may not know for sure how much you're going to like doing it.

Volunteer and Learn

This first set of explorations I'm going to describe have to do with finding and joining a nonprofit board. Okay, why do this? Well, a number of reasons.

By taking action and identifying some nonprofit boards you might want to join, you're going to be putting yourself out there. You're going to be doing something positive. You're going to be contributing to that organization. And then while you're doing that, you're going to be learning as you go. Because you're probably going to learn about financial reports, and quality improvement, and other topics that will build on what you already know through your medical career.

You're going to focus on joining a nonprofit that's in the healthcare field. There are many charitable organizations out there that you could join. But, I think it's better to focus on one that's in the healthcare field. Just to give you a preview, it would be boards for organizations that might be helping the disabled, or a women's shelter, boards for hospice, or if there was a nonprofit nursing home or home healthcare agency.

Let me talk about how you would find such an organization and contact them. Obviously, if you're well established in the community, you want to talk to your friends and colleagues. If you work at a hospital, you might see if they're looking for board members. If the hospital has an affiliate, such as a foundation or other spinoffs or affiliate organizations with a board such as a nursing home or home health, as I mentioned earlier, you might see if they need board members. And then, of course, just checking around, you might have knowledge about other facilities. Perhaps in working as a physician, you've interfaced with those in referring patients to them. And if all else fails, I have one other method for identifying a potential nonprofit to approach.

Use GuideStar

There is an organization called GuideStar. And it has a site called GuideStar.org. And, this is the site that lists all of the nonprofits in the United States. It’s sort of well-known because the 990 information that hospitals and other nonprofits have to publish is placed on GuideStar for review (by the public).

To get the most current data, you have to pay for a membership. But, you can sign up and obtain a free membership. If you really want to, you can go and look in the 990s and find out what your local hospital's CEO, CMO, CFO, and board members earned in previous years. The free version is providing only information from two three years ago or longer. But it's still a very interesting site.

But, for our purposes today, we're going to use it to try and find some candidates to approach for board membership. It's probably true that these organizations aren't just waiting around for a physician to show up and volunteer their services. But the reality of the situation is that many of these organizations would love to have physicians on their boards and have difficulty getting them.

Begin Your Search

So, it's very likely that if you find two or three that make sense to approach, one of them might have an opening. If not right now, at least within the next four to six months, because the board membership turns over usually every two to three years on most of these boards.

The process is quite simple:

1. You go to GuideStar.org.
2. And you click the button that says Sign Up.
3. Then you put in your name, and your email address. And now you have access to the free part of the site.
4. The next step is to click the Search button. That brings up a sophisticated search panel on the left.

Narrow Your Selection

Probably the easiest way to search is to click your state, or a closely neighboring state, and then click a city if you want to limit your search to a certain city. Then I'm recommending that you search for an organization that has revenues greater than $5 million per year. That way you know the organization's large enough to have meaningful financials, a sizeable employee population. And so, what you learn in looking at reports on an organization like this will apply to future jobs in many industries.

Let me give you an example. If I use this search function to search Illinois, it says there are 71,323 nonprofits in the state. If I look specifically at Kankakee, there's 191. Kankakee is a fairly small town outside of Chicago.

Or, I can look in Illinois and use a keyword search for “hospice,” which will identify 68 separate hospice organizations.

The other thing you can do is, under “Organizations,” you can break it down into type of organizations. For example, you might look in your state, and then under type of organization, you will find that letter “E” correlates to “Healthcare – General and Rehabilitation,” which includes a lot of hospitals, or “F” –  “Mental Health,” which is another medical field that might have appropriate organizations for you to consider joining.

To take it a step further, if you were to look under section “E” under Healthcare, you'll see that there are subsets. And for example, in the state of Illinois, under “Healthcare,” you've got 74 that are considered to be “Advocacy” organizations, 108 that are “Professional Societies,” 54 that are “Hospitals and Primary Medical Care Organizations,” and 115 that are “Community Health Systems.” These will probably overlap quite a bit.

But again, play around with it. Try and find three, four, or five organizations that meet your criteria, that seem interesting, that are located reasonably close to you. And, that have, as I said, 5 or 10 million dollars in gross revenue, so that they'll be big enough to be meaningful, but small enough to be approachable.

Similar Organizations

There are two other types of organizations that won't be found on GuideStar but are very similar. One is county health departments. They all have boards, and they all have physician members on their boards, generally. And they have the same type of meetings, looking at the same type of information that can be useful with regards to exposing you to some of these issues.

And, don't forget your professional societies. There are state and county medical societies that have boards as well. And they also review similar types of reports, although, they'd have to be a pretty large county medical society or association to match the budget, let's say, of one of the nonprofits we're talking about.

Anyway, the point is to see if you can get appointed to some of these. And just start attending the meetings. Do some networking. See if there's anything going on that is attractive to you. If you like participating, then certainly volunteer for membership on some of the committees where you can learn even more specific details on areas of interest.

If you find that it's something that doesn't really align with your interests or passions, then, by all means, after six to 12 months, just inform the chair that you will need to resign. And then consider looking for another opportunity.

Remember that you'll be learning along the way. It won't have any downside to put a year or two experiences on your resume. It shows both an interest in helping as well as some experience in business practices that you'll be exposed to. And it may lead to other opportunities that you can't even imagine.

Other Small Pilots Closer to Home

Well, I did say that we would have three steps or actions we could take. So, I know we're running out of time. But let me just add one, third step that's pretty straightforward. This applies to anybody's who’s in any kind of organization directly, such as an employee of a hospital or health system, or a medical group.

Or, even if you're independent, but you're on a medical staff of a hospital, or otherwise affiliated with an organization that you work with. Just stop for a moment. Look around and see if there are opportunities to assist that organization in any of the major areas that might be of benefit to your learning process.

So, I'm talking about they probably have a department, or at least a person that is assigned to tracking quality improvement, or perhaps safety, even if there's an area that looks at the finances or other, even clinical activities. Many hospitals have specific clinical teams and committees such as the cancer committee, tumor board, perhaps there's a cardiac cath conference.

Teams Need Physician Leaders

There might be units such as an observation unit, or the ICU, or other specific, very focused clinical teams that you can become part of. And they usually have meetings, and they usually need a chair. Then you get into that, and you start leading these meetings and assisting and demonstrating your expertise outside of the strictly clinical area into management and leadership.

You might join the UM or case management team, or the informatics team. We've talked about some of these in the past. But, as you get involved, not only are you learning some clinical subject matter, but you're also learning leadership and transferable skills that will apply to a specific medical directorship, medical advisorship, and then ultimately other types of positions.

Oh, and let's not forget about the continuing medical education committee, if there is one. That's a pretty altruistic area, but it's very practical to learn to skills regarding CME. You might learn about writing, presentation, accreditation, and these will provide some skills that can be transferred to other settings. And give you some ideas on what kind of long-term nonclinical career you might wish to pursue.

Take the First Step

The important thing is to get started with your education. Get started with exposing yourself to some other opportunities and other experiences. And, over time, you'll start to develop some clarity around what you want to do nonclinically. And you'll also discover other opportunities for being mentored or coached. You'll be networking. You'll be identifying other colleagues that may be a step or two ahead of you. And you'll also be identifying other resources that are out there.

Well, I think that's all we have time for today. And, I will remind you to please go into your podcast app and subscribe to the podcast. And, while you're there, leave a review and a ranking. That would be really appreciated. It will help to make sure that others who are looking for this kind of information can find it more easily.

Before we close today, let me remind you that I did put together a free guide called 5 Clinical Careers You Can Pursue Today. You can download that for free by giving your email address to vitalpe.net/freeguide. That's vitalpe.net/freeguide, all one word.

I want to end there today. I want to thank you for joining me. Next week we should be returning to the interview format. So join me then on Physician Nonclinical Careers.

Resources

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The post 3 Simple Tactics to Launch Your Exploration for a New Career – 038 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.

Obviously when you're working clinically, you need to communicate with patients, as well as with colleagues and other persons. If you're doing a nonclinical job, you'll be doing the same thing. But you might also be doing presentations, and something that's also very common and somewhat annoying at times, and that is: going to a number of meetings.

In fact, you might be going to a lot of meetings. Perhaps a meeting like this one…

Typical Meeting

I enter the conference room and take a seat. Four other committee members have already arrived. The meeting is scheduled to begin in about four minutes. As part-time medical director, I'm representing the interests of the occupational medical clinic. At five minutes after the hour, three more committee members have drifted in, but the chair has still not arrived. I'm a bit frustrated because I have lots of other work to do. And we're already running late. On top of that, I don't even have the agenda or the minutes from the previous meeting to look over.

The chair, William, walks in and hurriedly arranges some papers and hands out today's materials. He calls the meeting to order and accepts a motion to approve the minutes, which is quickly seconded and approved. We begin our discussion of the next agenda item. One of the other physician members, Dr. Milton, strolls in, followed by Maggie, the director of one of the clinical departments. Dr. Milton is the associate program director of the internal medicine residency program. Once he and Maggie are seated, William pauses the meeting while bringing them up to speed on what we've discussed thus far.

Photo by ål nik on Unsplash

We continue to move down the agenda. Maggie has opened her phone and is furiously responding to text messages. One of the other committee members provides an update on an action item from the previous meeting. A motion is made and quickly approved. We're now 30 minutes into the one hour meeting, and we've barely made it through the first few items on the agenda. For the next topic, Dr. Milton is clearly not in agreement with a proposal that may affect his residents. I cringe inside as he begins his attack on the proposal with, “I've been practicing at this institution for 30 years. When I was chair of internal medicine, we tried to adopt this approach and it never worked.”

He speaks for another 10 minutes reiterating the same argument at least three more times. At one point, he takes a verbal detour to a totally unrelated, but potentially important topic. Then he suddenly returns to his initial argument, repeating it a fifth time for good measure. As usual, William seems incapable of keeping the group on track. I jump in from time to time to help refocus the committee's efforts. But in spite of that, we fall hopelessly behind.

After grinding our way through about half the agenda items, William suddenly remembers that he's already five minutes late for his next meeting. He abruptly adjourns the meeting, stands, and exits the room. We didn't even get to the issue that I was hoping to speak to. And I'm left thinking that another hour of my valuable time has been wasted.

Learning Bad Habits

This meeting was fictional, but I've witnessed every bad behavior described in this story and many more. Unfortunately, for most physicians, the types of meetings we're used to going to are typically meetings like those at the hospital where we're part of the medical staff. Now, I understand, not all of you are on medical staffs. But for those that are, we go to meetings. The attendance is often poor partly because they're mandatory meetings and they're designed to meet regulatory requirements. And sometimes they get some good work done, but not always. And learning how to run meetings in that environment probably isn't the most conducive to learning good practices or good habits when it comes to meetings.

Today I'm going to talk about an important topic, which can be very helpful for both nonclinical and clinical careers. But if you're in a nonclinical career, you may be spending a lot of time in these meetings. You may be part of a hospital management team. Or even if you're doing some other nonclinical job, such as chart reviews or working for an insurance company of some sort, or working for pharma, you're going to find yourself in a lot of meetings, generally. And you may be ultimately running some meetings.

Again, getting back to my contention that physicians are natural leaders, we're going to want to do a really good job when we start leading those meetings because that's going to be a crucial element of our leadership, and believe it or not, meetings can be a very effective tool that can help us to get to know our teams better, to accomplish important projects and goals, and to make important decisions, so I'm going to talk today about the 10 ways or practices that you can adopt to become a master or a maestro of meetings.

Meetings Are a Communication Tool

Meetings are a fairly unique method of communication. Most of the communicating that we do are usually face to face with patients or with direct reports or other individuals, or we're used to doing presentations and teaching, but a meeting combines features of multiple types of communication in which the chair is in charge, but which sparks conversation and discussion within the meeting in a controlled manner, and so by following certain practices, you can get the most out of your meetings and make sure they're not a big waste of time for those participating including yourself.

Remember that a badly planned and run meeting can be worse than just wasting time or being ineffective. It can be costly and it can leave the participants more confused and frustrated than if they had never attended the meeting. Some of us come to actually hate meetings because we attend so many that are ineffective. They seem to be too numerous in number. They take too long. They waste our time. They take us away from doing the real work that we're paid to do.

Let's face it. If we're paid to do chart reviews or analyze the medical literature or write some kind of promotional material, sitting in a meeting is not generating income. And at the same time, it's costing the organization money because each of the attendees is being paid to be there, essentially.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Let's take an example. What would the cost be? If you take 10 or 12 people away from the duties that they're normally doing to get together, and, let's say, you're paying these professionals $30 to $50 per hour, then each meeting of 10 to 12 or 15 people is going to be creating about $500 or more in uncompensated expense, not counting any preparation time for the meeting. Imagine a larger organization with 50 persons attending just four to five meetings a week. The cost just for the meeting attendance can run into tens of thousands of dollars each month. And this is time that the participants are not actually generating billable hours, if that's the type of work that they're doing.

So how does this happen? Nobody goes into a meeting or an organization that has meetings thinking, “Well, I'm just going to try and waste everybody's time by getting them together and hanging out and talking about things that seem like they're important,” but basically the intentions are good. But there's three primary reasons that they're a waste of time.

Root Causes of Poor Meetings

The first is that they're often poorly planned. Perhaps they're a regular meeting that's scheduled weekly or monthly, and they just keep going in spite of the fact that there may not be important topics to address, or there's insufficient planning for them.

The second big reason is because they're poorly run. You can have all of the best intentions and have everything planned well, but if the meeting isn't run properly, and in a way that I'll describe in a moment, then it becomes fairly ineffective.

Finally, it includes the wrong people.  Either because the wrong people have been invited, or because the invitee list is too large and people that don't need to be at every meeting are coming, or the people that really need to present something don't show up, often, times without knowing in advance. And therefore the agenda for the meeting really can't be addressed.

So in a few minutes, I'm going to give you some pointers on how to avoid these missteps and others, but let's step back for a minute and let's talk in more detail about the purpose of a meeting.

Why Meet?

There isn't that much that you would do in a meeting, really. You're either getting people together to:

• provide them information,
• brainstorm or come up with a creative solution for a problem,
• discuss an issue and actually make a decision, possibly even by taking a vote, or,
• address a project, either move it along, or complete it.

Information

Now, if we step back to the issue of providing information, this is an important thing to keep in mind. There are obviously many ways to provide information. So unless the people need to get together face to face or online, and need to have a conversation, it might be best to provide that information in another format, possibly a written format, or you could even do a webinar or a recorded video.

The reason to have a meeting to provide information is that it gives you an opportunity to answer questions in real-time, which then often save time in the long run in terms of having to go back and forth in an asynchronous way.

Photo by Patrick Perkins on Unsplash

Brainstorming

Now, the meeting that includes creative discussion or coming up with creative solutions can be a little out of the ordinary. In this type of meeting, we're just getting together and brainstorming. We're trying to come up with “out of the box” thinking for different problem. And this can be a great reason for a meeting. The importance of this is to be sure that you're taking notes and capturing all of the ideas. These are the kind of meetings that sometimes go into strategic planning or goal setting for their annual planning process.

Decision-Making

As far as the typical meeting where you're making a decision, these are often the types of meetings where we're at a committee or a board, whether it's part of your organization or part of a nonprofit or what have you. And information has to be presented and then a vote is typically taken and a decision is made.

Project Planning

Finally, there are some meetings that are part of a project planning process, and I'll probably give an example of this a little later on. But it's not unusual in a large project to have multiple types of teams. Each team meets on a regular basis, depending on what it's addressing, and follows a project plan, completing steps along the way. And then ultimately, each of those teams reports to the steering committee, which is responsible for getting the project completed.

Characteristics of Well Run Meetings

Hopefully, many of us have been to very effective meetings and would recognize when we're part of one. And very well-run meetings seem to share a number of characteristics.

They generally have well-defined goals that answer the questions, “Why are we meeting? What will be true following the meeting that was not true when it started? What decisions will be made? What information will be delivered?”

And these questions need to be answered before the meeting so that the meeting can be focused. The meetings are well-run, which I'm going to talk a little bit further down, and ideally they should be parsimonious.

What does parsimonious mean? I guess technically it means frugal. But the way that I use parsimonious means something that has everything that it needs and nothing that it doesn't need. It's effective. It's getting the job done with minimal or no waste. And that waste could be in terms of time and in terms of involving persons that really don't need to be involved.

It may be hard to believe, but it is possible to use meetings effectively to generate results that are more than offset by their costs, and meetings that people actually look forward to attending. So what are those 10 practices that the meeting maestro uses to create a great meeting?

The 10 Practices of the Meeting Maestro

Well, in my opinion, these are the 10 features that those meetings should have, and the components that should be included in planning a meeting.

Practice No. 1

Number one is the goal of the meeting should be explicitly stated. Now, this can be in the charter for the team that was created and that is now meeting, it could be in a mission for a team, or it could just be stated as the goal of the individual meeting for that day.

Practice No. 2

The second thing is that the agenda, the minutes from the previous meeting if there was one, and other meeting materials should be sent out before the meeting, because that is the only way that participants can prepare for the upcoming meeting so that the meeting can start and end on time, and can address all of the issues that are being listed on the agenda.

Click here to get the CHECKLIST

Practice No. 3

As I said just a second ago, starting on time, which is the third item. We're going to start all of our meetings on time because that's the only way to honor those who are responsible enough to actually show at the start of the meeting.

Practice No. 4

Number four is the chair is running the meeting, but often talks the least. In most types of meetings, the chair doesn't make motions and the chair doesn't vote. The chair is there to coordinate the meeting, facilitate the meeting, make sure we stay on time, and address the other issues that I'm going to talk about in a minute.

Practice No. 5

Practice number five is to follow the agenda. I'm not saying necessarily that it has to be followed exactly in the order in which it's listed. Shortly before the meeting, the chair should look over the agenda. And if there are three or four out of, let's say, seven or eight topics that are critically important, it might make sense to prioritize those and then table anything at the end if they're not all addressed by the time of the close of the meeting. But again, the point is that we should stick with the agenda and not get sidetracked into issues that, while they may be interesting, really aren't part of the reason for today's meeting.

Practice No. 6

Now, practice number six may be the most important part of this whole meeting process. And that is that the chair controls the meeting, starting by limiting the discussion. There are certain types of meeting attendees who try to derail the meeting or otherwise interfere with it accomplishing its goals, and I'm going to address several of those right now even though they don't all necessarily relate to having to limit discussion.

Photo by Fabrizio Verrecchia on Unsplash

Latecomers

But for completeness sake, first I'm going to address the latecomers. I didn't mention that earlier when I said start the meeting on time, but I'm going to reiterate that it's important that you start your meetings when they say they're going to start, so that you respect the people that showed up at the appropriate time. My recommendation for dealing with latecomers is to basically ignore them.

I definitely don't think you should go back and reiterate everything that's happened in the first five or ten minutes of the meeting for those that come late. Because then you're just teaching everyone that comes on time to just come late because they don't want to sit through the reiteration and have to go through everything twice. Probably if this is a recurring pattern, then you should have a conversation off line with the person who consistently comes late, and the conversation may be that “It's fine if you come late. Come in. But we're not going to start over. But I'd really appreciate it if you come on time like everybody else.”

Dominators

Now, the other one that can derail a meeting or make it less than useful and less attractive to attend is the dominators. These are people, and they're very common in a medical staff, but in any type of meeting, these are people who feel they always have an opinion when something is being discussed. Now, it's not always done in a purposeful manner, and I'll give you an example.

When I was on the senior management team at my hospital, we had weekly meetings, and the CEO would typically bring up some new issue for input or discussion, and there were one or two people who always had an opinion. And it was interesting. As we dug into this over time as we were talking about trust and working together as a team, we found that they're just extroverts and creatives who seem to be able to come up with opinions on almost anything in the spur of the moment. If there's a slight pause, they're going to jump in. They're going to start talking.

Now, for those of us who are introverted, more analytical, if that's allowed to go on, then we're not going to really contribute much at all. So the chair needs to deal with the dominators, and I'll talk about how to do that in a moment.

Perseverators

There's also the perseverators. And I don't know if that's really a word. But sometimes people make their point and they keep making their point over and over again. At some point the chair has to step in and say, “Thank you, Dr. Smith. We understand, and let me reframe or summarize your point, and then let's move on and get somebody else's opinion.”

There's also the multi-tasker, and that's just somebody who's being rude. They're in the room, checking their phone, responding to text messages and so forth. And I don't think that should be addressed within the confines of the meeting other than perhaps asking that person to contribute on a specific topic. But that's another issue that should be addressed outside the meeting.

Basically inform the person afterwards or at another time that the members of the team really want their input. So we'd prefer they turn their phone off and participate fully in the meeting.

Photo by Sorry imKirk on Unsplash

The PARKING LOT Tactic

Now, before I go into the next type of strategy for running a meeting, I want to mention the use of a very helpful tool, and that's called the PARKING LOT. In fact, the parking lot can be used to deal with the dominators or the perseverators or others who seem to derail a meeting, and that's when somebody brings up a topic that's not particularly germane to the issue at hand, you can stop everything at that point and say, “Hey, this seems to be an important issue and it probably needs to be addressed at a future meeting, so what we're going to do is we're going to write this down on the parking lot list.”

This could be an actual list that's put up on a whiteboard somewhere during the meeting, and as these topics come up, you put them up there to be addressed at a future time. I think it's really helpful to use a parking lot. Sometimes it's just a sheet of paper that you can write things down.

Now, the reality is you may want to address these in the future, but sometimes you just won't. But at least you've stopped the conversation on something that is not to be addressed today on the agenda and get us back on track.

Practice No. 7

Practice number seven that excellent leaders use to run great meetings is to involve everybody, so whether you've got a lot of dominators or you just have people that have more experience, the point is if you're inviting colleagues or employees to a meeting, they should be adding to it unless they're there just to learn as an intern or something like that, so a really good leader will pause every once in a while and we'll say, “Hey, Stephanie, I've not heard from you today. On this topic, I think you'd have some good input. Why don't you tell us what you're thinking?”

That way the introverts or the analyticals, or those that tend to want to think about things more before chiming in will have an opportunity to express their opinions and add to the conversation, and that's what makes some of these meetings really interesting, knowing that you're going to be asked to participate and not just be there as an observer.

Practice No. 8

Now, the eighth practice is to summarize the actions that have been agreed upon at the end of the meeting, so let's say we've made a decision, we've taken a vote, everyone's on board, we're going to proceed with this project or we're going to proceed in this direction, or we've decided we're going to do such and such and bring that back to the next meeting, so it's nice if at the end, the last two to three minutes, we summarize everything that is an action step for the next meeting if there is a next meeting, and that way it's clear, it'll go in the minutes, and then it can be sent out with the other materials before the following meeting.

This is where the accountability can be built in so that these action steps should have one particular person's name next to them as the accountable person, and if they're going to be on the next agenda, that person definitely needs to be there at the next meeting.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

Practice No. 9

The ninth practice is to end on time. In fact, if possible, you should complete your work and end even early. Don't think of those last five to ten minutes of free time as social time. Give the participants a piece of their life back and say, “You know what? We've finished everything. Do we have a motion to adjourn? Let's all go back to our offices or whatever we were doing earlier than expected and get some additional work done if that's what we want to do.”

Practice No. 10

And then the last practice, number 10, is to be certain to follow-up at the next meeting with those items that we agreed to follow-up on during this meeting. It's amazing how many times we come to conclusions or assign tasks or decide to do something, and then the next meeting starts all over again in a different spot and there's no accountability and there's no closure on that loop, which is really the ideal way to keep things moving with meetings and projects and things like that.

Remember that one sign of a great leader is one who runs great meetings, and if given the chance to prepare and contribute to them, attendees will look forward to participating in your meetings.

To Summarize

Okay. Let me go over the 10 practices of the meeting maestro one more time.

1. The goal of the meeting is explicitly stated.
2. The agenda, minutes, and other materials are sent out before the meeting.
3. The meeting is started on time.
4. The chair facilitates the meeting but does not dominate the meeting.
5. The chair follows the agenda.
6. The chair maintains control by limiting discussion when needed, and using the parking lot as a tool to do that.
7. The chair involves everybody in the meeting.
8. The chair summarizes the action steps at the end with accountability attached.
9. The meeting ends on time, or even early.
10. All of the appropriate actions are followed up at subsequent meetings.

I think I'll end it there.

If you'd like to download a checklist to use when planning your next great meeting, go to vitalpe.net/037download, and I'll send you that simple checklist in exchange for your email address.

Thanks again for listening and join me next week for another episode of Physician Nonclinical Careers.

Right click here and “Save As” to download this podcast episode to your computer.

The easiest ways to listen:  vitalpe.net/itunes – vitalpe.net/stitcher

If you'd like to listen to the premier episode and show notes, you can find it here: Getting Acquainted with Physician NonClinical Careers Podcast – 001

The post Adopt These 10 Practices of the Meeting Maestro – 037 appeared first on NonClinical Physicians.