99. Physician Leadership - the Magic 3-Word Stack of the highest quality leadership

Speaker A: 00:00:00

In this episode, I'm going to show you one of the keys to being a successful physician leader.

Leadership is usually called into action when you have something that's not working out the way you want and you have the urge to ask the question, this isn't working the way we planned. What should we do now? What should we do?

And before you do anything, before you leap into action to save the day, let me show you this three word stack. Three magic words that if you use them in this order, you will always be an excellent leader, always aiming the team to a higher and better outcome.

It's one of the key skills of physician leadership. Let me show it to you. Let's get started.

Speaker A: 00:00:42

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the Stop Physician Burnout podcast.

A physician leadership podcast where you will learn the skills so that we can join together and lead the charge to physician well being skills to earn the respect of your colleagues in the front line, skills to exercise true influence in.

Speaker A: 00:01:01

The C suite and take back your.

Speaker A: 00:01:03

Job, your practice, your career and your life. All of these tools have been proven effective in my 40,000 doctor physician coaching and training practice.

And if I know one thing, I know you're super busy. So let's get started.

Speaker A: 00:01:18

As an independent consultant, trainer and coach, I have talked to over a thousand c suites in my career. And in each case, they came to me because they had a problem.

Typically it was about physician burnout and physician disruptive behavior and things like that. And their question to me was always, what should we do, Dyke? And my answer to them was always, I don't know and you don't know.

And the reason you don't know and I don't know is because of this three word stack. Now, if you're listening to the podcast, the words are vision, strategy, and tactics, in that order.

In a vertical stack, vision's on top, strategy's in the middle. Tactics is down below. I've given you an example in the show notes. Please grab a pen and write them. Vision, strategy tactics.

Let me ask you a question. Is what should we do? Dyke, is that a vision question, a strategy question, or a tactical question? Think about it. What should we do?

Is that a vision, strategy or tactics question? It's tactics.

And the reason that you don't know what to do when you're faced with a challenge, like whatever it is that you're facing in your practice or your job, and the reason that these C suites didn't know what to do is because we need to go to the top of the stack to guide our actions. This is leadership. This is transformational servant leadership. You have to start with a vision.

Once your vision is clear, vision of a positive outcome, no matter what the challenge is, then the strategy and tactics will just fall out. And let me give you a parenting example of this.

If you came home and your kid, let's say you had some, a couple of kids that were four and six years old, excitable, right? Ready to play at any point in time, you come home and you say, hey, kids, get packing. We're going on vacation. Which is a tactical command.

Would your kids actually get packing or would they instead stop and ask you a question? Well, of course they'd ask you a question. What's the question? Where are we going? They need to have the vision question answered, where are we going?

Before they can even begin to pack for that trip. So whenever you're faced with any urge to ask the question, or anybody asks you the question, what should we do?

Because something's not going as planned, stop and focus on vision. The vision of a positive outcome for this issue.

Now, the place that we use it the most in my coaching practice is in the generation of your ideal job description. Your ideal job description in an ideal world, if you controlled all the aspects of your job, if you had a magic wand, what would your job look like?

Your ideal job, what kind of patients would you be seeing for what kind of hours and what kind of pay on what kind of team and what kind of organization? Where in the world? And this is one of the key reasons that burnout is so prevalent in doctors.

We don't learn how to create a positive vision for our practice, and so what we do is just cope with the job description we were handed when we signed our contract. As an employee, what is your ideal job description? It's only then that you can create a strategy and tactics to get that outcome.

So leadership is about beginning with the end in mind. That's one of Stephen Covey's seven habits. Anytime you're faced with a challenge before you start doing something, don't just do something.

Sit there and figure out what the positive vision of the outcome is that you want so that you can get everybody on board. Now, there are some situations where you're talking about leadership for yourself. In that case, you make the decision on what the vision is.

But if you're leading a team, it's important to get consensus around the team's vision, the team's shared vision for a positive outcome. Ask the question, hey, how do you want to make this look everybody, how do we want to make this look when we're successful?

What does success look like?

How would we measure it and know that we're there and get everybody on the same page with regard to the vision of a successful outcome before you start to build out the strategy and the tactics. And again, one of the other key leadership skills that you use at that point is the power of asking questions.

See, the interesting thing about leadership is leadership is a lot like baseball. It doesn't matter whether you're little league or World Series champion, baseball only has four skills.

Throw the ball, catch the ball, hit the ball, run. Leadership only has a very small number of skills used consistently.

One is always be driving yourself and your teams towards a positive vision of the future outcome. That's number one. That's what we've taught today. And two is lead by asking questions, not giving orders.

This is where doctors have to take their doctor hat off rather than giving orders.

When we're playing a leadership role, lead by asking questions so you can get the most out of your team, harvest their learnings, their experience, come up with a collective vision that is the best possible for everybody involved. So there you go. You'll notice I carry this with me everywhere I go. Vision, strategy, tactics. Write it down on an index card like I have here.

Vision on top, strategy in the middle, tactics on the bottom. And let that guide your leadership structure from here forward.

In the next episode, we're going to talk about the four realms of leadership, the four areas in your human life. Your turn on this mortal coil where you can have a vision and exert leadership to create that vision in the world in your lifetime.

The four different layers of doing that, the realms of leadership. And I think it's going to be interesting because you're going to find that some of these realms are in conflict with others.

I'll see you in that podcast. Until then, keep breathing and have a great rest of your day.