Leadership Strategies: Achieving Personal and Professional Success.

Physicians and allied health staff in healthcare are finding themselves in situations characterized by uncertainty, chaos, and ambiguity, with high levels of burnout. A major influence is an aging U.S. population, resulting in increasing cost and reimbursement pressures. Medical group practices need leaders who have the capability to thrive in this environment. This article presents an integrated leadership model offering strategies and insights gained from keeping a journal for 40 years. Strategies to be shared include leading self through learning, leading others by developing relationships, leading organizations by achieving excellence, and achieving work-life integration and synergy.

Speed mentoring: an innovative method to facilitate mentoring relationships.

BACKGROUND: Junior faculty members have difficulty in identifying mentors. Speed dating permits people to efficiently try out interpersonal relationships. AIM: Evaluate a "speed mentoring" event to help junior faculty answer questions and initiate mentoring relationships. METHODS: This single-group pre-post study involved junior (mentee) and senior (mentor) faculty members at an academic medical center. During the event, each mentee spent 10 min talking with each mentor in rotation. RESULTS: Seven mentees and six mentors participated. All participants felt that time was well spent (mentees, mean [SD] = 6.3 [0.8] on a seven-point Likert scale [7 = strongly agree]; mentors, 5.7 [1.4]). Topics discussed included mentoring relationships, getting started in research, and time management. CONCLUSIONS: Participants perceived benefits from this low-cost, brief intervention to facilitate mentoring relationships.

Key financial indicators and ratios: How to use them for success in your practice.

Accounting and finance are not typically a core educational offering in medical education. However, for physician leaders and leaders-in-grooming, it is prudent to be familiar with key financial indicators and ratios. The purpose of this review article is to provide fundamental information for emerging radiology physician leaders by describing important financial indicators and ratios, how they are defined and calculated, and, most importantly, how they can be interpreted and utilized for improving practice performance. SUMMARY SENTENCE: Understanding and implementing key financial ratios and indicators is important to maintain and improve financial performance in radiology practices.

Leadership strategies in healthcare.

Healthcare is one of the largest and most important industries in the United States because it affects every individual in the nation. Numerous parties are stakeholders in healthcare, which contributes to the complexity of change efforts. Physicians and administrators play a significant role by providing direct care and influencing other decisions that impact the delivery of patient care. Success in the healthcare industry is influenced by numerous factors, some of which are controllable and others that are not. Understanding leadership and change management will be increasingly important to overcome resistance to change and to improve relationships, the core of leadership in an environment that will become more challenging. In what follows, different approaches to understanding leadership and change management are presented along with other leadership strategies to enhance the effectiveness of leaders. Raising leader awareness regarding transformational leadership behaviors and developing strategies to increase the use of these behaviors may be helpful to enhance organizational performance.

The Importance of a Radiologist-Administrator Partnership to Future Health Care.

Successful physician and administrator leader partnerships are a key differentiator in today's volatile, unpredictable, ever-changing health care landscape. Whether they are leading a division, a department, or an organization, intentional and mindful physician-administrator partnerships affect success from the micro individual level to the macro organizational level. Mayo Clinic's physician and administrative leaders are leveraging a long-held tradition of partnership by elevating their own competence as effective partners to ensure organizational sustainability. Specifically, physician and administrator leaders in the department of radiology have positioned collaboration at the foundation of their leadership practice, surrounded by the institutional values of respect, excellence, stewardship, and teamwork. From this framework, team leaders are better equipped and in a more stable position to prepare themselves and their colleagues for the very complex and unknown future.

Principles to promote physician satisfaction and work-life balance.

Substantial evidence suggests that difficulty balancing their personal and professional life is a major contributor to physician distress. Limited evidence suggests that the mission and policies of health care organizations may relate to physician satisfaction. In this article, we describe principles to promote professional satisfaction and work-life integration developed by the Mayo Clinic department of medicine. These principles can be used to measure and align policies. It is hoped they will serve as a model that can be used by other health care organizations.

Improving Efficiency Using Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing Methodology.

PURPOSE: The aim of this study was to increase efficiency in MR enterography using a time-driven activity-based costing methodology. METHODS: In February 2015, a multidisciplinary team was formed to identify the personnel, equipment, space, and supply costs of providing outpatient MR enterography. The team mapped the current state, completed observations, performed timings, and calculated costs associated with each element of the process. The team used Pareto charts to understand the highest cost and most time-consuming activities, brainstormed opportunities, and assessed impact. Plan-do-study-act cycles were developed to test the changes, and run charts were used to monitor progress. The process changes consisted of revising the workflow associated with the preparation and administration of glucagon, with completed implementation in November 2015. RESULTS: The time-driven activity-based costing methodology allowed the radiology department to develop a process to more accurately identify the costs of providing MR enterography. The primary process modification was reassigning responsibility for the administration of glucagon from nurses to technologists. After implementation, the improvements demonstrated success by reducing non-value-added steps and cost by 13%, staff time by 16%, and patient process time by 17%. The saved process time was used to augment existing examination time slots to more accurately accommodate the entire enterographic examination. Anecdotal comments were captured to validate improved staff satisfaction within the multidisciplinary team. CONCLUSIONS: This process provided a successful outcome to address daily workflow frustrations that could not previously be improved. A multidisciplinary team was necessary to achieve success, in addition to the use of a structured problem-solving approach.

Impact of organizational leadership on physician burnout and satisfaction.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the impact of organizational leadership on the professional satisfaction and burnout of individual physicians working for a large health care organization. PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS: We surveyed physicians and scientists working for a large health care organization in October 2013. Validated tools were used to assess burnout. Physicians also rated the leadership qualities of their immediate supervisor in 12 specific dimensions on a 5-point Likert scale. All supervisors were themselves physicians/scientists. A composite leadership score was calculated by summing scores for the 12 individual items (range, 12-60; higher scores indicate more effective leadership). RESULTS: Of the 3896 physicians surveyed, 2813 (72.2%) responded. Supervisor scores in each of the 12 leadership dimensions and composite leadership score strongly correlated with the burnout and satisfaction scores of individual physicians (all P<.001). On multivariate analysis adjusting for age, sex, duration of employment at Mayo Clinic, and specialty, each 1-point increase in composite leadership score was associated with a 3.3% decrease in the likelihood of burnout (P<.001) and a 9.0% increase in the likelihood of satisfaction (P<.001) of the physicians supervised. The mean composite leadership rating of each division/department chair (n=128) also correlated with the prevalence of burnout (correlation=-0.330; r(2)=0.11; P<.001) and satisfaction (correlation=0.684; r(2)=0.47; P<.001) at the division/department level. CONCLUSION: The leadership qualities of physician supervisors appear to impact the well-being and satisfaction of individual physicians working in health care organizations. These findings have important implications for the selection and training of physician leaders and provide new insights into organizational factors that affect physician well-being.

Preparing psychiatric residents for the "real world": a practice management curriculum.

OBJECTIVE: The authors describe a course designed for residents to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to collaborate and successfully compete in today's complex health care environment and to achieve competency in systems-based practice. METHODS: Postgraduation surveys demonstrated a need for improvement in preparing residents for practice management issues. The authors outline a 32-week practice management curriculum for postgraduate-year 3 (PGY 3) psychiatric residents. RESULTS: The course was rated highly by residents in terms of topics covered, faculty involvement, and overall expectations. The project assignments completed by the residents were effective in creating objective change in the resident outpatient practice. CONCLUSION: Practice management is an essential part of residency training and can be successfully integrated into the residents' clinical practice experience. Future steps include assessment of the graduates at 1 and 5 years postgraduation to evaluate the long-term efficacy of the course.

How perceived physician leadership behavior affects physician satisfaction.

OBJECTIVE: To determine whether faculty members at an academic medical facility perceive their physician leaders as exhibiting transformational leadership behavior and whether they are most satisfied with leaders perceived to be most frequently exhibiting this behavior. PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS: The study was conducted within the Department of Medicine at Mayo Clinic's site in Rochester, MN, from December 1, 2005, through March 21, 2006. A total of 314 physicians within the Department of Medicine were asked to complete a Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) consisting of 22 questions regarding their primary physician leader (ie, division or department chair). The MLQ asked how frequently the physician leader exhibited specific behavior comprising 5 transformational leadership attributes (idealized attributes, idealized behavior, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individual consideration) and included 2 questions regarding satisfaction with that leader. RESULTS: Leaders varied in how frequently their faculty perceived that they exhibited each behavior. Leaders were shown to exhibit the attributes "fairly often," but not "frequently if not always." Each of the leadership attributes highly correlated with each of the 2 satisfaction measures. However, the attributes most strongly correlated with satisfaction were among the least often displayed. CONCLUSION: Physicians' satisfaction with their leaders is closely associated with the frequency with which leaders are perceived as exhibiting specific transformational leadership behavior. These results point to 5 specific behaviors that might be targeted to enhance both leadership skills and faculty members' satisfaction with their leaders.