You're aiming to excel in healthcare leadership. What essential competencies should you focus on?

Implementing telehealth solutions can significantly enhance access to care, especially for rural and underserved populations. By offering virtual consultations, remote monitoring, and telemedicine services, healthcare organizations can provide timely and effective care to more patients.

Reflecting on challenges and how to overcome them is a good way to start as an healthcare leader. Understanding trends and latest innovation on healthcare services is essential.

In healthcare leadership, it's essential to communicate effectively with diverse patient populations. Consider a scenario where a community health center trains its staff in cultural competence. By understanding and respecting cultural differences in health beliefs and practices, providers can better tailor treatment plans and health education.

Communication skills is vital for healthcare leaders. Listening skills is required to understand your patients and team members.

I have found that the success of initiatives and strategies are hugely dependent on effective communication and in particular listening to stakeholders. There can be a tendency to rush to launch with exciting new projects, however, being able to listen to your target patient group, front line teams and those who will be impacted by your decisions enables you to adjust and pivot if needed but also to share the reasoning behind the changes being made if necessary. Identifying key stakeholders such as through a Mendelow matrix and engaging early in the process can have a huge impact on implementation. Listening to understand rather than respond to these groups is also key, this is a skill I am still working to master.

It is important to know the right time to make your decisions as healthcare leaders. Such decisions should be taken into consideration by your stakeholders and team members as well.

Ethical decision-making in healthcare leadership often involves balancing patient needs with resource constraints. For instance, imagine a hospital administrator facing a shortage of ventilators during a pandemic. By establishing clear protocols based on medical necessity and patient prognosis, the leader ensures fair allocation of critical resources.

Knowing what is right and ethical, and what harms patients and staff. This forms the basis for decision making. Stick to always what is the right thing to do - this can be conflicting in a commercially driven world, but Do what is right. The rest will take care of itself.

Healthcare services in a commercial setting, is a fine balance between financial sustainability/performance and ethical practice. It is ever so easy to tip towards excessive financial weightage and priority at the expense of doing what is right. All healthcare managers in a commercial company must know this deeply and tread carefully.

As a leader, you need to listen to your team. This includes what is not being said. Furthermore, you need to always lead with empathy, putting yourself in their shoes to create more effective communication. Read up on the EPIC framework for communication.

There are many virtues required to excel in healthcare leadership. However, I’m a firm believer that: “Courage is the most important of all the virtues because, without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.” Dr Maya Angelou. In leadership your personality in great parts determines how you influence the people around you. Along your leadership journey it’s critical to understand exactly who you are, as this will enable you to navigate more effectively with a clear understanding of any leadership gaps. Having courage to integrate and leverage every part of who you are will empower you to excel as a leader more consistently & authentically.