Important Leadership Qualities in Healthcare

With new technology and legislation, healthcare leaders face a daunting task: keeping patients safe and physician and employees satisfied -- while simultaneously battling uncertain mandates of healthcare reform. These factors are placing never-before-seen demands on the leaders in healthcare.

Here is a list of important leadership qualities in healthcare

Tech Savvy

Technological advancements have completely transformed healthcare. Both medical procedures and communication tools will continue to improve steadily. Nevertheless, hospitals are behind the times in adopting certain technologies. The cause may stem from the resistance to change, lack of knowing there is a solution, or the enormous time and economic investments required. Nevertheless, most facilities aren’t fully utilizing the advancements that can make their facilities more competitive. In order for 21st-century healthcare leaders to be successful, they must embrace new technology.

Strong Communication Skills

Today’s dynamic healthcare landscape relies on highly educated and motivated leaders that have strong managerial expertise. One way to determine the success of leaders is is to look at how well they communicate with colleagues throughout the hospital. Strong communication skills, including listening and nonverbal communication, give leaders the ability to develop personal relationships with kindness and compassion.  This study found some of the best ways to improve communication are to listen to patients carefully, conduct medical interviews with patients and always maintain eye contact.

Time Management

A good leader should know when to delegate repetitive tasks that take up more time than they should -- like supporting the hospital to embrace new technology, such as automated physician on-call schedules. In hospitals throughout the country, medical services professionals and their physician colleagues are still creating their on-call schedules by hand. It is not uncommon for it to take 15-20 hours to draft just one schedule. Performing tasks manually in the hectic hospital environment can jeopardize the accuracy and timeliness of updates to the call schedule.

What’s more, the many workflow interruptions that MSP’s face throughout the day: incoming calls, questions from physicians, administrators, and other staff, and repeated requests for physician contact information. All of this creates stress by making it difficult to complete other critical tasks on time. With our automated on-call scheduling system, time is spent more effectively. This allows hospitals to focus on the real task at hand -- patient care.  

Focus

Focus is one of the most important leadership qualities in healthcare. This is because, to successfully lead a team, leaders must possess an extraordinary amount of focus. Leaders must be able to retain clear minds and focus on the things that matter, even when they are pulled in numerous directions simultaneously. Harvard Business Review found that mindfulness, or meditation, is extremely beneficial in managing stress, maintaining strategic focus, enhancing cognitive performance, promoting emotional intelligence and improving interpersonal relationships.  

Integrity

A study found that employees and executives agree that integrity is the most important quality in a corporate leader. Integrity is a concept of consistency of actions, values, methods, measures, and outcomes. A leader with such a value never veer from their inner values, making them trustworthy. 

Ultimately, the key leadership qualities in healthcare are tech savviness, strong communication skills, time management, focus, and integrity. These qualities appeal to tomorrow’s stakeholders. These skills are what is developing the next generation of leaders. After all, they are our best hope to solving some of our greatest challenges in healthcare.

To learn more about MDsycnNET’s on-call scheduling system, request a free demo here or call 888-508-5061!