Why Health Care Executives Must Be Intentional About Learning Leadership
There’s a common trend in health care leadership: skilled and competent physicians with impeccable track records and quality credentials become department leaders.
“We take somebody who’s never had any training in leading and say, ‘Go lead a department’—and we expect them to do well,” explains Eric J. McNulty, associate director of the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative (NPLI) at Harvard University. “It is a real conundrum.”
“Competency in your field doesn’t necessarily translate into the capacity to lead,” says Leonard J. Marcus, Ph.D., NPLI’s co-director, who, alongside McNulty, instructs the two-day interactive course Health Care Leadership for Emerging Executives.
Marcus says the course guides health care leaders through the ever-changing landscape of modern-day health care, providing them with a roadmap for intentionally navigating and leading through changes.
The course teaches leadership, negotiation, and conflict resolution—all skills critical to health care leaders—and wraps them into a framework of “meta leadership,” which involves assessing problems, building solutions, and engaging people from a broad perspective.
Health Care Leadership for Emerging Executives is both practical and engaging. It is based on original field research, and participants learn directly from the sources. Much of the work on interest-based negotiation was initially conducted at Harvard.
The course stands out from other health care leadership courses, largely because of McNulty and Marcus, leaders in health care negotiation and conflict resolution with 50 combined years at Harvard. They developed the methodology they teach—their contribution, through the lens of health care, to the overall field of interest-based negotiation. It’s a four-step process called ‘A Walk in the Woods,’ which helps people effectively engage in interest-based negotiations and achieve a “win-win” situation in which their interests are met. It works at every scale.
“Very few people who come through this course have been trained in negotiation. When they think of negotiation or conflict, they think, ‘I’ve got to win,’” says McNulty. “This is a way of going from being adversarial to being more collaborative.”
The method involves:
- Assessing self-interests Figuring out what you want from something and what the person you’re negotiating with wants.
- Comparing interests and building common ground When you compare interests, you inevitably have more in common—a goal of quality outcomes or patient satisfaction, for example—with someone else than you realize.
- Brainstorming new ideas to solve issues allied against the problem rather than allied against each other.
- Identifying aligned interests or ways to solve the problem to benefit both people.
The course also offers a deep dive into mediation, a live role-play session (McNulty and Marcus encourage participants to bring real-life challenges to the course), a look at instinct versus intellect (what happens when you get into panic mode, how you can identify this, get out of this mode, and lead other people out of it), a guide to building cohesive teams, and a good deal about crisis leadership. As Marcus says, “COVID turned every leader into a crisis leader.”
Mostly, it’s an engaging, thoughtful, and intentional deep dive into the essential leadership skills that too many health care professionals often lead without.
McNulty often jokes, reminding those in his courses that if he showed up at a hospital having watched a couple of YouTube videos on heart valve implants, hospital staff wouldn’t allow him to practice medicine. “They’d laugh me out of the room,” he says. The same should go for leadership in health care.
“Incorporating leadership into your professional repertoire is a critically important step,” says Marcus. “We’ll give you the tools to do so intentionally.”
Dr. Leonard J. Marcus and Eric J. McNulty are founding director and associate director of the Program on Healthcare Negotiation and Conflict Resolution at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. They are program co-directors of the Health Care Leadership for Emerging Executives executive education program offered by the Harvard Chan School. They are also co-authors of Renegotiating Healthcare: Resolving Conflict to Build Collaboration.
