How Healthcare Leaders Can Balance the Art, Science, and Business of Medicine
Sometimes when I’m listening to a leader talk about how overwhelmed she is by a new challenge, how embattled she feels, my brain goes to The Princess Bride. I envision her as the man (or woman) in black confronting Fezzik—a stand-in for payers, regulators, vendors, even members of staff. She says to the behemoth, “You mean, you’ll put down your rock and I’ll put down my sword, and we’ll try to kill each other like civilized people?”
Sometimes, in healthcare, it can feel like we're facing one battle after another, barraged on all sides by demands, requests, disruptions, dire predictions, and pleas.
When Winston Churchill said, “True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information,” I doubt he was thinking of healthcare leadership in the twenty-first century. And yet healthcare leaders live in a vortex of uncertain and conflicting information: A constant flow of sometimes indecipherable legislation and regulation. Seismic shifts in science and technology. The demands to provide the highest quality care at the lowest possible cost. It can breed a battle mentality.
I’m using the war metaphor and The Princess Bride and rhinos claiming their territory to mirror that battle mentality that is too common in our industry—because that is our biggest hurdle to achieving true genius. If we hold on to the belief that the art, the science, and the business of medicine are factions in a healthcare civil war, we’ll never find the powerful solutions we need. Our evaluations will be faulty because our perspective will be limited. How can we effectively evaluate important information if we keep falling back on blame and mistrust and entrenched silos?
In my most recent article, I share three questions for testing your leadership approach for balance. I share insights from Sachin Jain, Warren Berger, Hal Gregersen, Jennifer Perry, Foster Mobley, Matt Brubaker, and more great leadership minds.
The more we work at balance in our decisions and actions, the more we’ll build cultures that support that balance. Those cultures will then influence our decisions and actions, building a more satisfying, more effective healthcare future. This is what the true genius that Churchill described can produce in our industry.
Click here to read more about the three questions you should be asking.
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?Halee Fischer-Wright, who received her M.D. from the University of Colorado, is a nationally recognized physician leader, health care executive, and former business consultant, whose work focuses on innovation and creating cultures of excellence. Dr. Fischer-Wright is president and CEO of Medical Group Management Association (MGMA), the author of Back to Balance: The Art, Science, and Business of Medicine, and the coauthor of Tribal Leadership, a New York Times bestseller. You can learn more about Back to Balance and access free resources at DrHalee.com.