Course 3 – Taking Control of Leadership; You Can Lead On Your Terms with Solve, Succeed, and Celebrate

Who should enroll in this program?

• You should enroll in this program if you are a physician early in your academic career and want to establish a strong foundation for professional and personal leadership success.
• You should enroll in this program if you are a new physician leader and want to poise yourself for a long, successful tenure.
• You should enroll in this program if you are a physician leader moving to or already located in a new institution and want to establish a long, successful tenure.
• You should enroll in this program if you are a physician leader tasked with making significant changes that are likely to be resisted, and you want to poise yourself for a successful transition and a long, successful tenure.
• You should enroll in this program if you are a physician leader who has been informed that you are struggling in your role, despite your best efforts and good intentions, and wants to improve.
• You should enroll in this program if you are a physician leader who feels overwhelmed in your current role and wants to take better control of the situation so that you can feel more comfortable in the role.
• You should enroll in this program if you are a physician leader who brings work stress home to your family and wants to feel more comfortable setting clear work-home boundaries.
• You should enroll in this program to learn from a fellow academic physician who survived and thrived in a 30-year academic career, earned 20 years of NIH funding, held significant leadership positions, learned from and recovered from mistakes, and achieved considerable success.
• You should enroll in this program to expand your current community of academic physician leaders who share everyday experiences, concerns, challenges, and goals with you.

LEADERSHIP IN ACADEMIC MEDICINE

Leadership is one of the most rewarding aspects of a career in academic medicine. I am grateful for the leadership positions that I have held despite the occasional heartache. These leadership positions provided me with unique opportunities to make a positive impact on many people throughout the layers of the academic institutions I served. These leadership positions stretched my capabilities and helped me develop my self-awareness. I believe I grew significantly with each leadership position.

Growth occurs in these leadership positions due to a call to lead across multiple domains, including clinical care, groundbreaking research, medical education, community service, and complex administration. Moreover, these leadership positions must thrive in the complex organizational structure of academic medicine, which involves diverse and often conflicting stakeholders and evolving external pressures.

Unfortunately, changes over the last thirty years have progressively made being a physician leader more difficult. This is due to a combination of external financial pressures, changes in societal attitudes, and the growing influence of non-physicians in medical matters. Consequently, the physician leader is being asked to implement and manage many of the following.

• Asking physicians and other faculty to be more productive in the clinical arena despite progressively fewer resources to support their efforts.
• Asking physicians and other faculty to be more productive in the research arena despite progressively fewer resources to support their efforts. Even more difficult is deciding which physicians and other faculty are to be funded and which are to lose support for their scholarship.
• Implementing changes due to external forces that, while necessary for sustainability, require significant changes to long-standing traditions or cultural norms that your physicians/faculty perceive as comfortable standards. Oh yes, and they blame you.
• Implementing changes to long-standing traditions or cultural norms for which you have been hired into a new institution, but must figure out how to make the change as the ‘new person’.
• Managing competing demands from the hospital system/CEO, the medical school/dean/department chair that place you in no-win situations with either the upper administration or the physicians/faculty that you lead.
• Managing finances as a priority, as opposed to managing the provision of high-value medical care, as we were trained to do.
• Managing morale in an atmosphere of Increased corporatization of healthcare with commensurate decreased humanistic experiences.

Traditional medical training effectively equips physicians with exceptional clinical skills, but often falls short in providing in-depth formal leadership training. This training is frequently limited to a few brief HR sessions, usually involving an externally purchased ‘culture’ from a third-party vendor.

The result is that when thrust to the forefront of leadership, physician leaders often feel underdeveloped, unprepared, and overwhelmed.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Our Physician Career Solution Institute program, “Taking Control of Leadership; You Can Lead On Your Terms with Solve, Succeed, and Celebrate,, Growth happens in these leadership positions because of a call to lead across multiple domains, including clinical care, groundbreaking research, medical education, community service, and complex administration.

Our leadership program is anchored on the overarching theme of ‘Solve, Succeed, Celebrate The Solve Element, ‘ which focuses upon diagnostic and strategic aspects of leadership, taking advantage of the natural strengths of most physician leaders. The Succeed element emphasizes the execution and interpersonal dimensions of leadership. This element involves translating solutions into action, achieving individual and team goals, leading diverse teams effectively, demonstrating key leadership qualities such as compassion and resilience, and navigating organizational dynamics to achieve desired outcomes by inspiring, motivating, and empowering others. The Celebrate element underscores the importance of recognition, reinforcement, and cultural stewardship in leadership. It involves reinforcing core values through actions and fostering a supportive culture where achievements are recognized and valued.

We have five principles that guide the design and delivery of the Physician Career Solution Institute’s program. These principles maximize the impact and applicability for busy academic physicians.

Holistic Integration: Leadership is not a siloed skill set. This principle emphasizes connecting personal attributes (e.g., values, strengths, operating style) with observable leadership behaviors. Learning will bridge the gap between self-understanding and effective action within the system.

Agency and Intentionality: The program aims to empower participants and foster a sense of agency – the capacity to act purposefully and make proactive, conscious choices about their leadership approach. We encourage intentionality.

Contextual Relevance: All content, discussions, and group exercises are specifically tailored to the unique environment of academic medicine.

Actionability and Practicality: The program prioritizes skills, tools, and approaches that participants can apply immediately to their daily work.

Engagement: The program incorporates interactive methods, reflective exercises, community forums, and breakout sessions to reap the benefits of peer learning and mentoring and recognize the value of active learning.

Indeed, one of the opportunities inherent in our program is the chance to join and learn from a community of fellow physicians and academic medical center members who share similar experiences, concerns, challenges, and goals. We strongly encourage engagement in this aspect of the program to get the most out of your experience.

These principles are woven into the fabric of each class, ensuring that the program is truly transformative for participating physician leaders, not just informative.

Our program is divided into five modules.

Module 1 is “Foundations of Self-Leadership” (Classes 1-3). This module focuses on building self-awareness as the bedrock of effective leadership. Self-awareness forms the essential foundation upon which all effective leadership is built. Before one can lead others or navigate complex organizational systems, a deep understanding of one’s internal landscape—values, strengths, weaknesses, and preferred ways of working—is crucial. This module guides participants through a structured exploration of these foundational elements explicitly tailored to the context of academic medicine.

Class 1: Discovering Your Core Values as an Academic Physician. Understanding your core values — those fundamental beliefs and guiding principles that dictate what is truly important to you — is the starting point for authentic and fulfilling leadership. Conflicts often arise in academic medicine – the pull between clinical productivity and research time, institutional demands versus personal well-being, or resource allocation dilemmas – and a strong internal values framework helps leaders navigate these tensions with integrity and purpose.

Class 2: Mapping Your Leadership Landscape: Strengths and Weaknesses. Strategic leadership development begins with an honest assessment of one’s current strengths and a plan for leveraging them. The assessment can also prompt consideration of external opportunities, such as new research funding streams, collaborative possibilities, and new career paths, as well as potential vulnerabilities and areas for development.

Class 3: Understanding Your Optimal Operating Style: Individuals possess distinct preferences in how they approach work, process information, make decisions, and interact with others. Recognizing one’s own “operating style” – and understanding the styles of others – allows leaders to leverage their natural tendencies, communicate more effectively, build stronger teams, and adapt their approach for greater impact in diverse situations.

Module 2 is “Learning from Leaders” (Classes 4-6). This module focuses on expanding perspectives by examining examples of diverse leadership styles and the role of compassion. This module builds on the self-awareness developed in the last module and broadens the lens to examine leadership in action. By studying the experiences, strategies, and impacts of diverse leaders – born within the specific context of academic medicine and across broader history – participants can glean valuable lessons, identify relatable role models, and expand their repertoire of leadership approaches. This model also delves into compassion, an increasingly recognized cornerstone of effective and sustainable leadership, particularly in caregiving.

Class 4: Illuminating Paths: Leadership Lessons from Academic Medicine: Studying the careers of influential figures within academic medicine provides highly relevant models for physician leaders. These examples illustrate the diverse pathways leadership can take within this unique environment, highlighting common challenges, successful strategies, and the potential for significant impact across clinical care, research, education, and policy/

Class 5: Timeless Wisdom: Leadership Lessons from History: Stepping outside the immediate field of medicine to examine influential leaders from different historical periods and cultures provides a broader perspective on enduring leadership principles. These figures faced universal challenges – crisis, change, conflict, societal transformation – and their strategies offer timeless wisdom applicable to leadership in any complex setting, including academic medicine.²⁴ This comparative lens helps distill fundamental leadership qualities and approaches.

Class 6: The Compassionate Leaders – Impact and Practice Compassion is a vital leadership competency in fields that focus on healing and human well-being. Compassionate leadership fosters trust, psychological safety, and mutual support, crucial for mitigating burnout, enhancing team performance, and ultimately improving patient care and research outcomes. This class explores the nature of compassionate leadership, its tangible benefits, and practical ways to cultivate it.

Module 3 is “Navigating Organizations and Change” (Classes 7-10). The focus of this module is understanding the environment of the academic medical center and developing skills to lead change and transitions. Effective leadership extends beyond self-awareness. Effective leadership requires the ability to understand organizational systems within which one operates. This is particularly true for the intricate ecosystems within academic medical centers, with their unique structures, matrices, and dynamics. This module equips physician leaders with approaches to understand how academic medical centers function and provides practical strategies for managing personal transitions and leading organizational changes.

Class 7: Decoding the Academic Medical Center: How Organizations Work: Physician leaders must move beyond their specific clinical, research, and/or education roles to understand the broader organizational landscape to lead effectively within an academic medical center. Academic medical centers are notoriously complex, characterized by multiple competing missions, diverse stakeholder groups with widely different agendas, and matrixed governance structures. Applying concepts from organizational theory provides valuable lenses through which to analyze these complexities, understand power dynamics, identify cultural influences, and ultimately navigate the system more strategically.

Class 8: Mastering Transitions: Entering New Roles and Organizations:  Stepping into a new leadership role or joining a different AMC presents significant challenges and new opportunities beyond technical or clinical expertise. Successfully navigating these transitions requires a deliberate approach focused on rapidly learning the new context, building key relationships, establishing credibility, and setting a clear direction within the complex AMC environment identified in Class 7.

Class 9: Planting the Seeds of Change: Initiating Transformation: Academic medical centers resist change, even mutually agreed upon necessary change. It’s always the other division that needs to change. Successfully initiating change – whether a new clinical protocol, a revised curriculum, a different research strategy, or an administrative restructuring – requires more than just a good idea. Successful change demands careful planning, persuasive communication, and strategic engagement of stakeholders to overcome inertia, address concerns, and build momentum within the complex AMC environment. Successful change requires leadership and institutional investment.

Class 10: Leading Through Change – Implementation and Sustainability: Initiating change is only the beginning and is the easiest part. Successfully implementing change and ensuring it becomes embedded in the organization’s culture requires a sustained investment and a commitment from leadership. Successfully implementing change requires navigating inevitable obstacles, maintaining momentum, reinforcing new behaviors, and ultimately anchoring the changes within the culture and systems. Ultimately, leadership must embody the change. Successful change is characterized by leadership changing first.

Module 4 is “Expanding Leadership Capabilities” (Classes 11-14). This module deepens the participants’ understanding of leadership styles, team management, and resilience. Participants will explore various leadership models to expand their behavioral repertoire, identify the core characteristics of effective physician leaders, learn strategies for cultivating high-performing teams, and develop personal and team resilience in the face of adversity.

Class 11: Diversifying Your Leadership Toolkit – Exploring Models: Leadership is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. Different situations, challenges, and follower needs call for different leadership approaches. Understanding various established leadership models gives physician leaders a broader toolkit of strategies and behaviors, enabling them to diagnose situations more effectively and adapt their style for optimal impact.

Class 12: Characteristics of Effective Physician Leaders: Effective leadership is characterized by a cadre of personal attributes and competencies. This class aims to identify a constellation of characteristics consistently associated with effective leadership in the demanding context of academic medicine by synthesizing insights from studied models, examples of successful leaders, and the foundational work on self-awareness. The goal is to help participants crystallize their definition of leadership success and identify strengths to leverage and areas for personal development.

Class 13: Cultivating Your Team – Knowing and Developing Direct Reports: A leader’s success is inextricably linked to their team’s success. In academic medicine, where leaders guide trainees, junior faculty, research staff, and clinical teams, investing time in understanding and developing each individual is critical. Effective leaders move beyond simply assigning tasks to actively cultivating talent, aligning individual motivations with team goals, and fostering an environment where people can thrive. Indeed, the higher the position, the greater the responsibility for supporting and sponsoring the careers of those who report directly to you.

Class 14: Thriving Through Adversity – Building Personal and Team Resilience: The path of an academic physician leader is inherently challenging, marked by high stakes, intense pressure, and frequent setbacks. Clinical outcomes are not always positive, research funding is competitive, educational challenges arise, community service is not supported, and administrative demands can be overwhelming. Building resilience – the capacity to bounce back from adversity, adapt effectively to challenges, and maintain well-being under pressure – is therefore not a luxury but a necessity for sustainable leadership and preventing burnout, both for the leaders and their teams.

Module 5 is “–Synthesis and Celebration” (Class 15). This module focuses on integrating all program concepts and committing to ongoing leadership development. This final module and class are the capstone experience, combining the diverse concepts and skills explored throughout the program. It provides a structured opportunity for participants to synthesize their learning, explicitly connect it to the program’s core themes of ‘Solve, Succeed, Celebrate’, reflect on the guiding principles, and create a personalized action plan for their continued leadership journey.

These classes in our program take place weekly, with adjustments made for holidays and traditional vacation times, such as Spring break (please see the site calendar). We recommend attending the classes in person, but each class will be recorded for convenience. Benefits of live sessions include being able to ask questions in the moment and participating in community-building breakout sessions. Watching a recorded class will count for attendance. Each class lasts approximately 60-90 minutes.

Your tuition allows you to attend live classes over 12 months and a 45-minute individual career counseling and/or coaching session with Dr. Lane. You also have access to our membership-only blog, which includes reviews of relevant evidence-based work on physician burnout and well-being, book reviews, and commentaries on topics ranging from health politics to compassionate leadership.

Over the 12 months from the date of your first course, you can attend any live session that is convenient for you from this program, and you can repeat any session that you find helpful. When you have finished attending the 15 classes, either live or virtually, you will need to submit a homework assignment that will be detailed and discussed in class. The ‘homework’ assignment aims to prepare you for further success by emphasizing key processes from the program. Upon completing the homework assignment, you will have earned a certificate worthy of framing from the Physician Career Solution Institute.