You Don't Need a Title to be a Leader: Practical Leadership Skills for the C-L Psychiatrist

High-quality health care increasingly relies on teams, collaboration, and interdisciplinary work. Physician leadership is essential for optimizing health system performance. This is important for the consultation-liaison psychiatrist who often has both explicit and implicit leadership roles on teams. There are data that leadership development programs can help physicians develop skills in this area. However, many C-L psychiatrists may have difficulty finding time to participate in formal leadership development opportunities, so this course will offer ACLP participants leadership development skills as part of their protected time at the conference. Presenters with share their experience of leadership and cover high-yield topics for formal and informal leadership roles.

Developing Your Identity as a Leader: In order to effectively lead, it is helpful to define who you are as a leader, why you lead, who you want to be as a leader, and how you want to approach the task of leadership. Dr Ratzliff will share models of leadership and lead a series of reflection exercises to help each participant leave with a clear identity as a leader.

Empowering Diverse Leaders: Traditionally, extroverted individuals are more accepted as leaders. Given that we all come from diverse backgrounds and experiences, leaders can contribute in different ways. Knowing your personality type, saboteurs, and strengths can help make a leader more successful. Dr. Toor will discuss different personality types and how to identify saboteurs and transform them into strengths and use these to discuss case scenarios.

Practicing Humility as a Leader: Leaders need to be able to embrace change, uncertainty, and model how to navigate complexity. In C-L psychiatry, the overlap between medical and psychiatric presentations requires us to hold these same characteristics tightly and move a team forward in treating complicated cases. Dr. Erickson will present on the topics of demonstrating humility, pointing out practice variation, and admitting mistakes as a leader of a team. She will run a role-play to explore these themes in common case situations.

Using Workflows to Lead Teams: A critical factor in effective team functioning involves balancing structure with flexibility. Dr. Whitfield will draw from best practices models for managing remote teams to illustrate how clearly defined workflows can engender a containing culture for effective teamwork and will lead a series of structured reflection activities to guide participants in identifying that more structured workflows.

Each of the topics will include both a didactic portion and interactive practice. The presenters will also share a list of personal recommendations for further leadership development.

References:
1. Lee TH. Turning doctors into leaders. Harv Bus Rev. 2010;88(4):50–8.
2. Shore JH. Best Practices in Tele-Teaming: Managing Virtual Teams in the Delivery of Care in Telepsychiatry. Curr Psychiatry Rep. 2019 Jul 8;21(8):77. doi: 10.1007/s11920-019-1052-x. PMID: 31286277.