Are you a healthcare leader? You may be and not realize that you are.
It's easy to recognize the CEO, or almost anyone with a "Chief" as the first word in their title, as a leader. But leaders do not reside only in the C-suite.
Whether you lead a team of two or three people in your office or unit, or a health system with 20-30,000 employees, or anywhere in between, your leadership matters. Studies have shown that the higher a leader's rating on leadership assessments, the lower the level of burnout for the people reporting directly to them.
Healthcare is the most difficult industry to manage, because it is far more complex than almost any other. It's not only the clinicians that are burning out, healthcare leaders are as well.
Faced with the multiple challenges of significant staffing shortages, negative operating margins, increasing supply and labor costs, and an increasingly disengaged workforce, leaders themselves are burning out.
Why We Started Organizational Wellbeing Solutions (OWS)
As experienced healthcare leaders with wide-ranging combined experience, Bruce Cummings, MPH, LFACHE and I recognize the unique challenges healthcare leaders face every day, and the burnout they experience as a result.
We also see a lot of effort going into helping reduce clinician burnout with support for wellbeing and resilience activities and efforts to improve practice efficiency, redesigning clinical workflows to get rid of the "stupid stuff" that overloads clinicians' time with administrivia.
We don't see as much attention paid to the relationship between leadership and burnout. The curious thing is, is that leaders who make a concerted effort to reduce burnout for their teams, can experience less burnout themselves.
Maslach and Leiter identified 3 manifestations of burnout (exhaustion, cynicism, and low self-efficacy) and 6 drivers of burnout (work overload, lack of control, insufficient reward, breakdown of community, absence of fairness, and values conflict.)
They also identified connections between the drivers and manifestations.
Work overload drives exhaustion. No surprise there. And that's all that most people think that burnout is, "I'm overloaded, I'm exhausted."
The other five drivers (control, reward, community, fairness, and values) drive cynicism. These also are core aspects of leadership. Leading in a way that increases the impact of these drivers, exacerbates cynicism. Leading in a way that reduces these drivers, leads to empowerment, alignment, and engagement.
Your Partners in "Beating Burnout and Building the Bottom Line"
At OWS we focus on helping healthcare leaders change mindset, behaviors, management processes, and organizational structures to help you improve your performance and thereby reduce burnout for your team and for yourself.
If you'd like to learn more about how we do this, take a look at our Organizational Well Being Solutions website and/or send me an email. We're happy to set up an introductory call to better understand your unique challenges and see if we can help.
Thank you for what you do, whether you take care of patients or take care of those who do.