Perhaps you’re looking for growth in your career journey. Maybe you have a vision of what the future of healthcare might be, and are looking for avenues to make tangible changes to the industry. Making the transition to leadership or executive roles can be a highly rewarding career move for anyone passionate about making significant impacts and influencing the direction of healthcare.
In recent years, many experienced healthcare professionals have been pursuing DNP leadership programs to cultivate transferable skills needed to transition from direct patient care into executive admin or management roles. However, unlike the usual promotion, advancing and making that pivot to management leadership roles requires intention and strategy, whether in defining what you aim to gain from it or taking a certified course to gain prerequisite leadership experience and credentials.
Shifting the Perspective and Mindset
By now, you have most likely already identified your specialized area, given that this is an expectation for all healthcare professionals early in their careers.
Executive positions, however, require a different lens, knowledge, and outcomes from other healthcare roles. Pursuing this career path can serve as a powerful motivator, giving you the impetus to solve highly domain-specific problems, lead teams, manage risks, and make decisions that can positively affect systems and organizational strategy.
As a professional clinical practitioner who has developed highly valued skills that can be applied to key areas of medicine and health, assuming an executive role means a widening of focus from individual patient care to encompass broader groups. This requires strategic thinking and knowledge about the healthcare landscape.
Identify Your Skills
Many doctors overlook the skills they need to build in order to be a successful practitioner and just focus on clinical knowledge. This is even more pronounced in the executive environment.
As such, it’s fundamental to do some self-reflection on the wide variety of transferable skills you have, which can include, but are not limited to:
- Communication: Common skills for doctors to simplify information for patients, families, and colleagues, which becomes crucial in executive roles when this is applied towards stakeholders and building influence.
- Teamwork: Working effectively and collaboratively towards shared goals is important to achieve both patient care and client outcomes. This is dependent on clear communication, mutual respect, adaptability, and willingness to take responsibility.
- Critical thinking: Skill evaluation, interpretation, and analysis of information is crucial to making informed judgements and decisions, and also requires the ability to ask insightful questions, critically examine potential solutions and approaches for problems through multiple perspectives.
- Leadership and team coordination: You may already have led teams, managed conflict, and coordinated care as an informal leader, showcasing your innate leadership skills.
- Risk management: assessing, diagnosing, mitigating, and communicating risk is essential for clinical practice. It’s also a core capability for many corporate or managerial environments.
- Digital literacy: a fundamental part of 21st-century management.
- Empathy: from supporting patients to clients, having the ability to understand the feelings of another person is essential in any circumstance.
- Cultural competence: the ability to understand, respect, and effectively interact with people coming from a range of backgrounds, beliefs, and experiences.
These are just a few examples within a whole trove of common transferable skills that doctors and many other clinical practitioners possess. In practice, it’s not just recognising what skills you have, but seizing on every opportunity to demonstrate and refine them further.
Be Active in Administrative Decision-Making
A great way to build influence is to start taking on administrative responsibilities in your current role. This can range from leading a meeting or committee to participating in quality initiatives and getting involved in hospital governance.
Doing this will not only build influence in your institution. It will also provide firsthand experience of administrative, managerial, and executive duties, as well as showcase your leadership capacities and potential to attain these roles.
Once you’ve mastered the skills of blending your clinical expertise with administration experience, it becomes easier to articulate your value to others.
Consider Formal Training Opportunities
The best leadership often requires additional skills and training.
Formal leadership education courses, such as the aforementioned DNP leadership program, executive programs, management courses, or even an MBA, can cement a foundation for strategic thinking, organizational behavior, and financial management, which are all part of becoming a successful leader.
They’re also valuable opportunities for professional networking, which can be highly beneficial for continued professional development or even future job opportunities. Use your resources, such as healthcare leaders, too. They are success stories of those who’ve successfully navigated the path from a clinical role to the executive environment, and can provide advice to support your own success.
Be Clear About Your Goals and Stay Plugged with Industry Trends
When stepping up into healthcare leadership, it’s important to have a deep understanding of current industry trends, policies, regulations, and emerging technologies that are advancing the field.
Stay informed by regularly reading healthcare research and literature, as well as attending conferences and engaging in discussions with other healthcare professionals about the future of the industry.
The best healthcare leaders are well-informed. Having specialized knowledge of their industry equips them with the tools needed to make strategic or organizational decisions, and also helps them share their vision for the betterment of healthcare.
