Protecting the Front Line When You Are Not the Boss

These questions work like magic because they force administrators to think about the human cost of their decisions without being confrontational.

Simple, open ended question that interrupt the usual rush to maximize profits and remind everyone to think about the people implications of every decision.

In this blog post, I'll show you two power questions that can safeguard the health and well-being of your colleagues in the front lines—especially if you are often the only doctor in the room in senior leadership meetings.

When you became a leader, I know you didn’t go over to the dark side. You’re not Darth Vader. These questions confirm your position as a guardian and protector of the front-line doctors and nurses every time you use them.

Add them to your wellness leadership toolkit and get ready to use them early and often.

A Collision Course Between Policy and Reality

In this post, I will reveal to you an impending collision of

~~ a chronic problem in the American health care system
~~ and a current piece of legislation in front of Congress

that could destroy local hospital access for 56 million people in the USA in a matter of months.

This is a long-term weakness of the US healthcare system and a short-term budgetary philosophy that could end up in disaster. Let me show you where these two trends intersect and what might happen if they do. Check it out.

Direct Primary Care (Concierge) Practice Opportunity in Williston Vermont

Join a Practice Where You Practice Medicine, Not Paperwork.
by Dr. Umair Malik, CEO and Founder

Fear of Failure Holds Us All Back Naturally and Automatically

We are hardwired to be creatures of habit. Our reticular activating system is always scanning the horizon looking for danger. This creates the bubble of safety we call our comfort zone.

As doctors, we have a number of comfort zones. Your personal comfort zone when you're away from work is one. At work, you have a comfort zone inside the boundaries of your specialty - the things you're comfortable doing with patients and the things you aren't (many of which are due to previous bad outcomes).

In order to keep us safe, we have a cognitive bias against doing anything new. We stay inside the protective walls of our personal comfort zone at work and at home.

The boundary guard of our comfort zone is fear of failure.

If we do something new it might not work out the way we planned.

We've learned to understand that as FAILURE, and avoid it at all costs

At the same time, all of us are constantly reaching for new goals and learning new skills. Check that ... All of us aspire to reach new goals and learn new skills.

Fear of failure can bring any outside-the-comfort-zone excursion to a screeching halt.

Things might not work out the way we planned. It's risky. I haven't got time for that. So ... we default to just getting busy again.

And as a doctor, you can always find something to get busy with. The Whirlwind is complicit in reinforcing the walls of our comfort zone.

In this post, you'll discover a way to redefine failure, to eliminate it completely from your vocabulary and your life experience at work and at home. It's a very simple mental exercise for scientists like you and me.

You see ... anytime you do something new, it's just another experiment - like the ones we did as undergrads. Let me show you how this mind flip works so you can stretch your boundaries, learn new skills, reach new goals and enjoy the ride.

Check it out.

The Surprising Power of One Simple Weekly Practice

• It increases your power and influence and effectiveness as a leader.
• Increases your team's engagement and enthusiasm for your shared work
• It's just one thing that you do once a week, takes about 10 minutes
• And it's been research proven to make a massive difference in both your experience as a leader and your team's experience of your leadership.

The Multitasking Myth - And Why It’s Makes Everything Worse

Quick question: do you think you're pretty good at multitasking?

You can do two or three things at once? In this post, you'll discover why that's simply not true.

Multitasking is not possible at the level of neurophysiology. "I can do two things at once" is an illusion with massive downside.

Any extra task you add to the one you're doing right now makes you stupid - it cuts the quality of your performance in half.

Let me show you what to do instead.

Give up multitasking.

Use the Pearl Necklace Technique to maximize your productivity and actually improve the quality of your work.

Check it out.

How to Build a High-Performance Team: Stop Answering Every Question

The Counterintuitive Leadership Skill That Changes Everything

In this post, you will discover a little-known and slightly controversial leadership skill set that goes like this:

• Do not answer every single question your team members bring to you
  
  
• AND do not say yes to all of their requests for your help

Let me show you how to avoid the trap of making your team dependent upon you - by not answering all the questions they bring to you. It'll free up your day. It'll help you be more effective. It'll help increase the initiative and capabilities of your team overnight, all of you will get home sooner without working harder when you pick up this habit—and it's totally against typical doctor programming.

Check it out.

The Challenge of Giving Feedback to Leadership

In this post, you'll discover a crucial skill set for speaking up the chain of command when you're upset by a bad leadership decision.

Your organization has made a decision you don't understand, maybe implemented something that doesn't make sense, and you've had to step in and take actions to save the day. How do you talk to your boss in a way that lets you say what needs to be said and their knickers not get in a twist? Check it out.

Let me show you how to speak to your boss in a way that doesn't challenge their ego, that gets the two of you on the same page, and allows you to give them the feedback they need because they just made a decision or took an action that has harmed the front line. You're closer to the front line than they are. You know this didn't make sense and was implemented incorrectly, and you want to give that feedback in a way that actually changes things for the better.

Here's one way to do it that works almost every time.

Otherwise

- Jane Kenyon

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

The Four Ways to Say Thank You—and the One That Doubles Your Impact

As a physician leader, you already know that gratitude is critical to your team's culture, camaraderie, and performance. But did you know there are four different ways to say thank you, and if you choose the right one, your thank you can have double the impact on your team's engagement and productivity?

In this post, I’ll walk you through all four thank you methods—and reveal the one that is a true leadership superpower. Ready? Let’s get started.