Curing Physician Management: Why Physician Managers Fail is written for physicians who are in or taking on a management role in healthcare, and for anyone who is managing health care professionals.
The premise of this book is that much can be learned from evaluating the types of personalities that enter physician management, what challenges of management might be unique to healthcare, and what strengths and weaknesses healthcare practitioners carry over into management roles.
There are three basic ingredients to being successful:
- Embracing the philosophy that humility is an essential, and developable, trait. Knowing that we don't know what we don't know, allows one to not only learn, but to include others in the quest to provide better health care.
- Cultivating, embracing, and regularly employing a personal set of principles that are aligned with one's values and with the mission and values of the profession.
- The skills necessary for successful management are not innate, nor are they routinely given to physicians or others as part of their education and training. It is crucial to spend time identifying the skills that are needed and being sure to learn and re-learn these skills while moving through the levels of management and leadership.
By using real-life examples of what can work, and what does not, Curing Physician Management demonstrates what can be done to optimize successful management practices, and what can be learned from management failures.
Aside from simply being a description of positive and negative qualities for managers and leaders, the book looks at specific skills that can be learned and practiced, filling in knowledge and experiential gaps. Linking back to the concept that humility is the first step to learning and improvement, understanding what makes a person a successful clinician may not be what's needed to succeed as a manager and leader and may actually be detrimental unless tempered by self-awareness and by skill development.
