All physicians are leaders, not just those with designated leadership titles, such as department chief, chief medical officer, or CEO. Leadership – i.e., influencing behavior to achieve a desired result – is foundational to the role of doctor.

But we aren’t routinely trained as leaders. More critically, as brand-new physicians, we aren’t explicitly told we are leaders. Typically, we think a “physician leader” is someone who has been promoted to an …

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An excerpt from All Physicians Lead: Redefining Physician Leadership for Better Patient Outcomes.

I Googled the term “physician leadership” and got 183,000,000 hits in 0.45 seconds. There are seemingly endless courses and programs devoted to developing physician leadership, and there’s no shortage of attention to the topic.

Almost uniformly, however, the books and courses approach the topic from a similar angle. Physician leadership is often viewed as something that occurs when …

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