Everyday Leadership: A Combined Resident and Faculty Workshop

Abstract

Historically, physicians have always been viewed as leaders in the healthcare field. Whether they embrace this role, physicians often find themselves in a leadership role, from the clinical setting to an institutional setting. In most cases, this leadership role is taken on without prior training on even the most basic concepts required for effective leadership. We created a combined leadership workshop for both faculty members and residents in training. The topics included an introduction to leadership styles, emotional intelligence, and negotiation skills. The leadership workshop was conducted as an interactive training session for faculty and resident physicians and was embedded during routinely scheduled teaching time for residents. We present survey data from two annual workshops, demonstrating a clear improvement in participants' perceived understanding of leadership skills in the areas of leadership style, emotional intelligence, and negotiation skills. We have found that fairly simple measures may be taken to embed this training into the busy schedules of medical faculty and residents in training and that tapping into local expertise was an effective and efficient approach to this. We believe the results from our experience can help inform other programs about practical approaches to teaching leadership skills.