Pitfalls in Radiology Leadership

Abstract

Radiology’s leaders face both external and internal challenges. External challenges include, among others, declining reimbursements, increasing workloads, and personnel shortages. Leaders can successfully meet such challenges only by adapting both themselves and their organizations to succeed in such environments or by modifying their environments to suit their own strengths. Internal challenges include leaders’ habits of perception, judgment, and imagination that limit their organizations’ opportunities for success. Leaders fail not only because they find themselves in untenable situations but also because they approach situations in both ineffective and counterproductive ways. Like runners with a hitch in their stride, leaders need to identify—and to correct—such bad habits if they are to perform at their full potential. This is one of the most important leadership development activities that radiology organizations can offer (1). The purpose of this article is to review eight leadership pitfalls, derived from the social-cognitive theory of Albert Bandura (2), that can seriously hamper a radiology organization’s performance. When such behaviors become habitual, they pose a serious threat to both the leader and the organization. They impair communication among the organization’s members, obscure the members’ vision of the organization’s goals and of their own roles in the pursuit of these goals, and undermine the members’ overall commitment to the organization’s success (3). Leaders who repeatedly fail to escape these pitfalls will find that they have depleted their leadership capital. Colleagues and subordinates will soon determine that the leader does not deserve their trust and respect, and the leader’s authority will be lost. In turn, the organization will suffer, because it has lost the benefits of an effective leader (4). By recognizing and avoiding these pitfalls, leaders can do both themselves and their organizations a big favor.