Keys to inspired leadership: Making the time for innovation, emotional intelligence, critical thinking and accountability

The right pace for decision-making that leads to the best results for your medical practice isn’t usually the pace that practice administrators keep.

“We come in every day, we’re kind of entrenched in an organization that’s usually into standardization and consistency with patient care,” said Nancy Babbitt, FACMPE, MGMA member, MGMA-ACMPE past board chair, founder and transformationist, V2V Management Solutions, Lewiston, Idaho, during a session at the 2016 MGMA Annual Conference. “So how do we break out of that and do something different?”

The answer, as Babbitt’s co-presenters suggested, is making the time to develop the component skills necessary for what they call inspired leadership.

Debra Wiggs, FACMPE, MGMA member, MGMA past board chair, founder and transformationist, V2V Management Solutions, noted that practice administrators can get caught up thinking about provider and staff burnout, but that it’s equally important to stop and ask, “What about us?”

“Give yourself permission to breathe,” Wiggs said. Just like breathing, practice leaders need to consider adding what you want in and exhaling what needs to be taken out. “In innovation, it’s in finding the space to do something else. So what is it you’re doing day in and day out that doesn’t add value to the organization?”

In terms of what medical practice administrators need to “inhale,” Wiggs recommends focusing on four pillars of inspiration: innovation, emotional intelligence, critical thinking and accountability.

Innovation

Babbitt pointed to George Couros, division principal, innovative teaching and learning, Parkland School Division, Stony Plain, Canada, for one of her favorite definitions of innovative leadership: “the ability to both think and influence others to create new and better ideas to move toward positive results.”

“Studies have shown if you’re an innovative leader, your team will be more productive, more engaged [and] they’ll be able to adapt,” Babbitt said. “What’s going to set your practice apart? What’s going to be your competitive edge?”

Babbitt again pointed to Couros in detailing eight distinct characteristics of an innovator’s mindset: Being empathetic, networked, observant, resilient, reflective, a risk-taker, a problem finder and a creator. Of those characteristics, the risk-taking piece may be the hardest for some practice administrators.

“There is a little downside to being an innovative leader … you’re going to take more risk, you’re going to ask your team to step out there and stick your neck out a little bit and you might have a few more failures,” Babbitt said. “I challenge you, though: Failures are okay.”

That’s also where the ability to be empathetic and the other pieces of the mindset play a large role, Babbitt said. “We have to be resilient and, most importantly, reflective, to understand successes and failures and to learn from them.”

Emotional intelligence

Co-presenter Sarah Holt, PhD, FACMPE, MGMA member, practice executive, Cape Medical Billing Co., Cape Girardeau, Mo., noted that emotional intelligence took time to gain acceptance – as popularized by leadership psychologist Daniel Goldman – but it now is recognized as an important part of what healthcare leaders need to understand.

“Today, nobody disputes the fact that emotional intelligence is important in your work life and can make a huge difference in the leadership opportunities that you are going to have,” Holt said.

Holt said when broken into a progression of four parts – perceiving emotion, facilitating thought, understanding emotion and managing emotions – an individual’s emotional intelligence can almost always be improved.

“There’s only about a third of us who have high enough emotional intelligence that we can pinpoint exactly what we’re feeling … if we can pinpoint it, then we can understand better what caused us to feel that way,” Holt said, “and then we can actually do something about that if we need to. We can confront a situation or we can get over it.”

Holt offered four specific strategies for improving emotional intelligence:

• Seek and accept feedback. Asking for input is important, but equally important is taking to heart whatever knowledge or opinions you gain in your decision-making.
• Understand that what you intend is not necessarily the impact of what occurs. Knowing that there can be a gap between what you say and how others interpret your words is a key part of understanding emotions and facilitating thought from a leadership position.
• Pause, listen and observe other people. “All of our social constructs are taught to us through paying attention to what other people say or what other people do,” Holt said. “That’s how we learn good manners at the table. That’s how we learn to hold doors open for people.”
• Put yourself in somebody else’s shoes. “That helps you develop empathy. … We need to practice it all the time,” Holt said.

Critical thinking

Critical thinking – an objective analysis of an issue to form a judgment – is a “sibling” of emotional intelligence, according to co-presenter Michelle A. Wier, CMPE, MGMA member, founder, president and chief executive officer, V2V Management Solutions, Lewiston, Idaho. And it does not come to all of us naturally. “It is a practiced skill set. It is a very deliberative skill set.”

Wier, who previously worked as an accountant, said that many professionals in healthcare and elsewhere live and breathe analytical thinking – breaking parts of an issue down via data and analysis – and may require a nurturing environment to truly develop critical thinking skills.

“We can become great, inspired leaders by using critical thinking, [but] our organizations cannot become great, inspired organizations unless we make it a safe place for that to occur,” Wier said, noting that innovative leaders need to be able to suspend judgment and not have visceral reactions to unexpected or unsatisfactory developments. She recommends critical thinking skills development to better examine the implications and consequences of decisions, as well as taking the time to re-evaluate things in light of new information. “Identify what you know, not what you assume to know.”

This aspect of the innovative leader’s mindset is often the most challenging for medical practice leaders accustomed to time-sensitive decision-making, Wier said.

“There are going to be those situations where our knee-jerk reaction, our instinct, is to make a quick decision off that evidence based [on what] we’ve experienced over our career and make that snap judgment,” Wier said. “I would challenge you to go back and give yourself that breath… Most of us need to practice this skill because we’re managers. We put out fires every 10 minutes throughout the course of the day. We don’t necessarily feel like we have a ton of time to stop and reflect every time someone flies [into your office].”

So how do you justify being a bit slower and measured in your decision-making with critical thinking? Wier suggests the threat of financial mismanagement is reason enough to slow down. “I don’t necessarily mean the deliberate spending of a dollar,” Wier said. “I mean, we made a snap judgment, we made a quick decision without all the information available … and we spend some unnecessary time and resources among our team ferreting out a right answer.”

Accountability

As Wier outlined, the importance of accountability should be evident in how a medical practice administrator fosters an environment where the other three pillars can develop – but you can’t achieve that level of accountability without making a record of it.

Engaging employees in your innovation and critical thinking work, setting attainable “stretch” goals and incorporating some of the inspired leader traits into job descriptions and performance evaluations all allow a practice leader to create a record of accountability. Once that record is established, it can progress to the point of routine benchmarking.

So, while practice managers often are asked to make quick decisions without first thinking about how to approach an issue, Wier noted that being willing to honestly reconsider a decision is another way to demonstrate strength.

“It starts with us as leaders. We should be thinking about how are we accountable to our team,” Wier said. “How are we accountable to make sure we have an environment that allows for innovation, that allows the ability for high emotional intelligence and true critical thinking? If you can bring those components into your personal skill set [and] into your organization, you will have a rockstar organization.”