The Physicians path To Effective Leadership: Humility and Will

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effective physician leadership

Most physicians think that they're effective leaders but there are plenty of clinics that rely more on authority than leadership.

So what do you need to be an effective leader? Personal humility and the will to be a great leader.

Studies shows that CEO humility is positively associated with empowering leadership behaviors. They tend to connect more effectively with both top and middle management, creating a collective empowerment for the organization.

This was the result of the study examining the concept of humility among CEOs in 63 companies from China. A More than 300 top management team members and 600 middle managers were surveyed in the study.

In 2001, the research done by Jim Collins about how a CEO's humility can impact a company has been shown in his book, From Good to Great. Here, Collins shattered the concept of a supposed CEO image: charismatic, authoritative, convincing, and larger-than-life.

Collins described leaders who have both personal humility and intense will to be "Level 5 Leaders".

According to our five-year research study, executives who possess this paradoxical combination of traits are catalysts for the statistically rare event of transforming a good company into a great one.

The other types of leaders, according to Collins, possess skills to transform companies but not sustain the level of excellence. This type is not the only one that can effectively lead a company, but it is essential. An interesting question would be: Can this type of leadership be learned? In an answer, Collins shares his hypothesis about two categories of people: those who don’t have the Level 5 seed within them and those who do.

My best advice, based on the research, is to practice the other good-to-great disciplines that we discovered. Since we found a tight symbiotic relationship between each of the other findings and Level 5, we suspect that conscientiously trying to lead using the other disciplines can help you move in the right direction. There is no guarantee that doing so will turn executives into full-fledged Level 5 leaders, but it gives them a tangible place to begin, especially if they have the seed within.

Read more:

  • https://hbr.org/2005/07/level-5-leadership-the-triumph-of-humility-and-fierce-resolve
  • http://asq.sagepub.com/content/59/1/34