Increase Your Influence Through Strategic Leadership

Robert Johnson:
A new workshop to help pathologists grow their influence through strategic leadership is on the agenda. When members of the College of American Pathologists meet in Washington, DC later this month, pathologists can learn to amplify their credibility, influence, and authority in a free, immersive executive education workshop planned on April 26th, the first day of the CAP House of Delegates and Pathologists Leadership Summit in the nation’s Capitol. The CAP is partnered with the American College of Healthcare Executives to produce the workshop. It'll run from 9:00 AM until 4:00 PM and offer six CME hours to those who attend. Jim Austin is a faculty consultant for the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and an adjunct assistant professor at Brown University. He'll lead the workshop.

Jim Austin:
Physicians that I've worked with, and my dad was an OBGYN, are incredibly skilled in their content areas. They may be not quite as skilled in bringing others along or working with other groups. And yet, as you know, medicine is changing so rapidly. It's not about, I'm a great fill in the blank subspecialist. It's rather increasingly about how do I work within the broader organization to help not just my subspecialty, but the overall organization. And I think those are going to be the challenges of the future for healthcare leaders.

Robert Johnson:
And your goal is to help members of the CAP work through those issues if they attend this workshop here at the HOD/PLS meeting later this month?

Jim Austin:
Absolutely. And the session, as you know, is all about leadership capabilities for the future. And I'm focusing on three specific areas. Number one, what does it mean to be an influential communicator? How do I build my political skills? How do I build my social capital and having discussions around or even bringing up some of those models that really transcend the for-profit, not-for-profit world. Secondly, how do I create organizational trust? And again, this is not personal trust. It's not you're a leader in this field of your subspecialty, but rather how do I bring others along that don't necessarily report to me, or how do I influence the broader organization? And then finally, how do I execute? Because at the end of the day, strategy is great, and I come from a strategy background. I was head of strategy for one of the large divisions at Baxter Healthcare for a number of years, but it's about what do we actually do? As Ben Franklin said in 1737, well done is better than well said, execute, execute, execute. And you can't execute if all you're doing is driving your team forward. You have execute broadly, horizontally, leading others along.

Robert Johnson:
And you've taught this workshop before? Yes,

Jim Austin:
Many times. And it varies by the group, I should say. It's not a canned approach, a canned speech. I've really enjoyed working with your organization to understand some of their issues more because I want to tailor this for your particular needs. But at the same time, there's some generic issues, generic leadership challenges, while at the same time being aware of some specific areas for pathologists in particular, for example, what will be the impacts of AI? And I think AI, my understanding is AI is already influencing the pathology world. It's influencing radiology, it's influencing dermatology, those fields that depend on interpreting patient data. Now that's an infant step. The challenge will be what will the pathologist's lab of the future look like? And that's what we'd be talking about.

Robert Johnson:
So the curriculum for this event then is taken from previous experiences, but also from your conversations with people at the CAP?

Jim Austin:
Absolutely. And so the CAP has been very generous with their time in helping me understand some of the issues your members or your organization is facing. At the same time, I should say, there are some generic issues. What does it mean to develop organizational trust? Well, this comes from some work by Zach pre-Covid who looked at a hundred plus companies across the developed world, not healthcare specific. But then what I try to do is take something like that and say, how is this relevant for your field? And if you don't share information broadly, if you don't exhibit what they call vulnerable leadership styles, how do you create that strong team going forward? And those will be some of the areas we discuss.

Robert Johnson:
What do you think attendees will learn if they make time to be part of the workshop?

Jim Austin:
I hope it's a number of things, but honestly, I like to say they'll be at least, I hope, half a dozen frameworks or ideas that attendees can take away and immediately utilize. This is not a lecture. This is very much applied very much. But at the same time, I would then recommend you can't go back to your workplace on Monday morning whenever you head back to the pathology lab and execute six different things or 10 different things. That's how groups get into trouble with execution. You have to take that half a dozen ideas and boil it down to one or two. What are the one or two things that you are going to take back to your team and help them operationalize more effectively going forward? So that's point one. Point two, I think so much of these sorts of interchanges are in part around content and in part certainly around what individuals take away.
But just as importantly is the peer relationships you develop. So for example, if I'm coming from a small community hospital and I bump into somebody from fill in the blank, Kaiser Permanente, Mayo, Pilgrim Healthcare, and they're dealing with similar issues to what I'm dealing with, gee, wouldn't it be great a month from now if I could call someone up and say, Hey, I know you've got a few more resources than I may have at this community hospital, but how are you trying to deal with it? And that's how you build a network. Again, Mike teaches leadership at the Wharton School. The most successful senior executives, the most successful senior leaders have the broadest social networks. And it's not because they love Facebook or love being on the internet, it's because they're constantly trying to learn. They're trying to leverage the relationships that they have to help them and their teams move forward. I hope that makes sense, Robert.

Robert Johnson:
It really does, and I appreciate that. Thinking about the amount of time spent in the workshop and your plans to give members who attend actionable takeaways, you say that there'll be enough for them to choose from that they'll have a lot of different opportunities to apply their learning back in their offices, their labs, their communities.

Jim Austin:
Absolutely. And what I try to do on my side is to make it fun and interactive. So for example, some of my exercises, it is one thing if you stand there and you say, oh, it's hard to listen, or, oh, it's hard to set a strategic direction. Well, okay, that's fine to say. How about an exercise where you're actually trying to convince someone and then you quickly realize, wait a minute, maybe I'd like to say to myself, I'm a good listener, but in fact, when I'm in the heat of battle, did I listen first? Did I try to understand before I'm being understood? Or did I try to push my point of view? The triple is when we're under pressure, we actually see fewer options, not more options. And the challenge with strategy, the challenge with strategic leadership is beware of jumping in, beware of assuming you understand the situation, understand before being understood. But again, that phrase sounds great until you're in the heat of battle. So what I try to do is to make it fun, to make it interactive, to bring home some of these concepts more intuitively, less analytically.

Robert Johnson:
The workshop runs from nine to four on Saturday, the first day of the event. Probably a good idea to have some interactive exercises.

Jim Austin:
Oh gosh, I don't think I could hold an audience for an hour if I were lecturing. No. And again, I try to leverage, I try to utilize some of the most current thinking. I like to say, I was in your shoes, not as a medical practitioner, but I was a senior leader in business. Here were some of the issues I dealt with. Let's understand where you're coming from, and then let's combine that with some of the latest academic thinking, both in the for-profit as well as the not-for-profit side and not just in healthcare. I think one of the great changes that I've seen during my lifetime working in healthcare is when I started with Baxter in the mid eighties, people said, oh, bring me healthcare examples. We don't want to hear about Southwest. We don't want to hear about Costco or Amazon. Well, Amazon wasn't even around then, but whatever.

But today, I think people say, wow, tell us why Amazon is doing what it's doing. What the heck are they doing coming into healthcare? Should I be worried about that? Well, absolutely you should. I mean, when Amazon, one of the greatest supply chain leaders in the world, when they start saying, we're going to deliver pharmaceuticals to patients home more cost effectively than a CVS or a Walgreens, or fill in the blank or Caremark, I'd start getting nervous. Now, the pathology lab isn't going to be directly affected by that, but they are going to be affected by other trends. What's happening in AI across the globe? What's happening with leaders intent, their ability to bring in diverse work teams, and how does that influence the environment that the pathology lab has to face? So those are some of the issues we will be discussing. And the setup I think is so important.

We'll have people sitting in tables of four to six, and it will be working with your table mates. Now, some of those exercises are individual, but by and large, it's how do I work across my table? How do I get my voice heard? And the most effective teams do three things. One, have high degrees of empathy. How do you build empathetic relationships in a fairly short period of time? Secondly, everybody equally contributes and there are no passengers. So in any sort of mixed group, there'll always be more internally focused folks and more externally focused folks. How do you bring up all sides? And then finally, the most effective teams are diverse. So I'll certainly go to a table with a bunch of older men that look a lot like me. Well, that's not a diverse team, that will not have as much optionality or as much different points of view as some other teams. So even those more indirect lessons I hope to bring forth in the seminar.

Robert Johnson:
Do you believe that our pathologists can afford to miss the workshop?

Jim Austin:
I hope that folks come with an open mind. I think these are fundamental capabilities. I teach a 10 week leadership course at Brown in their Masters of Healthcare leadership, and two thirds of the attendees are experienced physicians who want to move from that clinical arena to more of the administrative arena. Leadership is tough. It has a cultural overlay, it has a content overlay. What does it mean to be a good leader? And it doesn't exist? Separate from the environment, being aware of your own capabilities, being aware of what are the needs of my team, being aware of what are some current influences that could affect us all As Rita McGrath, who teaches strategy at Columbia, she's written a wonderful book called Seeing Around Corners. And her point is, there's too much stuff out there. How do you even know what to focus on? What does that concept of sense making? So I hope to give attendees both some basic leadership tools, but also some more what I would call advanced leadership tools for their particular group and lab situation. I also hope that those ideas will then spread in other parts of the conference. And I hope in that way that each attendee takes away some ideas for themselves, takes away some new relationships, and ideally takes away some ideas that they may want to discuss with others in the remaining several days in the conference.

Robert Johnson:
The Saturday leadership event is open to anyone attending the summit. All you need to do is make sure you've checked the event on your registration. For those who've already signed up for the summit, but not the Saturday session, you can modify your account. We have instructions about how to do that in the show notes. For the College of American Pathologists, this is Robert Johnson. Have a great day.