High-performing physician executives

Physician leadership extends beyond traditional clinical disciplines to hospital administration, group practice management, health policy making, management of managed care programs, and many business positions. What kind of person makes a good physician executive? What stands out as the most important motivations, attributes, and interests of high-performing physician executives? How does this compare with non-physician health care executives? Such questions have long been high on the agenda of executives in other industries. This article builds on existing formal assessments of leadership attributes of high-performing business, government, and educational executives and on closer examination of health care executives. Previous studies looked at the need for innovative, entrepreneurial, energetic, community-oriented leaders for positions throughout health care. Traits that distinguish excellence and leadership were described by Brown and McCool.* That study characterized successful leaders in terms of physical strengths (high energy, good health, and propensity for hard work), mental strengths (creativity, intuition, and innovation), and organizational strengths (mission orientation, vision, and entrepreneurial spirit). In this investigation, a subset of health care executives, including physician executives, was examined more closely. It was initially assumed that successful physician executives exhibit many of the same positive traits as do nonphysician executives. This assumption was tested with physician leaders in a range of administrative and managerial positions. We also set out to identify key differences between physician and nonphysician executives. Even with our limited exploration, it seems to us that physician executives probably do differ from nonphysician executives.