Leaderpreneurship Development

Leadership is in crisis and the command and control model is bankrupt. In healthcare, we will need a cadre of physicians to lead us to the promise land. However, doctors don't seem interested and are pre-occupied mostly with keeping their heads above water or putting them in the sand or some other anatomic place. Physician executives are not necessarily physician entrepreneurs.

Coping, let alone thriving, in this turbulent sick care environment will require an attitude change. Doctors need to evolve from knowledge technicians merely fixing patient problems to managers to entrepreneurs to leaderpreneurs, leaders of other physician entrepreneurs, to thrive. It is an extension of practicing at the top of your license. In addition, filling the C-suite with more physician managers just makes it harder to innovate and adds further clutter to the organization.

There are many myths about physician entrepreneurs. One is they are people who create companies. However, they are actually doctors who pursue opportunities with scarce resources with the goal of creating user-defined value through the deployment of innovation. Creating a company is, but, one of many ways to do that.

The pathway to ‘leaderpreneurship’ looks something like this:

1. Knowledge technicians practicing state of the art medicine with an understanding of potential innovation opportunities

2. Managing knowledge, skills, abilities, and competencies that help them maximize the now. Here are 5 strategies that might help.

3. Identifying those managers with an entrepreneurial mindset and helping them cultivate it and move from the now to the next.

4. Giving physician entrepreneurs what they need to get their ideas to patients and move from the next to the new.

5. Providing leadership development to physician entrepreneurs to create a learning organization.

Sick care organizations need to move their employees from the now, to the next, to the new. Converting physician, or other healthcare professional, knowledge technician prospects to leads to leaderpreneurs will deliver few at the bottom of the funnel, but those few can have a disproportionate impact.