Be Open-Minded

One of the great markers of an effective leader is that they aren’t afraid to take chances on people, ideas, or themselves. You might consider it naïve to be risky in business, but it’s the leaders who dare to be different that create the real impact. Instead of living in the safe zone, these leaders approach each situation with an open mind.

Open-mindedness is not something that necessarily comes naturally. It takes a lot of courage and risk to open yourself up and be vulnerable in business. We live in a world that is constantly changing, and no day looks the same. Leaders who are open-minded embrace this uncertainty and use it to their advantage.

Compassionate Listening

Leaders are designed to lead people. Without understanding who they are engaging with, they are soon destined to fail. In order to understand the people they work with, they must practice the art of compassionate listening. This means they go into each conversation with the intention to get to know that person better, instead of with the intention to tell someone who they are or who they should be.

Successful business owners take the time to get to know people. They listen to learn instead of listening to speak. This allows them to gain different perspectives and a deeper understanding of the world around them. If you’re wanting to be an effective, successful leader – one of the first things you need to practice is how to listen.

Honest and Transparent

A great leader knows that honesty and transparency are key to their success. They make a reputable and reliable name that both their employees and clients can count on. This means they are consistent – their actions always match their words. They don’t try and manipulate you into believing them. Instead, they show you why you can.

Not only are effective leaders honest and transparent with those around them, they are also honest with themselves. They have a great deal of self-awareness. In turn, this helps them to acknowledge and manage their strengths and weaknesses. If you’re wanting to grow as a leader, evaluate how honest you are with others and yourself.

Know That You Don’t Know

Along with being honest and transparent, leaders know what they don’t know. They don’t try and fool anyone into thinking they are somebody that they aren’t. Instead, they embrace their lack of knowledge in areas, and they use this to grow in their business.

Great leaders don’t presume to know it all. In fact, they have the extreme awareness that life is unpredictable, and every situation comes with new things to consider. Instead of viewing individuals the same, they know they have to have a deeper understanding than that. They take what they don’t know, and they build from that.

It doesn’t matter where you work, either. Your job as a leader in healthcare will always impact the quality of care that patients receive and also the job satisfaction of your staff. With burnout on the rise and an increase in challenges, there has never been a more pressing need for talented, passionate healthcare leaders.

There is always room to improve and many ways to prepare for a role in leadership. By focusing on healthcare in particular and by also working to develop a great set of soft skills, you can make significant improvements to healthcare as a whole.

Why You Need a Healthcare Management Degree

For decades, many leaders have used management and administration degrees to prepare them for executive-level roles. The difference is that in the past, the go-to option was to take on an MBA with a focus on healthcare management. Though this is still a good option, there are now more focused degrees available that allow you to improve your skills and management style with healthcare as the focus.

MBAs will help prepare you by providing a foundation of business fundamentals. The focus, however, is broad rather than in-depth, so while you can earn a certification in healthcare management, the entire focus will not be on healthcare overall. Mostly your coursework will be based around general business concepts with only a few instances where healthcare will be the focus.

MBAs do, of course, still have their place. Healthcare professionals who have spent their entire career working within the industry and feel they need more general business skills than specialized business skills can benefit.

More often than not, however, professionals looking to get started as a leader in healthcare will find more benefits from Executive MHA programs online.

An Executive Master of Health Administration focuses on healthcare and business and works to advance your skillset with sector-specific courses that are essential for healthcare leadership. It is ideal for existing healthcare professionals and those closely adjacent, like consultants or analysts, to take up healthcare leadership roles in their workplace or field.

These types of specialized administration degrees are streamlined and specific for healthcare, making them ideal for those looking to advance their healthcare career directly. They are, however, new. There are only a handful of these degrees available in the world, but even still, it is important to check for quality markers. Triple accreditation from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), Association for Master of Business Administration (AMBA), and EFMD Quality Improvement System (EQUIS) is a key sign of quality to watch out for.

It typically takes the same amount of time to complete an online MHA as it does an online MBA, meaning around two years or six semesters. You can typically stretch it out longer if necessary but always talk with the admissions advisor beforehand.

Additional Factors to Help Prepare You For Leadership

Having the know-how in healthcare management, finance, and analysis is a great start, but as any leader knows, you also need plenty of soft skills to be an effective leader. Managing people isn’t like ticking boxes or staying organized. Sometimes it needs a custom touch, and you always need to adapt your approach depending on who you are with and what the other person needs.

Know Your Leadership Style

A great place to start is to understand and work out your leadership style. Although you can customize and develop what feels like your own leadership style, it is important to remain consistent. If you flip flop between different methods of leading and managing your teams, you’ll only breed resentment and a hostile workplace.

You cannot go from being diplomatic and accommodating one day to draconian the next. Setting up standards is how everyone works more efficiently because they know what to expect and the quality of work that is required of them.

You want to get the most out of every member of your team, and setting the right expectations is a great place to start.

Though you will want to workshop and develop your own leadership style, a great place to get started is by understanding the types of leadership styles, as outlined in Lewin’s Leadership Styles framework that has been in use since the 1930s.

Autocratic Leaders

It is important to note that all leaders need to workshop and work with those working underneath them when it comes to decision-making. Autocratic leaders take the input and advice from those working alongside or under them and then make their own decisions based on that information. Though there will be a certain amount of autocratic leadership within healthcare, you never want to alienate the other leaders and managers within your organization.

Democratic Leaders

Democratic leadership puts team members in the running when it comes to decision-making. It can improve motivation and job satisfaction but is not always effective in healthcare when tough decisions need to be made, especially when it comes to being fair to all departments. A good way to look at leadership in healthcare is with a mix of democratic and autocratic decision-making. Knowing when to use both styles is how you will be an effective leader. You cannot and should not make every decision, but at the same time, there are certain standards, laws, and difficult situations that will require an autocratic stance.

Laissez-Faire Leaders

Laissez-Faire leaders support their team members rather than lead them. This can work in a few situations in healthcare, but due to the high levels of regulation and standardization, you’ll find you simply don’t have the opportunity to provide support and trust in your team to always make the best decisions for them. Between laws and budgeting, there is little room for this style of leadership.

On top of leadership styles, you also have different approaches. There are six emotional leadership styles. These styles include visionary, coaching, affiliative, democratic, pace setting, and commanding. There is even transformational leadership.

At the end of the day, knowing the different types of leadership and, most importantly, what option will suit the scope of your role is a must. You may even use different leadership styles when dealing with different departments. How you approach shareholders will be different from department heads or team leaders.

How to Develop the Essential Soft Skills

Soft skills can be practiced and guided, but they are not the same as other skills that can be learned. You need to develop and find your own approach that works for you and feels most natural. Soft skills, after all, are interpersonal. How you actually speak and communicate to your teams, your shareholders, and even the patients and their families depend on the situation.

The essential soft skills you will want to have, and if not work on, include:

1. Communication and Interpersonal Skills

Being able to effectively communicate comes easily to some and can feel like a nightmare to others. As a leader, you should be able to confidently speak to a room of people and at the very least be able to command attention when speaking to those who are directly underneath you. While there are coaching courses and other workshops you can take to improve your public speaking abilities, that is not the only type of communication you need to consider.

You also need to know how to listen and adapt. Interpersonal skills are a type of communication skill that you will want to continually improve upon. How you speak to one person won’t work for another. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if you think someone should be able to buckle down and get the work done because it is your job to get the most effective work out of your team. If that requires a more gentle touch and encouragement for some of your employees and a harder hand for others, be ready to adapt.

2.The Ability to Motivate and Stay Motivated

One sub-skill to communication is both motivating and being motivated. You want your team to go above and beyond, and in healthcare, that is a big ask. There is a massive shortage which means healthcare professionals everywhere are already going above and beyond for their patients. The good news is that motivating your team doesn’t mean pushing them to work harder but working smarter. It also means recognizing and rewarding their additional efforts if you can.

With burnout in healthcare at an all-time high, knowing how to motivate those underneath you is a skill that cannot be emphasized enough. Being able to motivate others is just the start as well. You also need to know how to stay motivated, especially if you are attempting to complete a degree while working in an existing managerial role.

3.Creative and Analytical Problem Solving

Knowing how to analyze data and understand it better is a great place to start, but it isn’t enough. Creative and analytical problem solving is something of an art form. The data you collect and the information you extract from it are the materials, but you are still the artist that needs to do something with the information presented to you. A great way to develop this soft skill is to actually learn and study. See how others have handled similar problems, and don’t be afraid to ask for advice from those in similar roles to you.

4.Conflict Resolution

Part of managing a team means managing the conflicts that will inevitably arise. You have to keep in mind that healthcare organizations around the world are stretched to their limits. They have to deal with people who are emotionally and physically often at their worst and most scared. They also need to deal with long hours and a lot of stress, thanks in part to the risk caused by the coronavirus.

This adds to a lot of stress and high tension. It would be a miracle if there weren’t any internal conflict that comes from such a situation, so you need to know how to handle it when it happens. This is something you will need to learn hard and fast when you start your first leadership or managerial role in any field, but there are online tools and advice available to help you prepare some mitigation strategies.

5.Organization

It would be best if you stay organized. There is a lot of work that comes in with managing a team or teams, especially in the healthcare setting. If you aren’t organized, you can easily fall behind on many different tasks. While that task might not have been altogether that important one day, left alone, it could build up into a problem.

Using the right organizational tools and investing in automating certain admin systems is a great way to reduce the level of hands-on organization you need to handle. However, it would help if you still were in the habit of staying organized and on top of your daily tasks.

6.Adaptability

Healthcare is a massive industry, and the challenges that are faced by healthcare organizations vary day to day. One day you may be dealing with a massive shortage because there was a COVID-19 outbreak and several members of your staff caught it and now need to quarantine at home. A serious car pileup could have occurred the next day, and now your ER is overrun.

There are so many challenges that face healthcare leaders, which is why one of the most important skills you will need to succeed as a healthcare leader is the ability to adapt and roll with the punches. You don’t need to do it on your own, but you do need to know how to leverage your team and the resources available to meet every challenge that comes your way.

Sales has always had lonely moments. However, when the pandemic sent salespeople home to Zoom, the loneliness became palpable. This is becoming a costly problem.

Many of the changes to the sales profession are no longer temporary. Our clients are reporting that a portion of buyers are permanently working from home. Sales organizations are hiring more remote employees and video calls are the expected norm.

In an agenda-driven video sales call, the social elements (handshakes, shared coffee, etc.) that once humanized the sales interaction have been stripped away. Without these emotionally engaging elements, and without a bullpen of colleagues to buoy their spirits, sales jobs are increasingly becoming transactional and lonely roles.

As one seller put it, “Before, I was busy all the time, and some of it was fun. Now, I’m on Zoom just trying to stay awake. I’m realizing I need more social interactions, but at the end of the day, I’m too exhausted to make the effort.”

Left unaddressed, salesperson loneliness can become a costly problem. Recent research conducted by one of us (Dr. Good) reveals that loneliness goes beyond just a hit to morale — it has begun to impact salesperson behavior with customers, leading to an erosion of revenue, margin, and market reputation. Dr. Good’s data was gathered from two studies that surveyed more than 250 B2B and B2C salespeople from a variety of industries, as well as follow-up qualitative interviews, performance data, and observations of more than a dozen sales teams. Findings revealed that salesperson loneliness is causing three problematic behaviors that ultimately create a cycle of poor performance:

1. Social awkwardness

When social skills aren’t routinely practiced, they deteriorate like any other muscle. Sellers in the studies were frequently observed misreading social signals and misjudging the importance of key details in exchanges with customers. While not surprising — all of us are a little awkward these days — sellers play a particularly heavy price for missing social cues. Buyers are less likely to engage, and the trust required for relationship building doesn’t happen.

Further compounding this problem is the fact that sellers may be coming into a sales interaction moments after having been rejected by a previous customer. Without the buffer of peers in close proximately to help them reset, this could increase the potential for a confidence deficit, contributing to even more initial awkwardness on the next call. An awkward start has a chilling effect on customer engagement and can derail or, at the very least stall, what could have been a successful sales process.

2. Loss of focus on customer needs

Sellers who are overeager for social connection don’t listen deeply during the needs assessment phase of the sales process. The data revealed that these lonely sellers were more likely to forget critical customer information.

In a virtual environment, the visual cues that make each customer distinctive and memorable are often absent. When each customer is just another tiny box on your same computer, in the same room, talking about the same things, they bleed together. This lack of distinction makes what happened (and what the customer said) harder to remember. As one seller told us, “I’m on with 20 customers a day, and every call feels the same.”

We also saw evidence that because they don’t have enough meaningful social connections outside their job, sellers can wind up treating the customer as a confidante, someone they share with, rather than someone whose needs should be the organizing element of the conversation. 

Without a clear understanding of customer-specific needs and goals, sellers are unable to create a compelling or differentiated story about their solution. This impaired memory early in the process winds up hobbling them when they try to close.

3. Conspicuous overspending on customers

Nowhere was the direct cost of salesperson loneliness more readily apparent than their expense account. Dr. Good’s studies showed that salesperson loneliness was directly connected to increased spending on customers. It’s not hard to understand why someone who’s lonely would want to buy their clients gifts and meals, or why they might want to reduce the price to maintain a client friendship. These actions usually generate a warm response from customers, and what lonely person doesn’t want to generate a more positive emotional reaction from the people they spend time with?

However warm it might feel in the moment, this “sweethearting” did not improve salesperson performance in either of the two studies Dr. Good conducted. While buyers may have been grateful, and sellers may have gotten the dopamine high of a positive social interaction, this conspicuous overspending did not create additional revenue. It was a cost with no return on investment.

In the current social-starved environment, many sellers are over-indexing on the old adage, “people buy from people they like.” In an effort to be liked, salespeople have forgotten that the true purpose of sales: to improve life for customers.

How Managers Can Help Lonely Salespeople

As humans, we’re hardwired to seek meaningful connection. The challenge for sellers (and their managers) is two-fold: the shift to virtual created a huge interpersonal void for salespeople whose time had previously been filled with human interaction. Second, when salespeople try to mitigate their loneliness, their coping behaviors play out with customers, which has a direct impact on the organization’s financial health and reputation.

The three above behaviors create a dangerous cycle that erodes competitive differentiation, eats away at the margin, and results in costly turnover in the sales role. With the virtual world of selling unlikely to fully revert, it is crucial that leaders proactively mitigate this problem. Here are eight strategies to break this cycle:

Create situations that encourage non-competing.

When every sales meeting feels like Shark Tank, with coworkers pitted against each other, it reinforces the loneliness. Go beyond the usual sales reporting meetings and give your salespeople regular opportunities to be together without an agenda or contest. Something as simple as a weekly 15-minute “Share your favorite TV binge” huddle gives sellers a way to connect with coworkers rather than thrusting their loneliness on unsuspecting customers.

Activate a sense of shared purpose.

Sales loneliness magnifies when sellers feel that they’re nothing more than a lone wolf quota filler. You can help counter this feeling by regularly reinforcing a sense of higher purpose. Make a practice of discussing how your organization’s solutions make a difference to customers, and how each member of the team contributes. This reminds sellers that their jobs have meaning and that they’re part of something bigger than themselves.

Design a structure for peer-to-peer support.

Hold regular peer meetings in which sellers brainstorm together to help improve each other’s skills. For example, you can ask people for their favorite questions to ask during discovery or how to open new conversations without awkwardness. Putting sellers in a situation where they’re sharing best practices creates a support structure they can draw upon during times of challenge and change.

Do some brain training.

Listening skills were the most obvious (and potentially detrimental) thing to decline for reps experiencing loneliness. Reverse this trend by running a quick training drill for your sales team where they practice listening and responding to each other describing personal things like weekend plans or how they’ve arranged their workspace. Improving their listening skills in lower-stakes social settings, where there’s not a deal at risk, will help them do the same in front of customers.

Make sure your sales team is crystal clear on your value proposition.

When a rep has confidence in the value proposition they’re offering to customers, they’re less likely to discount or “sweetheart.” Without this solid base, a rep is more likely to feel like they are risking the personal connection by offering a price that may be perceived as too high or overspend on the customer to mitigate negative feelings.

Set spending guidelines and model appropriate gifts.

When spending guidelines are vague, it diverts attention from the true objective of the sale, which is to improve life for customers. Show your sellers exactly what appropriate and effective spending looks like. Perhaps it’s giving customers a helpful book about an issue they’re facing or providing a coffee gift card for them to use in your meeting. Demonstrate to your team that your solution combined with their own expertise is enough; you don’t need elaborate gifts to make connections.

Encourage your salespeople to schedule small breaks between client calls.

Tell your salespeople, “Give yourself five minutes between calls to review the notes, have a glass of water and remind yourself how we improve life for these customers.” This will increase their confidence in their offering and give them a chance to shake off what may have been an unsuccessful past call.  Grounding themselves in the value of their offering helps them start more strategically and curbs the impulse to overshare.

Encourage friendships outside of work.

Your customers don’t need another friend, but your salespeople probably do. But to have friends, you have to be a friend. Truly caring leaders would be wise to encourage salespeople to seek opportunities to pursue friendship outside of work. While friendship may seem like a touchy-feely topic inappropriate for leadership commentary, the research tells us that a salesperson’s lack of friends can be quite costly. Given the high stakes, it’s a problem worth addressing.

Salespeople are no different than the rest of us. When they’re lonely, they become more awkward, they tend to overshare, and they try to connect in using whatever means they have at their disposal. The above strategies can help mitigate salesperson loneliness, and ensure that your team is approaching customers with calm confidence. 

According to Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, villagers would come from far and wide to hear Abraham Lincoln, then a prairie lawyer with a gift for storytelling. Lincoln didn’t have the benefit of modern technology. He stood on a tree stump instead of a TED stage, and PowerPoint wouldn’t be invented for another 130 years. And yet Lincoln “could simultaneously educate, entertain, and move his audiences,” writes Goodwin.

While the tools of communication have changed since Lincoln regaled crowds with his storytelling techniques, the human brain has not. Our minds are wired for story. We think in narrative and enjoy consuming content in story form.

Understanding the difference between presenting and storytelling is critical to a leader’s ability to engage an audience and move them to action. Unfortunately, presentation software often gets in the way. Slides should be designed to complement a story, not to replace the storyteller.

Following are five storytelling strategies to help you stand out the next time you give a presentation.

Presenters open PowerPoint. Storytellers craft a narrative.

If you want to engage your audience, you have to tell a story. But for most people who prepare presentations, storytelling is not top of mind.

Most “presenters” do what sounds logical: They begin by opening the slideware. But most presentation programs aren’t storytelling tools. They’re digital delivery mechanisms. PowerPoint’s default template asks for a title and text.

A bulleted list is not a story. A story is a connected series of events told through words and/or pictures. A story has a theme, attention-grabbing moments, heroes and villains, and a satisfying conclusion. Nicely designed slides cannot compensate for a poorly structured story.

Award-winning movie directors read or write the story before picking up a camera. They see the movie play out by sketching or drawing each scene on storyboards. In much the same way, effective presenters think through the elements of their content long before they open PowerPoint.

Before you sit down to create your slides, try this three-step process. First, write down your idea as if you were telling someone a story. Since you don’t naturally write or speak in bullet points, avoid them. Instead, use complete sentences with nouns, verbs, and transitions between paragraphs and ideas. Second, visualize each of your main concepts by “storyboarding”: sketching ideas on a whiteboard or a blank sheet of paper. Finally, gather the assets that will bring your story to life: videos, animations, graphics, or photos.

Presenters use text. Storytellers love pictures.

While serving as commander of the International Space Station, Chris Hadfield became a social media sensation by picking up a guitar and singing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” while floating weightless. Back on Earth, his celebrated TED Talk has attracted more than 11 million views.

Hadfield’s presentation, “What I learned from going blind in space,” was an astonishing display of visual storytelling. His PowerPoint deck contained 35 slides — with no text. Instead, Hadfield relied on pictures, images, animations, and videos to introduce the audience to a world few will ever experience.

Researchers have found that your audience will recall about 10% of the content if they simply hear information. But the “picture superiority effect” means that if they hear information and see a picture, they’ll retain 65%.

Florence Nightingale understood picture superiority more than a century before the invention of PowerPoint. Nightingale was a statistician and mathematician. She was also an empathetic nurse who was shocked to discover that more British soldiers were dying from unsanitary conditions in hospitals than were dying of battle wounds. When Nightingale sought funding from British authorities to improve conditions, she translated the dry data into a color-coded graphic. Nightingale knew that humans were moved more by stories and pictures than data and text alone.

If you want to engage an audience, build a presentation that favors pictures to complement the story you tell. A combination of images and words improves learning much more than words can do on their own.

Presenters dump data. Storytellers humanize it.

As Nightingale discovered, the human brain was not built to make sense of large numbers. Data is abstract until it’s put into context that people can understand. And people can understand people.

I once met with a group of executives at a large medical equipment company preparing to launch a new brain-scanning machine at a prestigious conference. They sent me hundreds of pages of clinical data to prove the technology could identify a patient’s condition faster and more accurately than any existing device.

“Where are the people?” I asked.

While the data provided evidence for the efficacy of the technology, it didn’t tell a story. Only humans could do that.

After a few hours of brainstorming with the executive team, we decided to put faces to the data. We built a presentation around two typical patients — David and Susan — who would benefit from the technology should they enter a hospital with symptoms of a possible stroke or heart attack.

At the same conference the following year, the executive who had delivered the presentation was walking down a hallway when a physician stopped him and said, “You’re the David and Susan guy. Great presentation.” The attendee hadn’t remembered all the data, but the story left an impression.

The next time you have large datasets to present, add a face to the statistics.

Presenters are predictable. Storytellers surprise audiences.

Most PowerPoints are boring because they’re predictable. We know what comes next — another slide of bullet points, followed by another, and another. A good story, however, has the element of surprise.

When Steve Jobs introduced the first iPod, he told the audience that the music player could store 1,000 songs. While other music players on the market could make the same claim, Jobs explained that none of the competitors could fit in your pocket. And with the flair of a magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat, Jobs reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out the smallest MP3 player on the market. “One thousand songs in your pocket” became one of the most iconic taglines in product history.

Although many people considered Steve Jobs one of the most outstanding business presenters of our time, the Apple co-founder knew the real secret to winning over an audience: Create a presentation that complements a well-crafted story.

The human brain pays attention to novelty — twists and turns and unexpected events. Our brain perks up when we detect something that breaks a pattern.

There’s no limit to your creativity. While you don’t need to pull products out of your pocket to grab the audience’s attention, do plan to surprise people with something they don’t expect.

Presenters practice silently. Storytellers rehearse out loud.

Most business presentations are forgettable because speakers forget they’re performing, not presenting. A great presentation informs, inspires, engages, and entertains. In other words, it’s part performance and should be rehearsed like one.

Most business professionals flip through their slides silently to prepare for a presentation. Storytellers rehearse — out loud. They practice their vocal delivery, adding perfectly-timed pauses and varying the pace of their speech. If they plan to stand in front of a group, they’ll stand during rehearsal. If they’re going to be seated in a Zoom call, they’ll take their seat in rehearsal and deliver each slide as though they’re giving the real thing.

. . .

When you see yourself as a storyteller, the presentation your audience sees will change. Don’t let presentation software get in the way of giving your audience information they’ll pay attention to — and retain.