A people-centric approach to leadership is something all healthcare leaders should embrace, according to Allison Roditi, vice president of orthopedic services at New York City-based Catholic Health.
Ms. Roditi joined the "Becker's Spine and Orthopedic Podcast" to discuss what healthcare leaders need to be successful in the coming years.
Listen to the full conversation here.
Question: What do healthcare leaders need in order to be successful over the next two to three years?
Allison Roditi: One thing is you have to be able to work with people. People are absolutely critical to what we do every day. People ask me all the time, "What do you do every day?" What I answer is, "I work with people."
I do budgets, and I do all these other tasks and work on projects. But I think the team building that I do — working through strategy, building awareness about things that we need to get moving through our health system, and having difficult conversations to bring people on board or understand where people are coming from — is really critical to being a good leader. I'm certainly not perfect at it. I'm certainly growing my tool belt and learning as I go. But if you can't work with people, healthcare may not be for you. If you have a strong sense of working with people and want to develop that skill, I think that's absolutely critical to being a great healthcare leader.
Along with that, a great mentor of mine once told me, "You should listen more than you talk." I've been doing this now for just under 20 years. As a young administrator, I loved to talk and give my opinion. I still love to give my opinion, but I really try hard to listen. I think the higher up you get in leadership, it's so important to be able to listen to your counterparts, to the people that work for you and the people that use your services.
Also in this crazy time, we've got rising costs and decreased payments and all sorts of technology coming at us, creativity is a key to being a great healthcare leader. I think you have to be willing to take a little bit of risk. You have to be willing to step outside of the box a little bit and look at different solutions. Some of that creativity also is in your hiring. I think you need to find people from other industries or other clinical backgrounds,get them out of their subspecialties and get a different lens on things. For example, I have a project manager who comes from an industrial engineering background. She's never really worked in healthcare before, but I absolutely love her perspective. She sees things in data and in processes that I don't see, and together we make such a strong team because we can really come at things with different lenses.