How do chief medical officers exercise leadership

This study investigated the leadership experiences of Chief Medical Officers in not-for-profit U.S. health systems of various sizes. The focus of this study was to first distinguish those leadership skill domains most salient for today's physician executive and also to document how those leadership skills are executed in real-world situations. Leadership situations were identified and prioritized by a 2-round national Delphi process panel. These CMO leaders and their colleagues agree that the most important leadership skill for CMOs is building trust. After that, perspectives differ but CMOs point to communication skills, problem solving, organizational awareness, and learning from experience as the other most important skills of those presented. They use many strategies across the board in leadership situations, regardless of whether those situations turn out to be successful or unsuccessful—and all these leaders meet with failure at some point. They tend to rely on reasoning strategies, ingratiating, and coalition building in order to achieve their aims although that is not to imply that they do not find other strategies useful as well. They also tend to use more of their skills in situations of building trust and the fewest in decision-making situations. They tend to employ more strategies when they are successful and fewer when they meet with failure. Rarely, if ever, do these leaders use any skills in isolation—just as they tend to tackle multiple goals in their jobs, they rely on multiple leadership strategies to achieve their aims. The communication method most important to these leaders is face-to-face communication. In fact, there were hardly any other types of communication mentioned in their leadership stories and many of those were associated with failure. However the same strategies are used regardless of organizational size or community, academic, or religious affiliation. While all these leaders meet with failure, one of the few common threads in these situations is their failure to implement their proven leadership skills in their stories of unsuccessful building trust, persuasion, and decision making. The methods used in this study led to the development of the Coaching Exercise in Leadership Learning (CELL) tool.