Not all of us thought about becoming leaders when we chose to become sports physicians. But our job description always requires leadership.
You must lead your patients out of the health problems that brought them to you. You must lead your office and the enterprises with which you are associated by achieving financial success. You must lead your professional organizations to improve the field of sports medicine. And you must lead in the efforts to improve public health, doing your part to address such problems as mass shootings, opioid abuse, and climate change.
As with any skill, we can improve our leadership with conscious effort. The first step is to understand the difference between leadership and management. Leaders deal with change, and look to the future. Managers deal with maintenance and focus on the present.
The next step is to work on each of the five components of leadership: self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, and courage.
Self-awareness
As a leader, you have to understand yourself, your moods, and your emotions and how they impact others. They affect every relationship you have as a physician, from your office staff to every patient, from the moment you open the door to the time you leave.
