Introduction:
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Gloria Wu, MD:
This is Dr. Gloria Wu. We are talking about women leadership and women doctors. Many of us are in practice now, 50% or more of every incoming medical school classroom made up of women. Yet in terms of leadership positions, as in medical schools, professors, winning awards, we’re less than 20%.
Continuing on, we were talking about Professor Rao of Stanford where they’re talking about the things to think about when we are leading an organization. He had 7 to-do things. Number 1, nip it in the bud. If it’s bad, get rid of it. Number 2, plumbing before poetry. Fix the basics before spouting the magic of your vision. Fix the bad things in your organization.
Number 3, adequacy before excellence. Bad customer service gets you 10 times more bad press than good customer service. Four, use the cool kids and the adults to squelch bad behavior in an organization. If people are looking at their cell phone all the time during a meeting, get them, enlist them to be part of the leadership so that they’re part of the team to lead you going forward.
Today we’re going to talk about numbers 5, 6, 7, which is kill the thrill. Mark Twain said, “Charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.” You want to think about things that people think is like a thrill.
Sometimes in Macy’s or the very large department stores, they call it shrinkage. People like to shoplift, employees shoplift. You want to kill that and get rid of that thrill, the thrill-seeking behavior.
For an organization such as a large hospital, a large medical organization, sometimes people like to talk behind the organization’s back, behind the leadership’s back. They want to sort of get more press time, more on-air time saying, “Well, so-and-so is bad, but don’t mention my name.” You want to kill the thrill, charm them. Charm them and get them into the team and get them to be part of the solution.
Number 6, time shifting. Think about what you want to be, what you hope to be, not just who you are now. Think about shifting yourself from current to your future self. That helps you with your mission statement. We all should carry around with us every day the why, why do we exist?
Ever since I started taking the AMWA ELEVATE Leadership course, which was September 2022, I learned about my why, my mission statement as a woman doctor. I’m an ophthalmologist. I want to help people see better. Not only the person in front of me, but the person in the community who needs to see better. Who doesn’t want to see better? We all want to see better. The tennis player wants to see better, the baseball player, my little kid wants to see better, and of course, grandma who had a bad accident falling on her head wants to see better.
I try to think about how do I help the person in front of me, the person in my community, in my county, and nationally? How can I reach this? That’s my why. If I time shift, thinking of just besides the person in front of me, which is the current, but to the leader that I want to become, it has helped me enormously, and it has gotten me leadership positions in the county and nationally.
I’m very pleased to tell all of you that taking these courses, reading these books has helped me enormously. Time shift, think from the present to who you might be.
Then last thing that Professor Rao talks about, at Stanford Business School, is focus on the best times, not just all the failures that could happen, and then the end. Research by the Nobel Prize winner,Daniel Kahneman in 2022, he uncovered the peak-end rule. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics for using psychology in what happens in economics.
No matter how good or how bad an experience is or how long it lasts, judgments about the outcome are shaped most about the best and worst moments and how it ended. How it ends is what people remember.
Then I want to leave you what Maya Angelou, the famous American poet, said, “People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
All of us as women doctors are particularly tuned in to how we feel or how our patients feel. We have been known to be compassionate. We talk more than our male colleagues. A lot of people seek us out because we will spend extra time. Remember, use that as your strong suit. Make that one of your genius qualities.
Thank you for listening to us. If you like this, listen again to our podcast, and I’m Dr. Gloria Wu. Thank you.
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