Dr. Gloria Wu Podcast: What Makes a Leader
Introduction:
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Gloria Wu, MD:
Today I am going to talk about the qualities that we need as a leader in ourselves. Number 1, know what our why statement is, our own personal mission statement. The why, which encompasses our beliefs, our passions. Now obviously we’re all doctors, we took the Hippocratic oath and we’re here to do no wrong and to save people’s lives and to deliver great patient care. Now, what does that mean for each of us? I’m an ophthalmologist. For me personally, I want each of my patients to see better, not only the patient in front of me but my community of patients. That’s why I made mobile apps to help them that were for free during COVID-19, that they could check their vision. Then I made mobile apps to help them with stroke, traumatic brain injury, to help them see better. Can they improve? Can we all improve our vision?
Also for the normal-sighted among us, to improve our vision for being a better baseball player, a better tennis player. This one is called ExerSight, it’s on the Apple Store. The other one for stroke and traumatic brain injury and amblyopia is called Eye Quix, also on the Apple Store. My free one is Telehealth Eye Test to check your vision. I’m very proud that I did this because I wanted to help my patients during COVID-19. Now, all of us as physicians want to lead and help and change the world. We’re all here to make the world a better place. [William] Faulkner said in his Nobel Prize-winning speech in literature, man has a voice. It is that voice that distinguishes us from animals. As a writer he used that voice, and we as doctors can use that voice. We must know a little bit about ourselves.
We have to analyze ourselves. Not only do we know about our why, our own personal mission statement, the passions that drive us, we have to evaluate our emotional intelligence, our EI, or as some famous Harvard psychologist from the Graduate School of Education called it, EQ, emotional quotient. Self-awareness, are we aware when we walk in a patient’s room how we’re comporting ourselves? Do we have a smile on our face? Can we be happy to see this patient? Are we delighted to hear Mrs. Smith’s story? Can we show that joy? Can we show that warmth so that she in turn can breathe a sigh of relief and start talking to us? She may be there sitting with clenched hands because she’s so scared to hear the diagnosis. We have to be aware of how we are when we walk into the patient room, the patient exam room, how we touch her shoulder, how we touch her hand.
Self-management, let’s say the patient becomes unruly, upset, angry, anxious, because they don’t like the diagnosis. We have to manage ourselves. We cannot kind of just say, “Oh my goodness, I’m going to leave this room.” But we must really look at that patient in the eye and feel her pain, feel her compassion, so that we can understand the depth of her feeling so that we can defuse the situation. We can say, “Well, Mrs. Jones, I feel your pain. Here, let’s take a breath. Let me get you a glass of water.” Sometimes that’s just enough to help. Then we have to think about social awareness and empathy. We have to think about this person. They may be walking in coughing with tuberculosis. We have to put on a mask. We have to tell our staff to put on a mask. We have to save our staff in order to save this patient. Then we put a mask on this patient.
We have to think about all this. We have to be aware and be empathetic. For example, if somebody is dying in quicksand, we just don’t jump in and save them. We have to think of the best way to save the patient and not ourselves be going in the quicksand as well. This is social awareness, awareness of the situation and empathy. For example, if a stranger is lying on the ground next to a street where there are cars roaring by, we just can’t jump in and expect the trucks to stop. We have to figure out how to get this patient to safety and to not have ourselves run over by a truck. This is social awareness and empathy. Then there’s relationship management with social skills. How can we influence others? As I said, many patients are very upset when we tell them the diagnosis or that we have to say surgery is needed.
They may be of a culture where they don’t expect to hear that. They expect it to be said, “Just take this medicine first.” Or they come from a culture where they don’t believe in surgery, they’re Jehovah’s witnesses, or they just want herbal medicines. We must understand that culture and be empathetic. We may not agree but we have to understand the situation where all this anger is coming from. Then our reaction controls what they will do next. If we can be calm, they will be calm too. We have to detach but with compassion. We just can’t detach ourselves and not care. But we have to detach ourself intellectually but emotionally still be in touch and care.
We have to use our empathetic skills, our emotional intelligence, to somehow lead, inspire, change that interaction in the exam room. Using those same skills we can lead and change and encourage our staff to join us on our journey of delivering compassionate patient care. Thank you. If you liked this, join us again for our podcast. These are qualities that we’re finding in ourselves so that we can dig them out, polish them, and become better leaders. Thank you again.
