Empathy in Physician Leadership: Current Insights and Strategies
In our work with physician leaders through WittKieffer’s Physician Leadership Institute, we meet experienced professionals in role transitions. After establishing themselves as dedicated colleagues, capable...
In our work with physician leaders through WittKieffer’s Physician Leadership Institute, we meet experienced professionals in role transitions. After establishing themselves as dedicated colleagues, capable clinicians, and committed patient advocates, these leaders attract the attention of senior administrators and hiring managers and are often tapped for leadership roles, including department chair, chief medical officer, and chief physician officer.
These opportunities, which present a chance to build one’s leadership capacity and have greater impact on a hospital or system, also pose a bit of a Faustian bargain – or an invitation to the “dark side” of administration. As leadership advisors, we’ve found that our most critical task is to help these leaders explore their motivations and preferences to shape a leadership role that they embrace on their own terms. Empathy has emerged as a critical trait for physician leaders, influencing everything from patient satisfaction to team morale. In an era of high burnout and evolving patient expectations, healthcare organizations increasingly recognize that emotional intelligence and empathetic leadership are not “soft” skills but essential competencies.
The value of empathy emerges through greater self-awareness
Numerous studies confirm that when physicians and leaders practice empathy, patient care markedly benefits. Empathy is often described as the “emotional bridge” between provider and patient, fostering trust and open communication. Outcomes data bear this out: patients under the care of high-empathy physicians have better clinical results across a range of conditions. For example, higher empathy scores have been linked to improved control of chronic illnesses like diabetes and asthma, faster recovery from the common cold, and reduced patient anxiety before procedures. Empathetic medical care also correlates with greater adherence to treatment – patients are more likely to follow doctors’ advice when they feel understood and cared for.
Empathy’s positive impact requires truly knowing – and then managing – oneself. Scientist and journalist Daniel Goleman defines self-awareness as the capacity to recognize our emotions and their effect on others. It is foundational to Goleman’s conception of emotional intelligence, the necessary-but-not-sufficient set of skills that allows us to manage interpersonal relationships intentionally and productively. (For our part, we have yet to meet a leader who has realized their potential without a commitment to taming these tendencies through self-management.)
Sigmund Freud famously opined that “the self you know is hardly worth knowing,” highlighting the difficulty in uncovering our motivations, desires, and essential natures. While we are sympathetic to the idea that this work is never truly done, we believe there can be great value in a disciplined approach to understanding what makes us tick, and how we harness that knowledge in working with and through others.
We are fond of research psychologist Tasha Eurich’s approach to the topic. Eurich’s research has determined that while 95% of the population believes itself to be self-aware, only 10-15% actually meets the criteria of being able to accurately see themselves as others see them and understand their own values, goals, strengths, and weaknesses. Curiously, Eurich and colleagues find a negative correlation between self-awareness, experience, and power – attributes we might otherwise associate with knowledge or wisdom. But it makes sense when you consider the insulating effects of things like a private corner office, or a legion of subordinates more eager to flatter than to speak candidly.
The value to physician leaders
As professionals who have embraced the ambiguity of dual roles and, at times, conflicting loyalties, physician leaders can particularly benefit from enhanced self-awareness – even in the context of a profession traditionally skeptical of navel-gazing.
“As a surgeon and as a leader, I understand deeply how important being self-aware is. My ability to operate and my ability to lead is rooted in first understanding how I show up and how present I am,” says Trey Eubanks, MD, CEO of Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital in Memphis.
Physician leaders today face intense pressures – heavy workloads, administrative burdens, and life-or-death decisions – that can tax their empathy. Research shows that without intervention, physician empathy tends to decline over the course of medical training. By the end of residency, many physicians experience “empathy erosion,” which, if unaddressed, can carry into their leadership roles. This decline is not without consequence: lower empathy leads to more uncompassionate care, dissatisfied patients, and damaged trust in the physician-patient relationship. Recognizing this problem, experts now emphasize that practicing empathy through greater self-awareness is a skill that can be taught and cultivated rather than a fixed trait.
Impact on team dynamics and organizational outcomes
Self-aware leaders profoundly affect healthcare teams and organizations. Physician leaders set the cultural tone for how staff interact and cope with stress. Leaders who listen and understand their team members’ perspectives build psychological safety and trust within teams. Research in physician leadership has shown that bi-directional empathy between leaders and clinicians helps address burnout, creating a sense of connection and mutual support. In contrast, when leaders lack empathy, team members may feel isolated or undervalued, fueling disengagement and turnover. Interviews with clinician-administrators reveal that a lack of trust and personal connection in leadership leads to frustration, defensiveness, and even dehumanization of colleagues. These dynamics can hurt organizational performance and contribute to staff burnout, higher turnover, and poorer quality care.
Developing empathy through greater self-awareness
We believe that cultivating self-awareness is an essential responsibility of physician leaders. (The American Medical Association agrees, codifying “continuous self-awareness and self-observation” as part of the ethical obligation of competence.) In fact, physicians’ perceptions of their work environment and values alignment are strongly tied to their leaders’ behaviors, underscoring how a leader’s empathy (or lack thereof) sets the tone for team culture. Surveys outside healthcare echo this need: in one study, 61% of employees and 76% of CEOs agreed that empathy is key to organizational success. Taken together, these insights paint a picture of both a challenge and an opportunity—while empathy may be under strain in today’s healthcare climate, physician leaders who prioritize it can significantly improve their teams’ well-being and performance.
Here, we share a few recommendations for developing self-awareness.
Get some perspective. In our engagements with physician leaders, we usually start with an assessment. The WittKieffer Leadership LIFT assessments, which leverage the Hogan Assessment Suite, provide a robust, validated look at personality and motivation Combined with interpretation by a certified coach and developmental feedback customized to the participant’s context, assessment provides (in our opinion) an excellent return on investment to the participant by increasing self-awareness.
Formal assessment isn’t the only way to get perspective, however. Remember New York mayor Ed Koch’s famous inquiry, “how’m I doing?” Getting the perspective of others can often be as simple as asking that question – but you must be willing to hear the answer. Leadership coach Kristi Hedges proposes an elegantly simple approach: find five people you work with and ask them two questions: “What’s the general perception of me?” and “What could I do differently that would have the greatest impact on my success?” When we’ve recommended this simple experiment to physician leaders, they’ve told us that it has reliably produced both anticipated and unexpected feedback and strengthened relationships as a result.
Ask yourself what, not why. Eurich and her colleagues have found that reflection and introspection can be valuable to developing self-awareness, but many people go about it the wrong way. The natural tendency is to ask yourself “why” you feel a certain way, which can lead to unproductive overthinking, rumination, and assigning blame. A more productive approach can be asking “what situations or triggers bother me, and what do they have in common?” This line of questioning lends itself to identifying patterns, which in turn present the opportunity to design interventions and, ultimately, solutions.
Conclusion
Cultivating empathy through greater self-awareness is more than a moral nicety in healthcare leadership – it is a practical driver of better outcomes for patients, stronger teams, and healthier organizations. The current landscape shows both concerning trends (empathy under duress amid burnout and training gaps) and hopeful momentum as many physician leaders and institutions work to rebuild this crucial capacity. Physician leaders can enhance their empathetic leadership by committing to emotional intelligence development, engaging in leadership development and coaching, and adopting daily practices that prioritize understanding others. In doing so, they not only improve the human experience of care for patients and practitioners but also drive their teams and organizations toward greater success in our patient-centered, compassion-demanding era.
