Beginning in late 2025, WittKieffer’s Physician Leadership Institute (PLI) partnered with the American Academy of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery (AAO‑HNS), the professional home for ENT specialists, to co-create an accelerated leadership development intensive. The six-month program was designed to build practical skills and confidence in physicians who have, to varying degrees, launched leadership journeys.
These surgeons, who excel in their fields and perform some of the most precise procedures in medicine, faced the same fundamental questions: how can I manage an expanding set of responsibilities, apply my time and energy appropriately, and show up as the leader I want to be for others? Despite careers that included professorships, chairs, chief roles, and private practice entrepreneurs, only four of the 20 participating surgeons acknowledged having received any prior formal leadership development.
In the spring, midway through the program, WittKieffer PLI and AAO-HNS faculty joined the cohort in Alexandria, Virginia, for a day-long summit designed to bridge individual development with peer learning. The summit's agenda focused on building a shared understanding of the current moment in healthcare, cultivating an enterprise leadership mindset, and intentionally building a supportive peer network.
Below, we share observations from the event, plus takeaways drawn from our experience developing leaders within this specialty cohort: physicians practicing in different regions, under different employer models and contexts, yet all navigating similar challenges and benefiting from the shared insight, perspective, and candor of their peers. The imperatives we share below are for the benefit of leaders charged with supporting the development of physician leaders within their organizations, whether health systems, medical groups, or medical-specialty associations similar to AAO-HNS.
Observation 1: A medical specialty is a leadership asset, not a constraint.
In physician leadership development, there is a temptation to strip away the specialty and teach a quote-unquote "universal" curriculum based on generalized leadership principles. The Academy resisted that, and so did we. The participants who walked into the Alexandria summit were laryngologists, head and neck surgeons, otologists, and pediatric ENTs. They shared a clinical language, a professional community, and a set of unspoken assumptions about how decisions get made in the operating room. Far from being a limitation, we quickly realized that shared identity accelerated trust among the group. By the morning break on the day of the summit, the room was already in candid conversation about the kinds of organizational dilemmas that take much longer to surface in mixed-specialty programs.
Moreover, we discovered that insights gleaned from years of specialized clinical practice served as the bedrock of these physicians’ leadership philosophies. That is, their medical practice largely informs and enhances their leadership abilities; for example, in our experience, ENT physicians tend to be data-focused, precise, and cautious, with a strong intrinsic motivation to help, heal, and improve outcomes. Meanwhile, they can struggle with issues like delegating, building consensus, and finding work-life balance. Their practice is the starting point to grow from.
The implication for those who design physician leadership programs is straightforward: specialty cohorts are not a narrow form of leadership development, but instead a more concentrated one that presents opportunities rather than challenges. Further, clinical specialties are foundations to build upon — whether in a single- or multi-specialty training environment, physicians should be encouraged to embrace lessons gleaned from their unique clinical experiences.
Imperative 1: Identify and leverage similarities and common ground among clinician leaders to enhance learning, reinforce key concepts, and tap into the collective wisdom of the group. Shared backgrounds accelerate how leaders ground themselves and start having impact. Rather than a limitation to overcome, view physician specializations as a well of expertise to tap into.
Observation 2: Self-awareness comes before skill-building.
Every participant began the program with a formal leadership assessment and a one-on-one debrief with a WittKieffer executive coach. This sequence matters: workshop content lands differently when a leader has just learned which of their strengths becomes a derailer under stress, or which of their motives shapes decisions they thought were purely analytical. The Academy's program was structured around our four leadership lenses — Visionary, Operational, Relational, and Self-Management — and self-awareness determines how leaders show up under pressure and what to focus on in skill-building. We have seen this pattern across every cohort our Physician Leadership Institute has worked with: the leaders who advance furthest are not the ones who know the most frameworks; they are the ones who can see themselves clearly enough to address shortcomings and leverage strengths.
Imperative 2: Ensure that leadership development for physician leaders is rooted in authentic self-evaluation as well as professional assessment tools, which often surface information about the individual they are unaware of. Convey that understanding self is a primary factor key to effectively leading others.
Observation 3: Peer exchange is essential to growth.
We find the greatest learning comes not from war stories or lectures about what physician leaders ought to do, but instead from the moments when peers work through problems together. Breakout activities during the summit and small-group virtual discussions in the weeks after provided a chance to work through problems together and discuss topics collaboratively. A key objective of the program was to create and nurture a mutually supportive "community of practice," providing these leaders with an ongoing sense of support and the fellowship of walking similar paths. While the reality of physician schedules limits incidental and serendipitous interaction (to wit, the program LinkedIn group hasn't seen much uptake), we have observed a real sense of community emerge in scheduled sessions that goes beyond the transactional.
Imperative 3: Early and often, create opportunities for physician leaders to connect, bond, and commiserate with their cohort mates. Instill the concept that leadership growth can be accelerated when it happens not in a bubble but in a shared context.
Observation 4: Individual events are effective in service of larger goals and activities.
Standalone leadership workshops can be effective, yet WittKieffer and the Academy understood that a single event, however well-produced, would be unlikely to yield lasting change for all participants. For that reason, the complementary components (assessment, coaching, ongoing small-group meetings) were mandatory parts of the program. The architecture was intentional: an immersive in-person experience helped build identity and trust, followed by a structured cadence of support that turns insight into practice, supported by a library of durable articles, frameworks, and templates for their reference.
Imperative 4: Build a range of learning activities and formats into leadership development, with ample opportunities for reinforcement of learnings via check-ins with coaches, conversations with accountability partners, and so on. Understand the limitations of one-off events if not integrated within a comprehensive framework of development support over months and even years.
Observation 5: Doctors respond to doctors . . . and experienced coaching professionals.
WittKieffer’s Physician Leadership Institute team consists of highly experienced leadership coaches as well as physician consultants (former physician executives themselves). The breadth of expertise and combined learning insights of the WittKieffer team, in tandem with the experienced medical faculty from AAO-HNS, were instrumental in creating a training program that resonated with the participating physicians. Physicians place the wisdom and advice of other physicians in high regard, and value interaction with coaches and consultants who have “been there, done that” with countless executives before. Our program’s impact was possible because of the unique blend of peer-to-peer conversations and the WittKieffer team’s expertise.
Imperative 5: Prioritize leadership development experts not only for their training, expertise, and experience but also for their ability to garner respect from participating physicians.
Looking Ahead
Physician leadership is no longer a side conversation in healthcare strategy; it is the conversation. As specialty societies like AAO-HNS step into the development role alongside their member institutions, the field will be richer for it and the organization those leaders ultimately serve will benefit from the difference.
We are grateful to the Academy, to Dr. Rahul Shah and Beth Burchill, and to the inaugural cohort for their partnership in this work.
