Why good leadership saves lives

When the stakes are life and death, Professor Jill Klein shares the importance of letting go of perfectionism and fostering psychological safety as healthcare leaders.

On a bad day at work, you might hear the expression “we’re not saving lives” after making a mistake.

But in the healthcare setting, the stakes can literally be life and death.

And this has profound consequences for people making decisions on the frontline.

Professor Jill Klein has spent more than a decade working alongside clinicians, medical students and leaders to explore the emotional and psychological impacts of working in healthcare.

What is clear is that if the right systems and leadership aren’t in place, it can have catastrophic consequences.

Here are Professor Klein’s lessons from working with those at the frontline of healthcare.

Letting go of perfectionism to build resilience

Professor Klein meets medical students on their second day of medical school, to help with the transition they are undergoing.

“A core part of their identity for years, if not their whole academic life, has been the person at the top of the class,” she says.

“But now we’ve taken all the top of the class kids and put them into one place together and that can be very challenging.”

The first step for Professor Klein is working with these high achievers to recalibrate their identity from being top of class to being in the class and focusing on learning the things that will help them be healthy and effective clinicians.

Psychological safety leads to better patient outcomes

Making decisions in a high-stakes environment is hard and there is a high rate of diagnostic error.

Professor Klein says a delayed or incorrect diagnosis is the third leading cause of death in the US.

“It’s very high, and it’s not because the people doing the work are stupid or they don’t care, it’s that it’s super hard.”

“Diseases present differently across different people, and symptom configuration is different and professionals can get it wrong.”

Professor Klein says psychological safety is a crucial factor in good leadership. When people feel comfortable speaking up, asking questions and discussing mistakes, teams make better decisions.

“If a senior person says something and everybody agrees, we’re just using one brain. But if there’s six of us in a group, how can we use all the brains and make sure people feel comfortable speaking up and discussing mistakes?”

Learn to admit when you’re wrong

A recurring theme in Professor Klein’s work is that we all find it difficult to accept mistakes. 

“We hate being fallible, so we self-justify, we ignore and we distort. But if we have a growth mindset, we don’t need to do that, we don’t need to protect our identity.”

This self-protective reaction can  make it harder to identify and correct our errors. The antidote to this, according to Professor Klein, is to work with leaders in a healthcare setting on developing a growth mindset. This allows us to focus on continuous improvement rather than holding the impossible expectation of perfection.

“We can recognise that we’re all on a journey of trying to get better and better and better, and we’ll never be perfect.”

Help prevent diagnostic error as a patient 

From the patient side, Professor Klein says there are also things we can do to help healthcare workers do their best job.

“Humans have cognitive constraints and can only think of four or five things at one time. So anything you can put in writing on a piece of paper or in an email is going to be very helpful.”

“Come in with your medical history, your medications, symptoms and the timing of when symptoms appeared. Timing is really important in diagnostic judgments.”

Professor Klein says coming in with this information ready to go allows healthcare workers to focus on processing the information you provide rather than extracting it from you.

Her advice is to also be wary of shift changeover times in hospitals as this is when medical errors can occur due to a lack of communication.

“No one has time to read everybody’s chart and know everything so as a patient or a family member  speak up, you can’t communicate something too much.”

Her final piece of advice starts with the observation that nurses are amazing people who work incredibly hard and they often do not get the respect they deserve.

“Remember they are human beings in a difficult situation and just showing empathy and gratitude can go a long way.”

Jill teaches Managerial Judgement, Decision Making and Resilient Leadership on the MBA, Executive MBA and Senior Executive MBA programs.

The Bastas Academy for Health Leadership (BAHL) brings together world-leading expertise in health and business into an internationally-leading hub focused on health sector excellence, innovation, and leadership capability. Jill teaches in the BAHL short courses Health Leadership for Impact and Activating Your Health Leadership.

Find out more about our upcoming short courses for healthcare professionals here.