Surgical Leadership

The Harvard Medical School Surgical Leadership Program features the latest management concepts, leadership tools, and learning approaches to address the unique challenges facing today’s international surgical leaders.

 

Surgical Leadership and Executive Skills

• Principles of leadership and management
• Turning around failing organizations and leading transformational change
• Personal leadership styles
• Situational awareness
• Communicating safely and efficiently in multidisciplinary teams
• Difficult decision-making
• Surgical crisis management
• Assessing leadership behavior and outcomes
• Giving feedback and conducting difficult conversations
• Negotiation skills
• Contract management
• Creating a “just culture”
• Understanding budgets and finances

 

The Surgeon as an Entrepreneur and Innovator

• Innovation theory in health care
• Business plan writing
• Raising capital to develop and commercialize your innovations
• Developing a startup company
• Transforming ideas into products
• Updates on new technologies in surgical practice
• Designing medical apps
• “Elevator pitch” development and delivery

 

Legal Principles for Surgical Leaders

• Iatrogenic harm
• Contract law
• Patent law, copyright, and intellectual property
• Litigation and medical defense
• Responding to complaints
• Duty of candor
• How to write an adverse event report

 

Communications, Motivation, and Negotiation

• Different approaches and when to choose them
• Negotiation skills
• Contract management
• Influence without authority
• How to initiate and nurture growth-promoting relationships
• Conducting difficult conversations
• Effective techniques for reaching favorable and win-win solutions

 

Building and Promoting Your Personal Brand

• How to develop and maintain a leadership posture
• How to build influence within and beyond your organization

 

Surgical Research and Education

• Writing research grant applications
• Funding a new clinical service
• Developing a modern surgical curriculum
• Raising sponsorship and endowments for academic purposes
• Supervising research and academic mentorship
• Assessment of surgical skills and behaviors
• E-learning and digital resources for surgeons

 

Quality, Safety, and Improvement

• State-of-the-art principles for quality and safety in surgery
• Developing a culture of safety
• Threat and error models from the aviation industry
• Human factors in surgery
• Value-based health care: measuring meaningful outcomes and accurate costs
• Quality reporting tools
• Reporting errors and leading root cause analyses
• Mitigating intraoperative stress
• The Learning Health System and the role of IT in surgical quality and safety
• Efficient design and use of clinical databases and registries
• Choosing and implementing electronic medical records

Group and Individual Skills-Development Activities 

This program offers both group and individual skills-development activities to help you advance your surgical leadership objectives, including:

• Building and leading high-performing teams and organizations
• Developing surgeons as entrepreneurs and innovators
• Understanding costs and outcomes measurements
• Adopting new technologies and developing apps to improve clinical practice
• Crisis management, negotiation, and conflict-resolution
• Quality and safety theory and practice
• Informatics, electronic medical records, and data management
• Writing research and grant proposals
• Medical education and mentorship development
• Developing your personal brand

 

Personalized Capstone Project

The capstone project allows participants to demonstrate creativity, innovation, and proficiency in the knowledge and skills taught in the program.

The objective of the capstone project is to develop and communicate a real-world intervention that can improve surgical practice. Each participant is required to write a business plan and deliver a three-minute elevator pitch to Harvard faculty as part of their capstone project.

Examples of these real-world surgical improvement scenarios include:

• Development or commercialization of a novel surgical device or innovation
• Delivery of a new surgical curriculum for residency training
• Implementation of a patient quality and safety intervention in the participant’s institution

 

Assignment of a Harvard Faculty Member

Every participant of the Harvard Medical School Surgical Leadership Program will have access to a Harvard faculty member. Your faculty member will provide guidance for your capstone project, including:

• Providing feedback at the outline phase of your project
• Reviewing the first and final drafts of your project and helping to optimize its value