Course Preview | Chief Medical Officer Program from Emory Executive Education
5:57 min
40
Hello. My name is Michael Sacks and I'm very pleased to welcome you to our health care leadership program. In addition to serving as academic director for this program, I'm also a Professor in Organization and Management here at the Goizueta Business School. A Professor of Sociology in our College of Arts and Sciences. And I have the honor of serving as academic director for the Woodruff Leadership Academy, which is our main leadership Academy for Health care here at Emory. I'd like to start this introduction by talking about why leadership training in health care? It's obvious that leadership training is great, but it isn't always obvious why we should be doing it in health care.
So, for about 20 years, I've been teaching on this topic and I work a lot across our campus here. So, often when I go to our medical school or our nursing school, or our public health school, or many other areas in health care, I'll ask them the question, how much training did you get in leadership or managing people in medical school, or in your physician's assistant program, or your nursing program? And the answer is almost always zero or close to that. And that's no disrespect at all to people. It's very normal. It's understandable. In fact, there's so much to learn in these programs. There often isn't a lot of space to squeeze in much about leadership. The issue then becomes, as people rise in their careers and get promoted and take, take increasing leadership roles and opportunities, they didn't get trained in it in school and so they have to learn after that which is totally fine. But the problem is those who aren't trained sometimes really struggle and they have the potential to do well with, with exposure to these topics. So, as we were designing the program, we really thought about what are the most important topics that are necessary for health care leadership that people might not have been exposed to before, but with some effort and with some training they can really master. So, when I first started teaching in health care in 2002, I was a little nervous to do it. I got a call from the dean of the School of Medicine, at the time who was starting a program in health care leadership, and he asked me, ""Would I teach a session in that program?"" It's very nervous. Health care wasn't initially my background, but he urged me to do it. He said it might take a little more work, he'll help me, but he's confident we can get the job done. So, I was a little nervous to do it. But pretty quickly I found that health care leadership is very important and that it's a learnable skill. With some effort, people can improve pretty quickly at that. In 2008, I had the honor of taking over as academic director. So, every year I'm exposed to lots of different projects across our campus and I've also worked with a lot of health care companies outside of Emory.
So, for about 20 years, I've been teaching on this topic and I work a lot across our campus here. So, often when I go to our medical school or our nursing school, or our public health school, or many other areas in health care, I'll ask them the question, how much training did you get in leadership or managing people in medical school, or in your physician's assistant program, or your nursing program? And the answer is almost always zero or close to that. And that's no disrespect at all to people. It's very normal. It's understandable. In fact, there's so much to learn in these programs. There often isn't a lot of space to squeeze in much about leadership. The issue then becomes, as people rise in their careers and get promoted and take, take increasing leadership roles and opportunities, they didn't get trained in it in school and so they have to learn after that which is totally fine. But the problem is those who aren't trained sometimes really struggle and they have the potential to do well with, with exposure to these topics. So, as we were designing the program, we really thought about what are the most important topics that are necessary for health care leadership that people might not have been exposed to before, but with some effort and with some training they can really master. So, when I first started teaching in health care in 2002, I was a little nervous to do it. I got a call from the dean of the School of Medicine, at the time who was starting a program in health care leadership, and he asked me, ""Would I teach a session in that program?"" It's very nervous. Health care wasn't initially my background, but he urged me to do it. He said it might take a little more work, he'll help me, but he's confident we can get the job done. So, I was a little nervous to do it. But pretty quickly I found that health care leadership is very important and that it's a learnable skill. With some effort, people can improve pretty quickly at that. In 2008, I had the honor of taking over as academic director. So, every year I'm exposed to lots of different projects across our campus and I've also worked with a lot of health care companies outside of Emory.
